litrant:
On the road to find out
Sinful Folk: A Novel of the...
On the road to find out
Sinful Folk: A Novel of the Middle Ages by Ned Hayes (Campanile Books, $12.95), with illustrations by Nikki McClure.
On a cold winter night in 1377, several boys are burned to death in a house fire. One of them is the son of Mears, a deaf-mute man.
Except Mears is actually the disguise of a former nun, who has hidden away in this village to raise her son in peace.
The fire was not an accident, and the fathers of the dead boys—and other villagers—undertake a pilgrimage in winter and without their Lord’s permission to seek justice from the king. Not only is the mystery of how the boys died—and of why Miriam, a nun, would have a son, let alone be pretending to be a deaf-mute man in order to raise him—a compelling one, based on an historical incident, but the outrageousness of peasants taking it upon themselves to seek justice is a bit of a mystery as well.
Like all good pilgrimage stories—and yes, there are echoes of “The Canterbury Tales” in this, but not overly so—this one unfolds as they move through the cold and brutal rural landscape of medieval England.
By focusing on the underclass, Hayes has given us a view of the period that doesn’t often show up in historical fiction. Nikki McClure’s contrasting paper illustrations add to the sense that we’re looking directly into the past, in a dark and foreboding version of an illuminated manuscript.
A very good mystery, Sinful Folk is also a very good historical novel.
