Can I tempt you to read this book ...

I've been making a start today on a good old tidy of my study and I came across a sheet of paper on which I had photocopied a page of James Meek's To Calais in Ordinary Time. I'd meant to review it when I read it, but life must have got a bit busy, or other subjects presented themselves, and it fell by the wayside apart from a passing mention of how awful I found it. 

To demonstrate its unique qualities I had photocopied this page before returning the book to the library so that I could quote from it. Here you go 

Ces ne gave no thanks, and her neb ne tokened no feeling of blitheness that she was free. She kept a hard stern cheer, and her gaze wouldn't meet Will's. It was like to she hated him'. 

390 pages all written like that. It was hard going. I might have found it worth while struggling my way through it had any of the characters in it been at all likeable but this was yet another example of a book peopled by the violent, the misogynistic and the plain and simple unpleasant. I did not want to spend time with these people and if I had to I certainly didn't want to be struggling through almost 400 pages of weird syntax and odd vocabulary to do it. 

As the title suggests the book centres on a group of people making their way to Calais from the Cotswolds. I was rather startled to realise that almost at the end of the book they hadn't even reached Bristol where they were gong to get on a ship for France. I felt like I had travelled with them to the end of the world by that stage.

It's set at the time of the Black Death, and I gave a small cheer every time one of the group succumbed to the disease. I was cheering quite a lot towards the end - although not enough, as the three most irritating characters of all were sadly still alive on page 390. 

I'm not going to deny that it's a very clever book, written by a man who is himself clever, although possibly not quite as clever as he considers himself. It is apparently about identity and gender and language and constructing the world and I'm sure it is about all these things and many more, and scholars will, in the years to come, have a field day writing about the book, its themes, its structure, its meaning etc etc. Which presumably will delight Meek, or his shade, because if ever a book was written in order to be written about, rather than read and enjoyed, this is it. 

And now I can throw away that photocopied sheet, and think about which bit of the study I will tidy tomorrow.