The centerpiece of the triptych, rather than an empty space, is actually a daring literary style that favors startling images that move from late fourteen- and early fifteenth-century England to late twentieth-century America with suddenness and ingenuity. The sentences have a way of holding their nerve, like someone driving on ice braking hard on a sharp turn. The book plays not only with time but with tone. It allows moments or emotions from one story to leak into the other, in the same way as one thought in consciousness loses its sway and lets something more immediate take its place, only to be supplanted in turn by another thought or image. What connects the stories and weaves its way through the book is the theme of death, death that comes from hopeless infatuation, from sexual desire, from plagues new and old.

Nothing is schematic in Margery Kempe. Its procedures, connecting the deeply personal with the experimental, are underpinned by a theory of fiction-writing called New Narrative that was proposed by Robert Glück and some associates in San Francisco in the 1970s.

The competing narratives in Margery Kempe work against expectations; they obey no rules. The novel allows the stories and voices to wander, as the mind might wander, following arrangements that are more organic than orderly. The book does not accept the idea of story itself as a single line and does not have sections that are intact, contained, discrete. It seeks to undermine the very notion of the master narrative, or even competing narratives, to be replaced by a sort of porousness or flow.

“My palette is a sentence. Each next sentence can start at a very different place and so that makes for a kind of porousness, which is a quality I want,” Glück said in an interview with EOAGH, in the spring of 2009. There are sentences in the book that seem to establish verisimilitude, but then the sentences coming next appear to parody that very possibility. There are moments that set up a time and a place to be followed by language that is deliberately out-of-date.

In the same interview, Glück said: “In Margery, for instance, all the birds are real, even in her visions of the Holy Land, the right birds appear where and when they should. All the clothing is accurate. Other things are purposely anachronistic.”

While the novel thus undermines stable ideas of time, it is held together by a delight in what phrases and sentences do, by a rhythmic vivacity in the texture of the prose that compels the attention, enters the nervous system almost stealthily until the structures that the book sets out to question, having been purified by holy fire, return to us, ready to be taken seriously.