Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake

Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake is among the strangest, darkest, most beautiful, novels I've read in some time. It was written with crowdfunding, which is perhaps one of the new routes to artistic patronage. It then went on to be shortlisted of several book prizes, and then got picked up by a mass market publisher.  This might be an usual route for a novel now, but in a few years will probably be pretty common.

The story centers on Buccmaster, a minor Anglo-Saxon landowner living through the devastation of the Norman Conquest of 1066. However, this is no ordinary piece of historical fiction. Much of the power comes from the strange language in which it is written, an amalgam of Old English and Modern English.  While some of my Anglo-Saxonist colleagues were bothered by its lack of historical accuracy, or better, historical specificity, I wasn't in the least troubled, and I strongly doubt that any reader not a specialist in the history of the English language would be.

The strangeness of the language, which is clearly neither Old nor Modern English, creates an atmosphere, a mood and, most powerfully, a personality for the narrator.  He is a disturbing character in many ways, and the brooding, menacing tone of the novel was, for me, highly effective, especially at the outset and again toward the end.  The evocation of the loss to the Normans is powerful, and made more complex because we largely experience it through a character that, for me, was decreasingly sympathetic.  Also, the description of the landscape and the human connection thereto is a great strength of the novel, and it was unsurprising to find (impressive research, since it is mentioned on the back cover) that Kingsnorth was editor of Ecologist magazine.  There rich descriptions of the fens -- the boggy wetlands of England, are striking and beautiful.

Buccmaster is in dire straits. His wife is dead, his town is burned to the ground by the "ingengas," the in-comers, the French. A passage wherein he thinks about the names of the trees captures much of his crisis. Read it aloud and you'll catch more of the meaning:

now in this small holt [forest] by bastune locan at the treows i was thincan that these frenc they woulde gif all these things other names. i was locan at an ac treow and i put my hand on its great stocc and i was thincan the ingengas will haf another name of this treow, it had seemed to me that this treow was anglisc as the ground it is grown from anglisc as we who is grown also from that ground. but if the frenc cums and tacs this land and gifs these treows sum frenc name they will not be the same treows no mor. 

When an English oak tree is known by a French name, he is saying, it won't be the same tree any more. The writing is so strange and alien that it takes 20 or 30 pages to get the hang of it, but once I got it, I fell deep into the meres and fens and woods and murk of this moment of cataclysm.