...[a] rich and strange new novel ... one of the many deep and destabilising pleasures it offers comes from trying to work out precisely what kind of a book – and what kind of a world – you are in at any particular moment ... The contemporary parallels – with Brexit, with the existential threat of climate crisis – are there for the making, but Meek never labours them ... There is a pageant, balletically violent fight scenes – as good as anything in Cormac McCarthy – and some memorable sexual encounters. The overall effect is of a radical generic ambiguity, so that you never know if you’re reading a comedy of manners, a bawdy romance, a dystopian novel or a medieval porno ... It is an audacious thing to try to create a world sufficient to be described in an invented language, but in To Calais, in Ordinary Time the effect is triumphant ... At the centre of this beautiful novel is an exploration of the difference between romance and true love, allegory and reality, history and the present. It plays out in unexpected and delightful ways, and it would be unfair to make these explicit. To Calais, in Ordinary Time ends with a consummation both of its technique and of its story that is affirming, tender and a little bit glorious.

...true love, individual will, and uncertainty take to the road in James Meek’s freewheeling, exhilarating novel ... There is an infectious energy to the whole complicated set-up ... 'You ne understand allegory,' says Berna to Pogge, in one of several winks to the reader early on, letting us know what kind of journey we are in for. Meek explains in a note that he researched his various Middle English dialects with the help of the OED ... Who knew? Such are the pleasing rabbit holes that Meek’s thickly textured language led me down ... The sheer brio with which Meek introduces yet another literary convention, stock character, or unlikely scenario into his still-somehow-realistic story is thrilling.

As with a play, the novel unfolds with the stately, mannered, self-conscious air of a troupe of travelling players treading the boards, each delivering lines in a different accent, their voices creating a chorus from another age ... Meek has written about the past before...but this is something new. Using a language of his own making, bolted together from archaisms, and embellished by imagination, he attempts to enter the mouths and minds of people so far distant from us the gulf feels too wide to bridge. With some characters he is more successful than others. The noblewoman Berna and her kind speak in such a stilted, artificial way it defies suspension of disbelief. ... Yet despite its many flaws, there is a mesmerising quality to the way in which the more lowly characters talk, and reflect, that turns To Calais, In Ordinary Time from a worthy attempt at historical imagination into something altogether more inventive and risky ... It will not be to all tastes but for those who surrender themselves to the flow, it gradually exerts an almost magnetic pull.

Through...skilful deployment of language, Meek manages to craft a living, breathing world populated with characters that come alive in the mind ... Although the medieval world Meek conjures here is an entirely foreign land, it’s hard not to read the novel with an eye on contemporary events ... An established way of life is threatened by the imminent arrival of a cataclysm (here the Black Death bringing to mind the climate emergency); and Meek raises questions of sexual and gender identity ...This is a fine novel that seems to speak across centuries with more than the likeness of truth.

... a brilliant novel ... [a] quirky tale, with...Shakespearean twists, turns, and bawdy humor ... The multifaceted, satisfying narrative follows along as the travelers, though they don’t anticipate the development, are provoked to see themselves for who, and what, they truly are: to confront their true motivations, face their fears, and come to know themselves and their desires better. An immersive and relevant trip into medieval times that features social unrest and a pandemic, To Calais, In Ordinary Time is an existential novel that leaves no one unchanged.

...the novel is at its most current, and initially most convoluted, in its exploration of gender identity ... It’s fascinating and eye-opening on many levels ... Meek is more overtly concerned with holding a mirror up to today than Hilary Mantel in her Thomas Cromwell novels and he lacks Mantel’s lightness of touch, the playfulness and drive of his narrative obscured by its disquisitions and conscious literariness ... While his erudition and research are almost too clear, his prose is often brilliantly fresh ... To Calais, in Ordinary Time is at its best and most immediate when the characters are allowed free rein ... the novel...may be a feat of imagination but is strained by over-intricacy.

The first challenge is that the book is written in Mediaeval English ... With perseverance it becomes easier to read. Is it worth it? The characters are authentic, and it is refreshing for a novel about mediaeval England to recognise the diversity of language. The story is, however, quite silly by modern standards, full of cross-dressing, mistaken identities and extraordinary encounters; a mediaeval pastiche, not a modern novel in a mediaeval setting ... This is a clever, challenging book about life and death, love and war, language and belief in the 14th century. Fans of the Middle Ages will enjoy the challenge.

This is a book that seeks to compress the distance between past and present, seeking out reflections of contemporary concerns in the medieval world ... This is a book about the power of perspective and the importance of broadening horizons. The Black Death is a kind of hold-all catastrophic metaphor: for climate change, political meltdown and moral decay ... Like all fiction, but perhaps more so, historical novels live or die by their use of language. Few attempt an accurate representation of the speech of a bygone era, seeking rather to forge their own idiom to give the reader the impression of that time. Mr Meek goes further: each protagonist speaks in a different register. Will’s tale is related in a kind of Chaucer-lite; in accordance with her reading, Bernadine’s narrative is French-inflected; Thomas is resolutely Latinate. This tapestry makes for a compelling story that, like all great historical fiction, is not only about the past, but says profound things about the present.

With much delving in the Oxford English Dictionary, which is a rich repository of the history of the language, [Meek] has contrived to employ a vocabulary which is at the same time wholly individual and capable of suggesting that it is a representation of the way men and women might have spoken more than 600 years ago. Readers may find difficulties at first, but if they are receptive and especially if they sound the words to themselves, they will get the sense. In doing so they will feel their way into a culture very different from ours, yet with comprehensible similarities. It is very clever and I think that on the whole it works. This is an unusual and highly intelligent novel. Parallels with our own time aren’t pressed hard. It can be read with pleasure as an evocation of a rich and disturbing age.