Company of Liars – Karen Maitland

Company of Liars – Karen Maitland                       6/10

With the on-set of the Black Death creeping up from the South Coast, a group of misfit travellers try to out run it by heading North, whilst they each try to hide a secret from the others in this historical thriller set in 1348.

This is Maitland’s second novel, although there was a 12 year publishing gap between this and her first The White Room. I think it’s fair to say that the success of Company of Liars however, is what has propelled her into the public eye and it’s fairly easy to see why this has been successful.

By no means is it groundbreaking however. I doubt you will read this book and say you have found your new favourite author. That aside, I found it pretty enjoyable. The first half is interesting enough to capture your attention, but I think it really starts to come to life after half way through as the momentum of the plot gathers pace.

At first it is difficult to figure out how exactly it works as a thriller, but as the novel progresses Maitland gets better at increasing suspense and drama through big plot devices. The story also begins to get gorier as it goes on, which comes as something of a shock at first, particularly with the mauling of one of the characters.

Our narrator is a Camelot, a seller of relics and is your typical everyman character – likeable, fair, intelligent and worldly. The rest of the characters each have well-defined personalities that stick with them throughout the tale: Rodrigo the honest and passionate musician, Zopheil the cantankerous and bullying entertainer or Adela, the naïve yet gentle mother to be etc. Episodes are described in depth over a chapter or so and then days or sometimes weeks can go by before the tale is picked up again.

To this end it makes some of the characters appear unbelievable. Rodrigo and Osmond are portrayed as honest and tolerant, but I lost count of the times when one of them held the other back from hitting Zopheil, almost alternately, until the reader is left wondering why exactly all these characters are sticking together. This kind of repetition starts to stagnate the story. Added to this, the book is certainly too long. I think Maitland could have halved the first half; there are a number of fairly pointless episodes that don’t add to the plot – the marriage of the cripples for example.

By far the biggest flaw though sadly, is the predictability. Maitland offers far too many clues to the reader as to what the characters’ secrets are. Adela and Osmond’s is obvious almost instantly, as is Joffre’s and even Camelot’s is not hard to guess in the end.

It’s a bit of a shame, because there are some great descriptive passages. As I said earlier, Maitland builds the tension well toward the end of the novel and I also think she does a decent job of re-creating the squalor of daily life in medieval England. She doesn’t gloss over some of the things that authors usually don’t bother with; the struggle to find food from day to day is a recurrent theme for example.

Still, I liked the book and would recommend it if you like thrillers or historical novels. It's also made me likely to read other books by Maitland.