Avi. Crispin: The Cross of Lead

One of the reasons I'm not a huge fan of much literary fiction is that I tend to be most interested in the very exotic. Fantasy, perhaps, scratches that itch best of all; much fantasy is not particularly numinous or fantastic, but it's an awfully good excuse for people to wear really cool clothes and have really cool adventures. And it's the same for much historical fiction that isn't actually very historically accurate. But it's fantastic when the book isn't historical costume drama, but something well-researched that seems to accurately depict what life really was life in a particular time and place.

Now, granted, what I know about premodern England could fit in a good-sized teacup, or a semester of Old English. But you can tell when the tone just feels right.

In Crispin: The Cross of Lead, Crispin is an impoverished, orphan peasant boy who hasn't even had a real name until he finds himself accused of thievery--and then murder--and has to escape. It's only then that the village priest starts to tell him that there's more than his past than he ever knew--that he has a real name, for example. But he never gets the chance to hear the rest. After his escape, he finds himself apprenticed to a massive, red-bearded juggler who goes by the name of Bear and has another agenda as well, perhaps.

The ending disappointed me a little; there was too much luck in it, I thought, and a little too much coincidence. But it also turns at least one cliché on its head quite nicely. Mostly, I liked the depiction of life in fourteenth-century England, and the clean, elegant but unpretentious style:

Sounds were stifled. Solid shapes were soft as rotten hay. No sun jeweled the sky. My entire world had shrunk down to the frayed margins of the sodden road. I walked as solitary as Adam before the creation of Eve.

It's not written in Middle English or anything approaching it, but there's something very authentic in the sentence rhythms. And something authentic, too, in the characters' attitudes and ideas about life. There's (as far as I can tell) no utterly anachronistic ideology, and Crispin doesn't think like a twenty-first century kid in old clothes:

The cause of this blight was well known: God had sent it as punishment for our sins. All one could do was pray to Jesus and run--and even then, there was no escape. God in His sweet mercy and unforgiving anger touches whom He wants. No soul can escape His wrath. Here, not one person appeared to have remained alive. The profound stillness that embraced all was its own sad and lonely sermon.

There are places where the book seems more concerned with giving you a history lesson than being interesting; it's a pretty good history lesson, though, and it usually remembers soon enough that this isn't supposed to be a textbook.