In Search of a Fortune

I really wanted to like this book.  I am speaking of The Book of Boy, written by Catherine Gilbert Murdock and published in 2018.  It immediately caught my eye in the library with its simple title, old-fashioned woodcut illustrations, critical accolades, and medieval setting.  Moreover, the plot involves a pilgrimage to visit the relics of St. Peter during the Jubilee Holy Year of 1350.  What could be better?

A lot, as it turns out.  First, the premise: a young hunchbacked man, known only by the dehumanizing name "Boy", was rescued as an orphan by a priest and is now serving as a page to a French knight named Sir Jacques.  Life is ok until the knight's wife and children are killed by the plague, and Sir Jacques suffers a head injury in a jousting tournament, leaving him completely demented.  Then the cook takes advantage of this situation to marry her mentally incapacitated former master, but not before condemning her former mistress to hell by refusing to fetch her a priest on her deathbed.  Now Cook is the de facto head of the household and mistreats the boy, until she grudgingly agrees to let him accompany a pilgrim and carry his luggage on a journey to a local shrine.

This is where I put the story down for awhile.  Abused orphans abound in traditional folklore, but it all seemed just a little too intense for a story written at what I would consider a 3rd grade reading level.  Moreover, it quickly becomes apparent that the pilgrim, rather than wanting to pray before the relics of St. Peter, actually intends to steal them for purposes of his own.  I decided this was going to be a story about the corrupt underbelly of the Middle Ages, filled with churchmen who are more concerned with relics as lucrative tourist attractions than as objects of veneration, and who can always be bought at a price.  And it is, indeed, about these things.  But it is also much, much weirder.

For, as it turns out, the pilgrim is actually an escapee from Hell (turns out so many people are flooding into Hell during the Black Death that no one will notice just one going in the opposite direction.)  He is trying to collect (i.e., steal) seven relics of St. Peter, because this will automatically gain him entrance to heaven.  Why God allowed this questionable loophole is never explained.  Then, in an additional crazy twist, it turns out that Boy's hunchback is actually a pair of vestigal wings.  That's right, he's actually an angel (unbeknownst to him).  Perhaps that explains why he doesn't require food for nourishment, has no male anatomy, and can communicate with animals.

I don't even know where to start with all the problems with this scenario.  First of all, no one gets out of Hell, and if someone did (like in The Great Divorce) it would be because he repented, not because he jumped through some arbitrary hoops.  Furthermore, the pilgrim's primary motivation is to be reunited with his wife and son, not union with God.  The reader is clearly meant to sympathize with the pilgrim's plight, and the protagonist is eager to assist him.  And the boy being revealed as an angel with amnesia makes even less sense.  Real angels have perfect knowledge and could not be unaware of their nature.  They are also in perfect conformity with God's will and would never aid someone who was trying to cheat the judgment of God.  And even setting all this aside, I'm not even sure what this plotline adds to the story.  It worked perfectly well when the boy simply wanted to go on the pilgrimage to be cured of his hunchback. 

That being said, I must admit that The Book of Boy is a well-written, entertaining story.  It's almost refreshing to encounter a mainstream book where the supernatural life is real.  In their travels, the pilgrim and the boy encounter both real and fake relics, and the real ones have actual power.  In fact, the reason the pilgrim needs the boy's help is that the relics burn him when he touches them, being a denizen of Hell.  And frankly, I want to give it points for having Hell be an actual place where people can end up.  However, I would never hand this book to my children.  My rating is an average of A- for story and writing, and a D- for its theology.

Rating: C