On a stormy night in 1434, a minstrel arrives at Durham Cathedral to entertain an audience of powerful clerics and gentlemen. This Mother Naked is not the amusement these men were promised: but never mind that, he says – he is “a Gleeman of long-standing and great skill”, adding waspishly that “I pray the fine claret hath cushioned thine guests’ long wait for the evening’s entertainment.” So begins Glen James Brown’s second novel, in all its daring and exuberance: for Mother Naked has a story to tell, and a tongue willing to lash an audience, and excoriate the grotesquely unjust society that these men represent.
[ Oisín Fagan: Why the Black Death holds a grim fascination for meOpens in new window ]
Mother Naked is a dazzling work of speculative fiction: the author has taken the barest scrap of historical detail in the form of a line in the cathedral records for 1433-1434, noting the appearance of a certain “Mother Naked” who received a miserable four pence for a performance. On the foundation of this terse record is built a story of fear, violence and class tensions: the Black Death has swept through England and strained old forms of governance; the long-term implications of the Peasants’ Revolt can already be perceived – but in this part of northern England, the old ways still apply, the serfs must till their lords’ fields before they can work their own scraps of land, and poverty is rampant. The countryside is emptying – and responsibility for such miseries is apportioned conveniently, including on the shoulders of the Fell Wraith, blamed for the destruction of a nearby village and its people 40 years earlier.
But this is no supernatural tale of horror. “What I tell be no ghost story fit only for the frightening of bairns. There be a grander purpose,” says the minstrel, before revealing his connection with this vanished village – and underscoring our sense that this extinction event had nothing to do with wraiths, and everything to do with power and inequality. In this sense, and regardless of Glen James Brown’s mastery of English medieval idiom, Mother Naked is an entirely modern story, focused on the whispers to which we listen, that drip poison into our collective culture – stories that distract, that apportion blame, that collar those “others” whom it is so easy to condemn and to hate.
