“Company of Liars is a medieval road movie, set during the time of the plague. Its narrator, Camelot, slowly gets surrounded by strangers, and together they travel to escape the pestilence, and to find a safe haven.
The prologue is promising and intriguing. The rest of the book is rather upstaged by it. I don't read huge amounts of historically set literature, but Company of Liars is quite disappointing. The language is not very rich and never really feels authentic enough for the reader to get engrossed in it. Of course it shouldn't be ancient English, but the story should at least feel partially submerged into another world. The story itself, moving along at the pace of a very slow wagon crossing England, is not particularly worthwhile. (People travel, some people die.)
The biggest problem is that the book never really finds something to be really good at. It starts out mysterious, but is not really good at being a mystery (and what mystery there is, is not satisfying in its revelations). It includes a howling unseen wolf, but does not sustain the creepiness. It is a story of the plague, but it is always at arm's length, never really being as claustrophobic around our characters as it should be. Plot twists are hinted at many pages in advance, the characters are not really exciting, ...
Basically, Company of Liars is an average novel that tries to do many things, but does none of them well. It's an easy read, but not a satisfying one.”
Robert H wrote this review Thursday, March 12 2009.
(
reply |
permalink )
