Peter Ackroyd's new novel deals with dark actors playing games in medieval London. A group of heretics called the "predestined men" are staging arson attacks on churches to fulfil an obscure prophecy and thus, they hope, to bring about the Second Coming. But the ringleader, a renegade friar, is really working for an atheist secret society known as Dominus, which has "the sole purpose of dethroning Richard II". The highly placed members of Dominus are fed up with Richard's confiscatory taxes. The idea is that the rabble will be outraged by the church-burning business and the king will look "weak and foolish" for not putting a stop to it.
The reader may consider, on sober reflection, that the conspirators look pretty weak and foolish themselves for coming up with such a nugatory plan. After all, the predestined men start only token fires and there are only five churches on their to-do list: a symbolic reference to the five stigmata, apparently. Besides, Dominus is already financing the military campaign by the subtle usurper Henry Bolingbroke, which we all know is going to succeed, so this cloak-and-dagger stuff is a redundant sideshow. And the revelation that Dominus is in turn somehow controlled by a mad nun, who aims to be the holy power behind Bolingbroke's unlawful throne, borders on the farcical.
But then Ackroyd is careful not to encourage sober reflection. The atmosphere of intrigue and the superabundance of period detail tend to conceal the fact that the story never begins to make the remotest kind of sense.
Another useful distraction is the structure of the thing. Each chapter places a different character in the foreground - there is no central character at all, unless you count London - and the chapters have titles such as "The Friar's Tale", "The Clerk's Tale", "The Miller's Tale", and so on. In the introductory note to the "List of Characters" at the front, Ackroyd writes: "The reader may recall that many of the characters within this narrative are also to be found in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer." The blurb recycles this line, claiming that "the whole cast of The Canterbury Tales" puts in an appearance, and several critics have duly followed suit.
But Ackroyd is having a laugh. Despite all the textual allusions, most of his characters are pointedly not Chaucer's pilgrims. They have never met on any pilgrimage to Canterbury, and they certainly won't in future, either, be cause a number of them end up dead or exiled. Ackroyd's Prioress is not called Madame Eglentyne, she's Dame Agnes de Mordaunt. She comes from the wrong convent and owns a pet monkey instead of a pet dog. The Reeve has the right name, Oswald, but he's a Londoner; Chaucer's Reeve was from Norfolk. Likewise, the Merchant ought to be from Suffolk, but he's another Londoner. The Cook, Roger of Ware, is quite close to the original, except that he keeps a scrupulously clean kitchen. The Wife of Bath is transmuted into a Clerkenwell procuratrix who earned her nickname when she ran a bathhouse. Although a Sergeant-at-Law (equivalent to a modern QC) looms large in the story, for some reason the "Man of Law" who gets a chapter to himself is the Sergeant's humble pupil. The Miller is a quiet, thoughtful chap, nothing like the one in The Canterbury Tales. Only the Physician and a couple of others really fit the Chaucerian bill.
Ackroyd is quite keen on the Physician's obsolete medical doctrines as a way to show how different the times were in 1399. "The dung of doves is a soporific when it is applied to the soles of the feet . . . Abstain from hazelnuts. They discomfort the brain. But eat green ginger. It quickens the memory, and may yet make you gay." The Physician also believes that the astrological signs have to be right for any course of treatment. "Aries, which is a fiery sign, moderately dry, governs the head and all its contents." Then again, we are probably meant to note that modern alternative medicine can be just as daft.
The descriptions of London are sometimes awkward, emphasising a squalor that would not have been so apparent to people living at the time, and the characters are liable to do whatever the plot requires, with scant psychological conviction. But there are some good scenes, in the taverns, in the law courts, at the mystery plays, and in the outlying fields that long ago vanished under the city's sprawl.
