This novel is a work of historical fiction. It purports to be a mystery, set in England during the late Dark Ages. It stars a
Brother Cadfeld-esque monk/physician, Matthew Bartholomew. As the book jacket blurbs, it's 1348, Cambridge University is newly founded and struggling to survive, and the Black Plague is sweeping across Europe and England. The college has been rocked by the suicide of the beloved president, the disappearance of several other monks, wild rumors of murders and conspiracies, and an ongoing power struggle with the more-established Oxford University.
It's a historical mystery, with a likable main character who is, of course, a man out of time. He's got the only pair of eye glasses in England, he's traveled widely and developed some knowledge of germs and disease [when everyone else just thinks the plague and everything else worse than the sniffles is God's punishment to be (ineffectually) prayed against], and he's pure and right and just and noble and innocent of his scheming, malicious colleagues. Not especially believable, and the author is clearly a better academic and historian than a novelist, but it wasn't a bad read.
To the scores:
A Plague on Both Your Houses, by Susanna Gregory
Plot: 6
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/5
Characters: 7
Fun Factor: 6
Page Turner: 5
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 6.5
I would have bet this was the author's first book. It's very "how to write a book 101" in style and presentation, and isn't very well-edited or composed. It's too long, the plot wanders around quite a bit during the middle, the characters are all over the place, and it just didn't feel like a very coherent novel. It felt like something throw together by a newly-minted PhD, who wanted to do something with all of that historical research into the Black Plague and early Cambridge she'd done while working on her thesis.
Actually, that's not true. In that case the book would have had more passion and youthful exuberance, if less technical accomplishment. This felt like that book every senior academic has in them, extrapolated from their life's work and research in the field. More about the facts and history than the characters, who the author has had in mind for so many years that they're almost too thought out, and thus under-realized to the reader. (It can be a mistake for an author to know her characters too well, since it's easy to forget to share all that knowledge with the reader. Kind of like how you could provide a fairly good description of a new acquaintance, but would stumble when describing your mother.) In this novel the reader gets far more background info and backstory than is necessary, and knows every bit of the characters' bios, but not enough essential info about what makes them tick, what motivates them, why they're engaged in the activities they're pursuing, etc.
I stuck with that theory as I read about
the book on Amazon.com, but got some confusion there, since the official description says this is the third book in the series. The book itself seems to agree; there are two other novels listed "Also by Susanna Gregory" and the book jacket blurb says that this book "continues the fascinating chronicles of a charismatic medieval sleuth." (Incidentally, he's not especially charismatic, and isn't a sleuth; he just stumbles over the solution to the mystery, largely by virtue of surviving the plague which kills off most of the possible suspects.)
However, the
wikipedia page on the author lists this as the first book in the series, and nothing in the book made it sound like this was a series. There weren't any of those, "It reminded Brother Bartholomew of that strange sequence of events last summer, when..." type of remarks. All of the characters were introduced as though the reader had never heard of them before, and as I said earlier, this very much had the feel of a first novel by a non-writer. Too polished in some ways, kind of sprawling and unfocused in others.
I don't care enough to dig to the bottom of the contradiction, but I'd guess it's about publication order. This was the first book the author wrote and it was the first one published in England, but for whatever reason it was the third one released in the US, which is undoubtedly where my edition and the Amazon.com edition were published.
At any rate, it's a fairly good book, with lots of gory and very realistic descriptions/depictions of life in the Middle Ages, and especially of the horrors of the Black Plague. Filling/thrilling the reader with just how awful and miserable and ghastly things are is a bit beyond the talents of the author, but even her fairly straightforward descriptions of bodies heaped in the streets, plague pits, rotting body parts, pus-oozing buboes, etc, paint a gruesome and realistic portrait. By the same light, the characters don't quite come to life, since they're sketched in very full details, but don't really get the spark of personality or verisimilitude that characters do in a really good book. The main character always feels kind of disassociated from events, with his narrative voice somewhat distant, and the other principles feel like characters who only show up and act when they're on stage, but who don't exist in other situations. Everything revolves around Brother Bartholomew, even though he should be far on the outskirts of most of the situations.
Still, you could go worse with historical fiction. If you like this sort of book, you'll like this one. Just don't expect a romance and love story, or a real stirring adventure. It's much more history book than romance novel.
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