The Owl Killers

It is said that the past is a foreign country, and Karen Maitland's novel of the Dark Ages opens the door to a world that is both strange and oddly familiar. Like a trip to Europe. The village of Ulewic is peopled by characters who work, play, gossip, scheme and simply try to live - just like us.  Their lives however,  are shadowed by ignorance, superstition and religion,   The parish priest is flawed, both intrinsically by his own failings, and extrinsically by the unenlightenment of the age, for example, damning a young dumb girl because her lack of screams when being tortured as a suspected witch, proved her devilment. 

The women of the nearby Beguinage, whose religion is both humanitarian and bound by piety, aggrieve the priest, and he, desperate to regain favour with the Bishop of  Norwich, becomes inadvisedly drawn to the anti-religion secret sect known as the Owl Men. Cleverly narrated by several lead characters, events are given a different complexion depending on the teller. The denoument is perhaps a little flat, with the tale shouting for a heroic intervention somewhere.  But the writer knows her subject well enough to immerse us in a very dark time indeed, so that we feel we know the village, the people and the mindset.  And for that, it is a very rewarding excursion to that foreign land.