Healer Monk’s Prophecy
A fictitious English saint, Odo of Whye, commanded a couple of handy superpowers including the prescience which let him see through the fogs of nowadays into far future ages and could be in two locations at once.
Hurdy Gurdy is Christopher Wilson’s 10th novel and reveals the picture of plague-ridden 14th century England, with its whiffy blend of squalor, sensuality, and scholarship.
St Odo’s book of prophecies, The Great Unhappened even foresees an “orange-faced King” with “ straw-yellow hair” who said that “truths were lies, and lies were truths”.
It is the year of our Lord 1349 and it is the season of the Plague. Novice friar Brother Diggory, now sixteen, has lived in the Monastery of the Order of St Odo at Whye since his eighth birthday, as his life is about to change. The sickness is creeping even closer and the monks must attend to the victims.
Brother Diggory is nominated to tend to those afflicted, he realises he is about to meet the Plague, and that it is more powerful than him. What he does not realise is that encountering the illness and understanding it are two quite different things.
This uplifting novel about sickness and health, the fashions of 14th Century medicine, and how perhaps we are never quite as cutting-edge as we might like to believe. This was in the season o the plague, in the 21st year of Our Lord King Edward, Long-Hair, the Great Unbuttoned – may God preserve him- who loves his people sorely, especially the women. Never forget, in hell, a man weeps more tears than all the waters of all the oceans. While his brains are boiled in vinegar for all eternity. As his flesh is chewed from his bone by demons.”
The novel set in England from 1349 to 1352, as the Black Death seizes every second person, leaving the country as ” a book with half the words missing. We do not make sense anymore.”
A travelling priest’s bastard, Diggory has been dumped in ramshackle St Odo’s monastery, Brother Fulco, trains as a surgeon-apothecary, learn the scribal arts, and plays the Hurdy-gurdy, whose droning tones- his Abbot claims- voice “the eternal battles of mankind” between good and evil, order and chaos. The Plague strikes from the south carried, so the monks believe, on a “miasma” of foul vapours and secreted in ” small airborne particles”
Hurdy Gurdy by Christopher Wilson, Faber & Faber £14.99, 256 pages.