Father Alberto and the Flying Girl by Timothy X Atack review – a fable of medieval madness

A parish priest cares for the mentally afflicted in an absorbing tale that combines antic comedy with serious moral themes

In 1474, in a fictional location in southern Europe, Father Alberto arrives from Jormel Abbey, where he has failed in his ambition to become a manuscript illuminator at their renowned scriptorium. He is the new parish priest of the villages of Hem and Long, whose congregants are generally “piebald and errant”, but not the most peculiar or refractory of his flock. Among his duties is to tend to the mentally afflicted of the convent of Saint Particular, patron saint of the unloved, who are confined in cells for the greater part of the year. The fearsome Abbess and the silent Sister Lorenza introduce Alberto to his charges using the Index, an annotated manuscript of the inmates whose strange minds are “filled o’er the brim”. They include Pieter Mastiff, a raging, blaspheming carpenter; Selina, compulsively naked and unhappily sexual; Carin Marina, a former princess with a secret; Malike Dene, who has scarred his body with a map of the “topography of the universe known”; Zanzibar, a homicidal horse; and a mute girl in rags who “remorselessly attempts to fly”. These are only a few of a wide cast of characters in a fable-like novel that skilfully combines antic comedy with serious moral themes.

At the end of each summer comes the Feast of the Holy Fool, a festival of misrule with intensely described acts of cursing, drunkenness, violence and sexual vagrancy. The mad are released to wander free but must be returned to their cells by the priest with the aid of his eccentric and resourceful sexton, Oblong. The most challenging to retrieve is the Flying Girl, who is fleet of foot on the ground and through the treetops. She speaks in “a cavalcade of light and tuneful gibberish” that might be birdsong.