I have to say that this book was a pleasant surprise. I don't read too many recent novels because, as one pundit put it, "I'd rather read books written by the people who built our civilization than those written by the people tearing it down." Ha! But I had to break with that rule because this book just sounded too darn interesting. I read an interview with author Paul Kingsnorth where he said that he wrote The Wake in response to the chaotic atmosphere of the early 21st Century. As someone who also finds contemporary events to be disorienting at best, and downright insane at worst, I needed to delve into this one.
I am not disappointed. Paul Kingsnorth has written a memorable tale that is somewhat reminiscent of William Morris' excellent House of the Wolfings. While Morris detailed the struggle of a Germanic tribe to withstand the avarice of ancient Rome, here we see William of Normandy's apocalyptic invasion of England in 1066 from the eyes of a very unique character named Buccmaster of Holland.
Even before the Norman invasion, the reader gets the sense that Buccmaster is a hard, primitive man with a tenuous grasp on reality. As a child, his obstinate, pagan grandfather filled his head with ancient legends. Now a man, Buccmaster sees himself as being the culmination of those tales, a demi-god in waiting. When the Normans invade and unleash chaos upon England, Buccmaster starts listening to the voices in his head that urge him to violent action as an avenging king of old, one charged by the gods to drive the "crist" and his "preosts" from England and restore the old pagan order.
One of the things I found interesting particularly interesting about The Wake is how Kingsnorth presents a believable picture of how people deal with the upending of reality in different ways. While those like Buccmaster and his small band of rebels ("grene men") choose violence, others just roll with the punches and make the best of it. I think this is brought to life when the mayor ("gerefa") of a particular town argues against Buccmaster's call to arms:
"it is no thing of ours saes the gerefa that is all no thing of ours. we has gifen geld to the frenc and done their biddan and thu can see they has left us free as efer we was if thu does their biddan they is good to thu
...
"this is all we is he saes and it is the same as it was and it will cepe bean this way no frenc has cum here to mac us do frenc things."
Perhaps this is one of the lessons of The Wake: chaotic times do not become less chaotic by adding to the chaos. In a sense, this is similar to an idea often referred to in Roman Catholic circles as "The Benedict Option": be content to look after your own community and don't be tempted to wage war against the world because you will just make things worse and ultimately lose everything.
Sadly, Buccmaster, being consumed with rage and filled with delusions of grandeur, is unable listen, something that ultimately makes him into a less sympathetic Hamlet.
Another aspect I really liked about The Wake is how Kingsnorth brought the land of dark ages England to life in a fashion reminiscent of Tolkien. Unlike a lot of contemporary authors who seek to emulate Tolkien, Kingsnorth seems to understand that Tolkien didn't make Middle Earth feel real just by populating it with memorable cities and cultures (as, say, George Martin does with his Ice and Fire series), but also by demonstrating an intimate connection between the land itself and the people who dwell on it. In Buccmaster's worldview, the land - e.g., the trees, the rivers, the fens, and so on - are all an expression of the primitive divine and, as such, serves to influence his thoughts and actions continually throughout the novel.
"well i gan out of the holt then to the ecg of the fenn where the yeolo secg met the land and the efen was cuman in across the low waters. fugols was callan and climban up and cuman down again and the sunne was startan to fall down to eorth and with it cum its yelolo light across the flat lands of my folcs"
For this reason, Buccmaster's slice of England felt vividly realized to me.
Now, what about Kingsnorth "Shadow Tongue"? As you can probably tell from the above quote, this novel is written in pseudo version of Middle English that the author crafted from a combination of Old English, Middle English, and some modern usages. I agree with the author: to have told this tale use contemporary English would have diminished its impact. However, I do question why Kingsnorth didn't just use actual Middle English (the English used in Beowulf) instead of this ancient / modern amalgamation. Perhaps this was more artistic in the author's mind? Whatever the reason, it is a mere quibble. Over all, while not as impressive as Tolkien's fabricated tongues, what Kingsnorth created does lend an air of authenticity to the novel, particularly in some of the better passages:
"none will loc but the wind will cum, the wind cares not for the hopes of men
the times after will be for them who seen the cuman
the times after will be for the waecend"
It does take some getting used to (such as the early Modern English of Shakespeare), but the effort is worth it.
Overall, I highly recommend this novel (I am giving it 4/5 but it really deserves 4.5 out of 5!). I particularly like the fact that the author, while writing about the contemporary reality of mass change, didn't get on a soapbox and provide a thinly-veiled diatribe. Instead, in the fashion of the best authors of the past, Kingsnorth just focused on telling a really good story of a world and a man gone mad (much like William Conrad's Heart of Darkness), and left it to the reader to make sense of it all.
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S. Tortorice
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Excellent Tale of Madness in a World Gone Mad
Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2016
C.Erickson
4.0 out of 5 stars
For those who love language, it is a delight
Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2016
The triumph of Paul Kingsworth’s historical novel The Wake is its language. It draws the reader into the mind of the unpredictably violent but grief-stricken protagonist, Buccmaster, who struggles to find meaning in his fate after the Norman invasion of 1066 CE. Kingsworth explains in a note that he wrote the novel in a “shadow tongue”, or a pseudo-language contrived to convey the authenticity of Old English. This shadow tongue takes some patience to learn, but is worth the effort. The process of wading through the unfamiliar spellings and vocabulary of the first few pages of the book, diligently looking up words using an Old English translator and the author’s glossary, is reminiscent of learning a different language—only not as time-consuming or difficult. For those who love language, it is a delight. The spellings are consistent and the vocabulary limited; soon enough the language and syntax clarify, and the world of the story emerges in a unique and thrilling way that would not be possible using modern English.
The point of view perches the reader like a bird on the shoulder of Buccmaster, a farmer proud of his position and land, and wary of foreigners and anyone who claims authority over him. Life seems quaint at first: he lives on his farm outside a small town; he is happily married with two sons, although sometimes he feels it necessary to beat his wife and yell at his oldest son, whom he thinks offers little respect to him as his father. His farm has been passed down through his family, and the places of the land—the woods, the lake, the moors—influence him deeply. Not only is this land his birthplace, and where his family is from, it is also the home of the old gods, including Odin. In one eerie and foreboding scene, a teenage Buccmaster takes a fishing trip with his grandfather, and from the boat looks down to see a dark black forest submerged under the water: “Under the boat under the water and not so deop was the stocc of a great blaec treow torn to its root lic a tooth in the mouth of an eald wif” (Pg. 51). When he asks his grandfather about this drowned forest, his grandfather tells him that the “gods them selfs waits still beneath these waters for us to cum baec and when angland is in need if we call them they will cum all of them from the eald holt [old forest] below” (Pg. 54). After his wife and sons are killed and the town pillaged by the Normans, a certain level of tension begins to wrap around the narrative. One suspects that Buccmaster’s thoughts, especially the way he interprets messages from the gods, who he believes are speaking to him, may not always be reliable.
The ending hints at the horror Buccmaster has carried and wrought throughout his life, but leaves no clear answers concerning what happened or what will happen. Before the reader can decide, the text breaks apart into the displaced words reflecting the chaos of Buccmaster’s mind; the misty fenns and holts of angland thereafter disappear.
The point of view perches the reader like a bird on the shoulder of Buccmaster, a farmer proud of his position and land, and wary of foreigners and anyone who claims authority over him. Life seems quaint at first: he lives on his farm outside a small town; he is happily married with two sons, although sometimes he feels it necessary to beat his wife and yell at his oldest son, whom he thinks offers little respect to him as his father. His farm has been passed down through his family, and the places of the land—the woods, the lake, the moors—influence him deeply. Not only is this land his birthplace, and where his family is from, it is also the home of the old gods, including Odin. In one eerie and foreboding scene, a teenage Buccmaster takes a fishing trip with his grandfather, and from the boat looks down to see a dark black forest submerged under the water: “Under the boat under the water and not so deop was the stocc of a great blaec treow torn to its root lic a tooth in the mouth of an eald wif” (Pg. 51). When he asks his grandfather about this drowned forest, his grandfather tells him that the “gods them selfs waits still beneath these waters for us to cum baec and when angland is in need if we call them they will cum all of them from the eald holt [old forest] below” (Pg. 54). After his wife and sons are killed and the town pillaged by the Normans, a certain level of tension begins to wrap around the narrative. One suspects that Buccmaster’s thoughts, especially the way he interprets messages from the gods, who he believes are speaking to him, may not always be reliable.
The ending hints at the horror Buccmaster has carried and wrought throughout his life, but leaves no clear answers concerning what happened or what will happen. Before the reader can decide, the text breaks apart into the displaced words reflecting the chaos of Buccmaster’s mind; the misty fenns and holts of angland thereafter disappear.
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candyldp
3.0 out of 5 stars
Starts off well but loses something
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 3, 2023
It's true that you get used to the shadow language fairly quickly and this does add a unique dimension to the novel that transports you away to an old and lost England. I enjoyed the first half of the novel and felt the genocide of the Norman Conquest really brought to life. Later on I realised that nothing was really happening though, there is minimal plot, minimal suspense, and a terrible rendering of female characters. I almost gave up. And the brief appearance of women there are, they are poorly characterised, nothing more than disempowered victims caught up in a war with no hopes of survival. This would be OK if the male characters were likeable, and most of them are. Unfortunately the protagonist is quite unlikeable, and definitely not the hero of this story. I'm not quite sure what the author was trying to achieve here, but I do respect the ambition to capture the enormity of what happened in 1066 and how this transformed and destroyed much of England forever. I would have liked to have seen stronger appearances from women (because there would have been women outlaws and strong female survivors and heroines back then, we weren't useless and totally disenfranchised thanks, a while ago we even found the will of an Anglo Saxon woman so we know they owned property and had agency). I'm aware Mark Rylance has bought the adaptation rights to this novel. It needs significant tweaking to work on the screen and feel relatable beyond it being one man's long and drawn-out tantrum and/or psychosis episode. This is a book worth reading but could have been so much more if it had a likeable protagonist and a rounder characterisation of women. It feels very isolated and heavy on the soul. Ironically, towards the end a Norman Bishop is introduced, and his characterisation is so powerful that you almost end up agreeing with the Normans. I liked the complexity this brought, but I'm not sure it was intentional on the part of the writer. If you look into the biography of William the Bastard, he was really quite something, so it would make sense that he surrounded himself with other larger-than-life men of the era.
Mac McAleer
4.0 out of 5 stars
i is feohtan for angland
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 11, 2014
This is a novel about how the events of 1066 affected one man living in the fen-lands of England, his reaction to these events and his own personal fight for England. The overwhelming characteristic of this novel is the style of language the author, Paul Kingsnorth, has used. This language in turn bemused, exhausted and enriched me. The main character is not Hereward the Wake but Buccmaster of Holland (Lincolnshire). He is a flawed man, not a hero. This is an interesting book and I would recommend it, but only if the reader can handle the language.
EXAMPLE: The following is taken from the near the start of the novel on page 9: "a great blaec fugol it was not of these lands it flown slow ofer the ham one daeg at the time of first ploughan. its necc was long its eages afyr and on the end of its fethra was a mans fingors all this I seen clere this was a fugol of doefuls. in stillness it cum and slow so none may miss it or what it had for us. This was eosturmonth in the year when all was broc" I presume that this means that a comet was seen in the sky. A great black bird (fugol) flew slowly over the village one day in the early morning at the time of the first ploughing. Its neck was long and its eyes afire and on the end of its feathers were a man's fingers. I saw all this clearly and this was the devil's bird. It came slowly so no one would miss it. This was in the Easter month (April).
This is not an exceptional quote; this is the style and language of the whole book. At first I found it incomprehensible. I missed much of the story because I was concentrating on the language. It did seem to be more understandable as I continued reading, but this was because I got used to the language, not because the language got any easier.
EXAMPLE: The following is taken from near the end of the novel on page 324: "well he is frenc and this is a frenc biscop and he has been gifen the abbodrice of petersburh as his. this was not one month ago and all of the fenns is specan of it for when hereweard hierde that the abbodrice was to go to a frenc biscop he gan in and he threw out all the muncs and toc all the gold and all things from the abbodrice to say to the frenc that this place can nefer be theirs". I think this means that a French bishop (biscop is pronounced bishop) had been given the monastery of Peterborough a month ago and everyone in the Fens was talking about it. When Hereward heard about it he went there and threw out all the monks and took all the gold and other things from the monastery, saying that this place would never be theirs.
The language and the story are both down-to-earth, but I was surprised to find many F-words and some C-words, especially as these would have been unknown words in Old English. However, this is not Old English but a special language designed to give the atmosphere of the time.
EXAMPLE: The following is taken from page 141. It describes an encounter between a child and his new Norman master. "frenc fuccer calls the cilde thu cwelled my father and I will cwell thu and all the hores thu calls thy folc and the bastard thu calls thy cyng. Go home frenc c-word or thu will die. At this the cilde then tacs dawn his breces and teorns his bare arse at the thegn". I would render this into modern English as: French f-worder, calls the child. You killed my father and I will kill you and all the whores you call your people and the bastard you call your king. Go home, French c-word, or you will die. At this the child takes down his breaches and turns his bare arse at the lord.
It helps in understanding this language to whisper it as you read rather than staying silent in the modern fashion. In fact, this book may be better as an audio book. This is all a long way from Charles Kingsley's best-selling Victorian novel Hereward the Wake with its easy English and its romantic re-writing of history.
THIS NOVEL is 344 pages long. There are no chapters but the text is divided into three sections named 1066, 1067 and 1068. The novel is followed by "A partial glossary" (4 pages), "A note on language" (4 pages), "A note on history" (4 pages), "Sources" (4 pages), "Subscribers" (6 pages) and "A note about the typeface" (1 page). I suggest reading the glossary and then the note on language before reading the novel itself.
EXAMPLE: The following is taken from the near the start of the novel on page 9: "a great blaec fugol it was not of these lands it flown slow ofer the ham one daeg at the time of first ploughan. its necc was long its eages afyr and on the end of its fethra was a mans fingors all this I seen clere this was a fugol of doefuls. in stillness it cum and slow so none may miss it or what it had for us. This was eosturmonth in the year when all was broc" I presume that this means that a comet was seen in the sky. A great black bird (fugol) flew slowly over the village one day in the early morning at the time of the first ploughing. Its neck was long and its eyes afire and on the end of its feathers were a man's fingers. I saw all this clearly and this was the devil's bird. It came slowly so no one would miss it. This was in the Easter month (April).
This is not an exceptional quote; this is the style and language of the whole book. At first I found it incomprehensible. I missed much of the story because I was concentrating on the language. It did seem to be more understandable as I continued reading, but this was because I got used to the language, not because the language got any easier.
EXAMPLE: The following is taken from near the end of the novel on page 324: "well he is frenc and this is a frenc biscop and he has been gifen the abbodrice of petersburh as his. this was not one month ago and all of the fenns is specan of it for when hereweard hierde that the abbodrice was to go to a frenc biscop he gan in and he threw out all the muncs and toc all the gold and all things from the abbodrice to say to the frenc that this place can nefer be theirs". I think this means that a French bishop (biscop is pronounced bishop) had been given the monastery of Peterborough a month ago and everyone in the Fens was talking about it. When Hereward heard about it he went there and threw out all the monks and took all the gold and other things from the monastery, saying that this place would never be theirs.
The language and the story are both down-to-earth, but I was surprised to find many F-words and some C-words, especially as these would have been unknown words in Old English. However, this is not Old English but a special language designed to give the atmosphere of the time.
EXAMPLE: The following is taken from page 141. It describes an encounter between a child and his new Norman master. "frenc fuccer calls the cilde thu cwelled my father and I will cwell thu and all the hores thu calls thy folc and the bastard thu calls thy cyng. Go home frenc c-word or thu will die. At this the cilde then tacs dawn his breces and teorns his bare arse at the thegn". I would render this into modern English as: French f-worder, calls the child. You killed my father and I will kill you and all the whores you call your people and the bastard you call your king. Go home, French c-word, or you will die. At this the child takes down his breaches and turns his bare arse at the lord.
It helps in understanding this language to whisper it as you read rather than staying silent in the modern fashion. In fact, this book may be better as an audio book. This is all a long way from Charles Kingsley's best-selling Victorian novel Hereward the Wake with its easy English and its romantic re-writing of history.
THIS NOVEL is 344 pages long. There are no chapters but the text is divided into three sections named 1066, 1067 and 1068. The novel is followed by "A partial glossary" (4 pages), "A note on language" (4 pages), "A note on history" (4 pages), "Sources" (4 pages), "Subscribers" (6 pages) and "A note about the typeface" (1 page). I suggest reading the glossary and then the note on language before reading the novel itself.
MisterHobgoblin
4.0 out of 5 stars
a folc harried beatan a world brocen apart
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 28, 2014
The Wake bills itself as being a novel unlike any other you will read. This, I suspect, is true.
Set in 1066 at the time of the Norman Conquest, we meet Buccmaster of Holland. Buccmaster narrates his story is a strange hybrid of Modern and Saxon English. The spelling is heavily stylized and Paul Kingsnorth has gone to some lengths to make it fit with a consistent set of rules - albeit rules based on his own logic. The language is mostly supposed to be words of Saxon or Germanic origin although Kingsnorth tells readers that he has made some compromises. The text can be hard to read at first but after a few pages, the reader gets accustomed to the spelling, absence of punctuation or capital letters, and weird sentence structure. It kind of builds into a rhythm that is hypnotic. But be in no doubt - and Kingsnorth would not have it any other way - the resulting style was chosen more for look and feel than for adherence to authenticity.
What is authentic, however, is the feeling of loss, of chaos and destruction following the Norman invasion. The people become real, living breathing beings rather than crudely embroidered stickmen in the famous tapestry. Unlike the history books that tell of a tired and depleted army marching south after defeating Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge, we find tales told by Saxon soldiers of how they could and should have beaten William. We see tales of strategic errors and bad luck. We have a sense of a pre-conquest society that was mature and political. Whilst The Wake, just like English history books, begins in 1066, we see a significant pre-history. We have men who fondly remember the reign of Canute; who are in touch still with the earth-gods that predated Christianity; who wait for dead kings to awaken beneath the high barrows in which they were buried with their battle ships. These are people who appear to have a freedom that was to vanish in subsequent centuries.
We get to know Buccmaster pretty well. He is a boastful man who has three oxgangs; he is a socman who never gave geld to a theyn. His high station exempts him from manual work, permitting him instead to stand offering advice to others on how they should do their work. Buccmaster has a penchant for idiom that is somewhat, er..., Anglo Saxon. He is a colourful man for whom the phrase "all mouth and no trousers" could have been invented.
The story is twofold. There is the story of resistance to the Normans. History tells us how that will end. There is also the story of Buccmaster himself - who he is and how he came to be where he stood in 1066. Both are compelling but slow moving. The joy, though, is in the recreation of an ancient time; an ancient habitat and ancient values. It's a bit like Achebe's Things Fall Apart - the text shows the pointlessness in trying to view other times and other cultures through a lens of modern values. Buccmaster's attitudes to women, to peasants, to priests and to those who disagree with him are initially shocking, then comical and ultimately tragic.
The language, which is always going to be the main talking point, is a mixed blessing. It is a mighty feat and there is something comical about Buccmaster's brazenness being filtered through this pseudo-Saxon-speak. However, after a hundred or so pages, one feels one has rather got the point and the endless repetition, backtracking and lack of plot direction gets wearing. Moreover, the style makes it difficult for any character other than Buccmaster to have any depth. The only real emotion seems to be in Buccmaster's own head, leaving others as no more than their deeds. One is reminded for much of the novel of Lady Gregory's Kiltartanese tellings of the ancient Ulster legends, with academic rigour replacing characterisation. But as well as an un-Gregory-like use of humour, Paul Kingsnorth does have a final trick up his sleeve. The ending is not quite what the reader had been led to expect, and that does repay the effort of sticking with the text.
The Wake has been longlisted for The Booker Prize. It may not win, but it is one of the most interesting books to have been listed in recent years.
Set in 1066 at the time of the Norman Conquest, we meet Buccmaster of Holland. Buccmaster narrates his story is a strange hybrid of Modern and Saxon English. The spelling is heavily stylized and Paul Kingsnorth has gone to some lengths to make it fit with a consistent set of rules - albeit rules based on his own logic. The language is mostly supposed to be words of Saxon or Germanic origin although Kingsnorth tells readers that he has made some compromises. The text can be hard to read at first but after a few pages, the reader gets accustomed to the spelling, absence of punctuation or capital letters, and weird sentence structure. It kind of builds into a rhythm that is hypnotic. But be in no doubt - and Kingsnorth would not have it any other way - the resulting style was chosen more for look and feel than for adherence to authenticity.
What is authentic, however, is the feeling of loss, of chaos and destruction following the Norman invasion. The people become real, living breathing beings rather than crudely embroidered stickmen in the famous tapestry. Unlike the history books that tell of a tired and depleted army marching south after defeating Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge, we find tales told by Saxon soldiers of how they could and should have beaten William. We see tales of strategic errors and bad luck. We have a sense of a pre-conquest society that was mature and political. Whilst The Wake, just like English history books, begins in 1066, we see a significant pre-history. We have men who fondly remember the reign of Canute; who are in touch still with the earth-gods that predated Christianity; who wait for dead kings to awaken beneath the high barrows in which they were buried with their battle ships. These are people who appear to have a freedom that was to vanish in subsequent centuries.
We get to know Buccmaster pretty well. He is a boastful man who has three oxgangs; he is a socman who never gave geld to a theyn. His high station exempts him from manual work, permitting him instead to stand offering advice to others on how they should do their work. Buccmaster has a penchant for idiom that is somewhat, er..., Anglo Saxon. He is a colourful man for whom the phrase "all mouth and no trousers" could have been invented.
The story is twofold. There is the story of resistance to the Normans. History tells us how that will end. There is also the story of Buccmaster himself - who he is and how he came to be where he stood in 1066. Both are compelling but slow moving. The joy, though, is in the recreation of an ancient time; an ancient habitat and ancient values. It's a bit like Achebe's Things Fall Apart - the text shows the pointlessness in trying to view other times and other cultures through a lens of modern values. Buccmaster's attitudes to women, to peasants, to priests and to those who disagree with him are initially shocking, then comical and ultimately tragic.
The language, which is always going to be the main talking point, is a mixed blessing. It is a mighty feat and there is something comical about Buccmaster's brazenness being filtered through this pseudo-Saxon-speak. However, after a hundred or so pages, one feels one has rather got the point and the endless repetition, backtracking and lack of plot direction gets wearing. Moreover, the style makes it difficult for any character other than Buccmaster to have any depth. The only real emotion seems to be in Buccmaster's own head, leaving others as no more than their deeds. One is reminded for much of the novel of Lady Gregory's Kiltartanese tellings of the ancient Ulster legends, with academic rigour replacing characterisation. But as well as an un-Gregory-like use of humour, Paul Kingsnorth does have a final trick up his sleeve. The ending is not quite what the reader had been led to expect, and that does repay the effort of sticking with the text.
The Wake has been longlisted for The Booker Prize. It may not win, but it is one of the most interesting books to have been listed in recent years.
J.O. Quantaman
3.0 out of 5 stars
He's a wanker in feverish love with his muse
Reviewed in Canada on December 15, 2014
"The Wake" by Paul Kingsnorth is an offbeat tale. The setting is England in the throes of the Dark Ages. 500 years after ending of Pax Romana, the landscape is as pristine as it was in the era of Stonehenge. Buccmaster is the novel's hero and narrator. He's a man of the earth, untutored and illiterate, yet a self-made man in a primitive society of scattered villages. After the Norman invasion of 1066, the conquerors raise the taxes to unheard of heights. Native folks are divested of their lands. Everyone must bend to the yoke of the Norman overlords.
When Buccmaster and his village mates refuse to pay, Norman knights set fire to their homes, rape and kill everyone they catch. Buccmaster loses his wife, his stores, his servants, his livestock and his crops. So he takes to the woods, seeks the comfort of Old Norse paganism and leads a small band of rebels against the Norman overlords.
Buccmaster is a hard man who pursues his beliefs to the point of fanaticism. He's suspicious of books and especially the Book touted by Christian priests who have allied themselves with the Norman conquerors. In some ways Buccmaster is a prototype of a modern serial killer or a deluded cult leader who demands unquestioned loyalty from his flock. Yet he is true to his inner lights, and it is hard not sympathize with him as he tries to make sense of a world gone berserk. He embraces Nature and old pagan witchcrafts. He is the epitome of a guerrilla warrior who strikes without warning and vanishes into the wilderness.
He knows the land. He knows how to survive without the comforts of hearth and home. He's attuned to the seasons, the plants and animals of the forests. He can live off the fish of the streams and fens. In short, Buccmaster is one with the natural world around him, which is the opposite of we moderns who have cushioned ourselves from the vagaries of nature, who live in urbanized artifices, who are causing irreparable damage to earth's delicate ecologies. Buccmaster raises issues that few of us care to acknowledge.
The real problem with this novel is its presentation. Kingsnorth has decided to write his tale in a cryptic language that evokes the cadence and sounds of the time. I never thought anyone could manage to write a novel as indecipherable as "Finnegan's Wake" - but Kingsnorth has done it. He expects readers to decode his scribbling practically from scratch. All he gives us is a woefully inadequate glossary. As far as I can tell, the author is as deluded as his narrator. He's a wanker in feverish love with his muse. The trouble is there are no lyrical passages aka John Keats. Instead there are loads of redundant choruses, but their sounds and cadences are dubious at best, since the author doesn't leave enough clues as to how they might be vocalized.
If you want a genuine Ode to Paganism, try Keith Robert's "Anita" – which is a thousand times more accessible and way better written.
To add salt to our wounds, the issuer, Unbound.com, is an Indie publisher without a clue. The yokels have tossed "The Wake" on the marketplace as if they were dumping the contents of a chamber pot. There is no chapter index. There are no endnotes to aid the reader. They've used some weirdo font that makes passages in Italics almost unreadable without a magnifying glass. This book is like a single-colored jigsaw puzzle. And these guys expect you to make donations for their total lack of effort and 21st-century know-how ??? Forget it. "First learn how to make Birthday Cards, guys."
When Buccmaster and his village mates refuse to pay, Norman knights set fire to their homes, rape and kill everyone they catch. Buccmaster loses his wife, his stores, his servants, his livestock and his crops. So he takes to the woods, seeks the comfort of Old Norse paganism and leads a small band of rebels against the Norman overlords.
Buccmaster is a hard man who pursues his beliefs to the point of fanaticism. He's suspicious of books and especially the Book touted by Christian priests who have allied themselves with the Norman conquerors. In some ways Buccmaster is a prototype of a modern serial killer or a deluded cult leader who demands unquestioned loyalty from his flock. Yet he is true to his inner lights, and it is hard not sympathize with him as he tries to make sense of a world gone berserk. He embraces Nature and old pagan witchcrafts. He is the epitome of a guerrilla warrior who strikes without warning and vanishes into the wilderness.
He knows the land. He knows how to survive without the comforts of hearth and home. He's attuned to the seasons, the plants and animals of the forests. He can live off the fish of the streams and fens. In short, Buccmaster is one with the natural world around him, which is the opposite of we moderns who have cushioned ourselves from the vagaries of nature, who live in urbanized artifices, who are causing irreparable damage to earth's delicate ecologies. Buccmaster raises issues that few of us care to acknowledge.
The real problem with this novel is its presentation. Kingsnorth has decided to write his tale in a cryptic language that evokes the cadence and sounds of the time. I never thought anyone could manage to write a novel as indecipherable as "Finnegan's Wake" - but Kingsnorth has done it. He expects readers to decode his scribbling practically from scratch. All he gives us is a woefully inadequate glossary. As far as I can tell, the author is as deluded as his narrator. He's a wanker in feverish love with his muse. The trouble is there are no lyrical passages aka John Keats. Instead there are loads of redundant choruses, but their sounds and cadences are dubious at best, since the author doesn't leave enough clues as to how they might be vocalized.
If you want a genuine Ode to Paganism, try Keith Robert's "Anita" – which is a thousand times more accessible and way better written.
To add salt to our wounds, the issuer, Unbound.com, is an Indie publisher without a clue. The yokels have tossed "The Wake" on the marketplace as if they were dumping the contents of a chamber pot. There is no chapter index. There are no endnotes to aid the reader. They've used some weirdo font that makes passages in Italics almost unreadable without a magnifying glass. This book is like a single-colored jigsaw puzzle. And these guys expect you to make donations for their total lack of effort and 21st-century know-how ??? Forget it. "First learn how to make Birthday Cards, guys."
BobH
4.0 out of 5 stars
Effective pastiche
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 26, 2014
‘The Wake’ by Paul Kingsnorth is a weird book – I’m sure that adjective would be appeal to the him as it stems from the Anglo-Saxon ‘wyrd’ (Fate) and this book is about the fate of a character whose lifestyle was destroyed by the Norman conquest in 1066.
The author insists historical novels should be written as of the period. Commendable but impossible. Compare a novel written in 1860 about contemporary life with one written in 2014 ABOUT 1860 and you can sense more nuances, allusions and sheer detail existing in the earlier work. So this novel is written in ‘shadow-tongue’ (a bastard form of Anglo-Saxon/Old English) which becomes easier to understand as the reader progresses (one tip is to read an unfamiliar word ALOUD, remembering the pronunciation rules stated by the author). In some ways the simplification is overdone – e.g. the use of ‘is’ with any personal pronoun whereas Anglo-Saxon used eom, eart, is( and sind for plurals) and so on. Here is an example of what I mean
‘what is thy name he saes
what is thine i saes cwic
he loccs at me for sum small time and i sees him also locan at welands sweord what i is wearan on my belt and what is scinan bright after i has clened it
i is harald he saes i is gerefa of this ham
i is buccmaster of holland i saes and i is leader of this werod
werod he saes smercan locan at us well this is sum small werod i can see why thu locs for mor men’
As shown above, a major problem I found was the virtual absence of punctuation (especially no commas!) but here Kingsnorth is conforming to medieval manuscript style – we are lucky he does use SOME paragraphing. I found his glossary inadequate but an Anglo-Saxon dictionary I own solved MOST problems.
The Buccmaster of Holland, the narrator, is not a pleasant man. He’s over-protective of his status as sokeman, reluctant to work like others (e.g. NOT digging a grave for a victim of Norman brutality). He is obsessed by a semi-mythical past, with which he has a strange empathy, and almost paranoid about the intrusion of Christianity, kings, laws and anything which might disrupt his own little world; women (including his wife), ‘geburs’, children must all respect him as master. Then 1066 transforms the world and he’s left bleating out questions to the trees, to the old gods, to Weland the Smith – like a child lost in a new neighbourhood and haunted by dreams/visions of half-remembered encounters with that other world..
He assembles a company (‘werod’) of three including himself and goes out to wage war against the’ ingengas’ (foreigners) who have stolen his life. The company expands and the Buccmaster’s personality is usurped by hubris before disintegration and disaster.
In essence the novel is an explosion of emotion, frustration and rage by a man who refuses to accept his fate. It carries the reader along, despite the language, but I feel I can only give it 4 stars. One reason is because so much of that emotional impact is similar to ORIGINAL outpourings of works such as ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Seafarer’ (albeit from a pre-1066 CHRISTIAN literature). There are excellent descriptions of battles (e.g. Stamford Bridge and Senlac/Hastings) – influenced by the Anglo-Saxon accounts of Brunanburh (937) and Maldon (991) among others. In sum, it’s an effective pastiche of an Anglo-Saxon autobiography– remembering, off course, that an 11th century layman would have a 0.1% chance of being literate. Even so, I suppose it meets the author’s idea of an historical novel.
Was I influenced by reading it in Kindle format? I don’t know, but I’m pleased it’s being considered for the Mann-Booker Prize.
The author insists historical novels should be written as of the period. Commendable but impossible. Compare a novel written in 1860 about contemporary life with one written in 2014 ABOUT 1860 and you can sense more nuances, allusions and sheer detail existing in the earlier work. So this novel is written in ‘shadow-tongue’ (a bastard form of Anglo-Saxon/Old English) which becomes easier to understand as the reader progresses (one tip is to read an unfamiliar word ALOUD, remembering the pronunciation rules stated by the author). In some ways the simplification is overdone – e.g. the use of ‘is’ with any personal pronoun whereas Anglo-Saxon used eom, eart, is( and sind for plurals) and so on. Here is an example of what I mean
‘what is thy name he saes
what is thine i saes cwic
he loccs at me for sum small time and i sees him also locan at welands sweord what i is wearan on my belt and what is scinan bright after i has clened it
i is harald he saes i is gerefa of this ham
i is buccmaster of holland i saes and i is leader of this werod
werod he saes smercan locan at us well this is sum small werod i can see why thu locs for mor men’
As shown above, a major problem I found was the virtual absence of punctuation (especially no commas!) but here Kingsnorth is conforming to medieval manuscript style – we are lucky he does use SOME paragraphing. I found his glossary inadequate but an Anglo-Saxon dictionary I own solved MOST problems.
The Buccmaster of Holland, the narrator, is not a pleasant man. He’s over-protective of his status as sokeman, reluctant to work like others (e.g. NOT digging a grave for a victim of Norman brutality). He is obsessed by a semi-mythical past, with which he has a strange empathy, and almost paranoid about the intrusion of Christianity, kings, laws and anything which might disrupt his own little world; women (including his wife), ‘geburs’, children must all respect him as master. Then 1066 transforms the world and he’s left bleating out questions to the trees, to the old gods, to Weland the Smith – like a child lost in a new neighbourhood and haunted by dreams/visions of half-remembered encounters with that other world..
He assembles a company (‘werod’) of three including himself and goes out to wage war against the’ ingengas’ (foreigners) who have stolen his life. The company expands and the Buccmaster’s personality is usurped by hubris before disintegration and disaster.
In essence the novel is an explosion of emotion, frustration and rage by a man who refuses to accept his fate. It carries the reader along, despite the language, but I feel I can only give it 4 stars. One reason is because so much of that emotional impact is similar to ORIGINAL outpourings of works such as ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Seafarer’ (albeit from a pre-1066 CHRISTIAN literature). There are excellent descriptions of battles (e.g. Stamford Bridge and Senlac/Hastings) – influenced by the Anglo-Saxon accounts of Brunanburh (937) and Maldon (991) among others. In sum, it’s an effective pastiche of an Anglo-Saxon autobiography– remembering, off course, that an 11th century layman would have a 0.1% chance of being literate. Even so, I suppose it meets the author’s idea of an historical novel.
Was I influenced by reading it in Kindle format? I don’t know, but I’m pleased it’s being considered for the Mann-Booker Prize.