Hurdy Gurdy

There is a cure for pandemic gloom. What you need to do is read a funny novel about an even more deadly plague, the Black Death of the 14th century. Hurdy Gurdy is that novel . . . this novel is as short and funny as Dudley Moore. A read made for plague-fogged brains.

Of the Covid-inflected novels expected this year, few will be as weirdly entertaining as this cautionary tale.

The Black Death seems an improbable subject for a comic novel, but Wilson takes up the challenge, and the result is fiercely funny.

Hurdy Gurdy bubbles with a convivial, earthy humour and Brother Diggory is an amusing antihero. The prose is highly evocative, full of flesh and blood . . . This is an entertaining and atmospheric picaresque – though in the midst of our own pandemic, Wilson’s satire of misguided churchmen and unscientific plague doctors feels somewhat quaint: our own leaders appear far more monstrous. Still, it is often ingenious and frequently hilarious. Brother Diggory kills many, yet survives to tell the tale. I for one am glad.

Ribald yet deeply touching.

Christopher Wilson’s 10th novel, set against the backdrop of a medieval pestilence, is salutary: not only does it serve as a reminder that we’ve prevailed over this sort of thing before, it’s also genuinely and therapeutically funny.