Hurdy Gurdy: The absurdities of the human condition in the middle of a plague

Hurdy Gurdy

Author: Christopher Wilson

ISBN-13: 9780571361946

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Guideline Price: £14.99

Now here’s a palate-cleanser of a novel for you. There’s something refreshing about a book that springs out at us unforeseen by fashion or precedent, though we might expect the unexpected from Christopher Wilson, whose previous fiction has ranged in subject matter from a zoo in 1950s Moscow to a monkey shipwrecked on an island to Victorian music-hall London.

Wilson’s speciality in his eight previous novels has been the outsider – a “gentleman cannibal” scientist (Baa); a Brazilian tribesman transplanted to London (Mischief); or a black boy in Mississippi who passes as white and can hear other people’s thoughts (The Ballad of Lee Cotton).

His method is to highlight the shadows and unkink the absurdities of the human condition, often through comedy.

And his new novel, Hurdy Gurdy, is once again the same but different. We have another diverse setting – England in 1349 – and a hero who starts out as an insider but doesn’t stay that way for long. Jack Fox (“so I rhyme, face and arse, with the Black Pox”), also known as Brother Diggory, is a 16-year-old monk and hurdy gurdy player in the Order of Odo, “a small, poor band of thirty-nine brothers” in a fictional English village.

Odo, the founder of the brotherhood, had the gift of prescience and wrote books predicting “the great unhappened”, including some amusing descriptions of modern life (“also, there would be icy cold drinks, in small, squat suits of armour, bursting with bubbles that prickled your tongue”), and some less amusing (“the orange-faced king, Small Hands, with straw-yellow hair wound round his head like a helmet”).

But so much for the set-up; the story is really about what happens when the Black Death (“God’s punishment to the English for being English”, according to the Scots) reaches the monastery. Young Brother Diggory draws the short straw and is assigned to plague duty, being a brother who “could readily be spared”.

Repent his sins

Diggory is none too pleased by this, in particular worrying that he might die without being able to repent his sins – not least because he hasn’t had a chance to sin yet. And naturally the brotherhood’s scientific knowhow isn’t quite up to 21st-century standards.

“It was Brother Fulco’s conviction that you could best assess a patient by piss-prophecy. That is by sipping their urine, gargling, swilling it about the mouth, to release the full palate of aromas, before spitting it out, to keep the mouth pure and unsullied. There are twenty-seven varieties of piss known to science, and Brother Fulco was wise to them all.”

Unfortunately, such learned counsel is not enough to prevent the onrush of the Black Death, and the entire brotherhood of Odo succumbs to the plague, with only Brother Diggory surviving. Even more unfortunately – and this is the central plot driver and conceit of the novel – he becomes a living superspreader, carrying the plague-ridden fleas with him everywhere, even though he is himself now immune.

So this is a picaresque tale, where Brother Diggory travels out from the monastery as a “plague doctor”, meeting the eccentric and everyday alike: a man who claims to eat others’ sins; a rat that he fights for a mutton fat candle to eat; and even a member of the oldest profession (“she was up and away at the first, quick sneeze of my loins, and sprung off the bed, quick as a terrier sighting a rat”).

Poor Diggory stands in place of us all as he blunders through the country, and through life, without really understanding what he is letting himself in for – or indeed what he is capable of. He blunders into marriage after he and a woman make “a beast with two backs, and just one set of fleas.” He gets into comic but deadly scrapes with impressive efficiency – half Blackadder, half Baldrick – and a comment from Wilson on our contemporary world is never far away.

Corrupt influence

Needless to say, one rich seam of both comedy and tragedy is the fatal overlap of ignorance – both innocent and wilful – with the fervour of the religious zealot. Brother Diggory initially believes that the plague is God’s way of deciding “to rub us out and start over again”, and it’s only with help that he comes to recognise the church’s negative influence on his life, when a scrivener he encounters lists 11 examples of its corrupt influence. ‘“Oh,’ I replied, because of that…’”

So Hurdy Gurdy manages to entertain and enlighten without ever seeming – Trump jokes aside – like a self-conscious attempt to be relevant in Covid terms or otherwise. Let’s hope, as we await the literary fallout of the pandemic over the coming years, that its spirit is contagious.