Blackburn

I normally have little interest in historical fiction, particularly set during the medieval period, but I decided to have a gamble on The Leper’s Companions (1999). That was partly because it is such a beautiful book, and partly (moreso) because I’d read and enjoyed Julia Blackburn’s very unusual biography of John Craske. I thought if anyone could get me to enjoy a book set in 1410, it would be Blackburn.

We are thrown into a community of people who are mostly poor and ill, and often on the edge of some disaster. The miraculous and unexplained is commonplace – whether that be a mermaid washing up on the shore or a baby being born with the head of a fish (because of the mermaid’s curse, they assume). Things we’d recognise as severe illness sit alongside things that don’t make sense to a 21st-century audience. What I appreciated about Blackburn’s writing is that we are in this world on its own terms. There aren’t attempts to show what was really happening now that we have more medical and scientific knowledge, or a rationalising of medieval stories – rather, we see it all in modern English but contemporary understanding:

I walked through the village. Walls were pulled back like curtains so that I could see inside the houses. In one there was a woman lying in the sour stink of a dark room while a mass of devils crawled over her naked body. Her husband was with her, and even though his face was turned from me, I was suddenly afraid of him.

In another room in another house a woman was sitting upright while all her life walked before her eyes, fast and then slow, the years unfolding into each other as she watched them.

I appreciated how connected everyone was to their environment, and how open they all were to signs – whether from nature, from God, or from a mix of local and international beliefs. For instance, even those who would dismiss various of the omens that matter to this community would respect their recognition of the following omens. For the community, there isn’t a distinction:

Everyone in the village was filled with a sense of impending dread. They knew that the approaching winter was going to be very severe because there were so many warning signs. The geese were flying off in great creaking crowds even before the month had come to its end. The trees were much too heavily laden with fruit, anticipating that they couldn’t presume to survive and so had to trust in the scattering of their seeds. There was a feeling of time itself closing in, of a gate being clanged shut while the world waited with growing apprehension.

After various traumas and tragedies, as well as vows and wonders, three of the community decide to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Off go the leper of the title, a priest, the shoemaker’s wife, and fisherman’s daughter and the narrator of the book.

Here’s where I confess that I didn’t really get on with The Leper’s Companions. In the early sections, thanks largely to no attempt to put it in Ye Olde English, I was quite enjoying it. But I don’t think the quest narrative is for me in any of its myriad forms. The second half of the novel is basically the people travelling (though surprisingly little is told about the mechanics of this), meeting various people often in states of extreme misery, and going on their way. I have to admit that I didn’t find it particularly interesting.

I think Blackburn is a really good, interesting writer and she certainly creates vivid scenes. For me, there wasn’t quite enough to sustain interest in what she then did with those scenes strung together.

But it’s quite likely that I’m the wrong audience for The Leper’s Companions, and the fact that she got me to read to the end of a book set in 1410 is nothing short of miraculous in itself!

I don’t remember putting Threads (2015) on a wishlist, but I think I must have done – otherwise the choice my friend Barbara made in buying it and sending it to me was more serendipitous than I can expect. I imagine I put it there while reading Claire Harman’s biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner – but I had the happy experience, with my terrible memory, of forgetting anything about the connection at all until Warner’s name cropped up near the beginning of this book.

In brief, Craske was a fisherman who had a serious breakdown that left him unable to continue that profession – and he turned, instead, to painting and (later) embroidery. He was discovered by Sylvia Townsend Warner and her partner Valentine Ackland, and briefly became something of a cause celebre in a select circle – though has since been rather neglected; the museums that hold his work are often ignorant or ashamed of the fact.

Blackburn’s book – beautifully produced by Jonathan Cape, with a lovely solidity and brilliantly chosen cover and illustrations – isn’t really a biography. It’s more an account of tracing his life story, which emerges in bits and pieces as the book continues – and of Blackburn’s life as it continues alongside.

I feel like I don’t know much more about Craske than I did when I read the blurb on the inside jacket. He proves quite an elusive figure – beyond the bare framework that Blackburn details of his ancestry, his occupation, and his war. Perhaps he let his work do the talking – and there is plenty of that in this book; we see his depictions of the sea and ships which he painted on any surface that was available, from trays to biscuit tins. Eventually there is the extraordinary, large embroidery of the D-Day landings – a tiny part of which is shown on the cover. Usually the art conceit of using ‘detail’ to mean anything that isn’t the whole image really annoys me – but in this case it is only a detail. Craske’s work, whether in paint or embroidery, is a striking mix of naivety and knowledge. As a fisherman, he knows precisely how the sea behaves; as an artist, he is teaching himself and has a unique perspective.

Two people truly emerge from this book. One is Laura Craske – John Craske’s wife, who valiantly and quietly cared for him through mental illnesses that she did not understand (and his brothers – defeating any sort of stereotype of unsophisticated rural fishermen – were equally sensitive to Craske’s ailments and requirements). She was also determined for his work to have exposure, when offered, though also rather alarmed at the money that Warner and Ackland offered her for the work. By incremental millimetres, we learn about Laura’s character and resilience, and I certainly warmed to her.

But far and away the most dominant character in this book is Julia Blackburn herself. Her style of writing is so unusual, as is her approach. I had to check to see if she’d written any books before – she has, quite a few – because this feels so like somebody writing for the first time, and striking it lucky. Like Craske’s work, and (who knows) maybe influenced by his work, Blackburn’s prose is almost primitive. Here, for instance, she is doing some research into the family:

Philip came back with the photograph album and there was Grandfather the good doctor, tall and pale-eyed with a big blond moustache and a look of benevolent abstraction on his face. And here was Granny Cats his wife, also abstracted, but less benevolently so, or was that my imagination? And here was their infant son who appeared so thin and wan and that you would never expect him to survive into adulthood, but he got through and became a solicitor and married and had a son called Philip so that was good.

So many of her accounts seem to be about artwork she forgot to see or questions she forgot to ask. The raw threads of her biographical technique are exposed here, like looking at the back of a piece of embroidery. Many of the people who might have known the family are now very old – and she comments on the erratic interviews she manages to get. And the tangents! A thought leads to a thought. There is a chapter on a man she knew who had a parrot, which has nothing to do with Craske; there is a chapter that is a story a man called Keith sent her; there is a surprising chapter on Einstein’s visit locally (and accounts of the firm rebuttals made to her by Einstein experts that he couldn’t possibly have been seen riding a bike at that point, as he had yet to learn). There are sections of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, which I, of course, loved. There are very moving chapters on Blackburn’s husband and his illness.

It is all a very unusual combination, and would put Hermione Lee into hysterics – but it works, and completely beguiles. Blackburn does nothing linearly. The quest for Craske is the book, and he is not the subject – instead he, and his art, are (yes) the golden threads shimmering through the centre of this strange and wonderful work.