The Wake

Buccmaster Trilogy #1

by Paul Kingsnorth

In the aftermath of the Norman Invasion of 1066, William the Conqueror was uncompromising and brutal. English society was broken apart, its systems turned on their head. What is little known is that a fractured network of guerrilla fighters took up arms against the French occupiers.

In The Wake, a postapocalyptic novel set a thousand years in the past, Paul Kingsnorth brings this dire scenario back to us through the eyes of the unforgettable Buccmaster, a proud landowner bearing witness to the end of his world. Accompanied by a band of like-minded men, Buccmaster is determined to seek revenge on the invaders. But as the men travel across the scorched English landscape, Buccmaster becomes increasingly unhinged by the immensity of his loss, and their path forward becomes increasingly unclear.

Written in what the author describes as “a shadow tongue”—a version of Old English updated so as to be understandable to the modern reader—The Wake renders the inner life of an Anglo-Saxon man with an accuracy and immediacy rare in historical fiction. To enter Buccmaster’s world is to feel powerfully the sheer strangeness of the past. A tale of lost gods and haunted visions, The Wake is both a sensational, gripping story and a major literary achievement.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Historical, Fantasy, Novels, British Literature, Medieval

365 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2014

About the author

Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer and thinker. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. He lives in the west of Ireland.

He studied modern history at Oxford University, where he was also heavily involved in the road protest movement of the early 1990s.

After graduating, Paul spent two months in Indonesia working on conservation projects in Borneo and Java. Back in the UK, he worked for a year on the staff of the Independent newspaper. Following a three year stint as a campaign writer for an environmental NGO, he was appointed deputy editor of The Ecologist, where he worked for two years under the editorship of Zac Goldsmith.

He left the Ecologist in 2001 to write his first book One No, Many Yeses, a political travelogue which explored the growing anti-capitalist movement around the world. The book was published in 2003 by Simon and Schuster, in six languages across 13 countries.

In the early 2000s, having spent time with the tribal people of West Papua, who continue to be brutally colonised by the Indonesian government and military, Paul was instrumental in setting up the Free West Papua Campaign, which he also helped to run for a time.

Paul’s second book, Real England, was published in 2008 by Portobello. An exploration of the changing face of his home country in an age of globalisation, the book was quoted in speeches by the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury, helped inspire the success of the hit West End play ‘Jerusalem’ and saw its author compared to Cobbett and Orwell by more than one newspaper.

In 2009, Paul launched, with Dougald Hine, the Dark Mountain Project – a call for a literary movement to respond to the ongoing collapse of the world’s ecological and economic certainties. What began as a self-published pamphlet has become a global network of writers, artists and thinkers. Paul is now the Project’s director and one of its editors.

In 2011, Paul’s first collection of poetry, Kidland, was published by Salmon. Since the mid-1990s, Paul’s poetry has been published in magazines including Envoi, Iota, Poetry Life and nthposition. He has been awarded the BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year Award and the Poetry Life Prize, and was narrowly pipped to the post in the Thomas Hardy Society’s annual competition.

Paul’s journalism has appeared in the Guardian, Independent, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, Le Monde, New Statesman, Ecologist, New Internationalist, Big Issue, Adbusters, BBC Wildlife and openDemocracy, for which he has also worked as a commissioning editor. He has appeared on various TV and radio programmes, most shamefully ‘This Morning with Richard and Judy.’ He is also the author of ‘Your Countryside, Your Choice’, a report on the future of the countryside, published in 2005 by the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

Reviews

[Adam McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

"lif is a raedel for dumb folc but the things i has seen it is not lic they sae. the bocs and the preosts the bells the laws of the crist it is not like they sae"



this is a good boc about a triewe anglisc man who was feotan the ingengas who cwelled harold cyng he is buccmaster a socman with three oxgangs but the fuccan frencs beorned his hus and his wifman so he macs himself a grene man who lifs in the holt hwit the treows

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upon reading the 2014 Man Booker longlist announcement, I was immediately drawn to The Wake because of it's unique premise and because I believe it's the prize's first crowdsourced nomination. Sourced by readers? I had to give it a try.

What is perhaps the most unique about this novel, and needs to be mentioned, is the language. Written in a version of Old English created by the author for layman readers, I didn't know what to expect. But what I think should be made clear is that Paul Kingsnorth didn't write this novel intending it to be a chore for the reader. He wrote it this way to reflect the world it takes place in, and he did so beautifully. The story is fascinatingly alien, and utterly relevant to a time we can only try and imagine. I appreciate Kingsnorth's reasoning in the note on the language:

"The way we speak is specific to our time and place. Our assumptions, our politics, our worldview, our attitudes - all are implicit in our words, and what we with them. To put 21st-century sentences into the mouths of eleventh century characters would be the equivalent of giving them iPads and cappuccinos: Just wrong."

And he's right. Ever get annoyed reading modern morals in a character of historical fiction? I bet Kingsnorth would too, but by taking the brilliant extra steps with language he's created something magical. Once you pick up on the "rules" of the language, reading it becomes second nature. It nourishes the story, never detracting from the tale. There is a partial glossary in the back, but I didn't use it once. Kingsnorth did all the hard work for us, and I found joy in understanding his new words through context.

Set during the Norman invasion of England, the story follows Buccmaster, and his somewhat misguided attempt to bring England back to what it used to be. Buccmaster is cocky, outspoken, and probably schizophrenic, but oddly riveting in an endearing sort of way. Except for the homicidal tendencies of course. But it's 1066, and his entire world is in turmoil. The journey is dark, but dreamy, and I was sad to see it end. Not that I was expecting otherwise, but I'll be honest, this one caught me off guard. One of the best historical fictions I've read yet, it brings exciting new breath to the genre.

I look forward to reading more of Paul Kingsnorth's work in the future. Highly recommended.

[Althea Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the Norman invasion of England, the French ravage and burn. One man, Buccmaster, returns to his home to find nothing but ash, and his wife's body amidst the ruins.

He takes to the woods to become a 'green man' (an outlaw), with loud proclamations of his intention to raise a group to fight the French in revenge for all he has lost.

The story is told in Buccmaster's own words. From a narrative perspective, this means that he clearly tries to paint himself in the best light possible, seeking the reader's sympathy for his situation. At first, as readers, we do have sympathy. Certainly, from the first, Buccmaster seems to be all talk and little action. Many of the actions he justifies to us seem pretty cowardly. He's arrogant, violent, superstitious, self-entitled, and certainly knows how to nurse a grudge. But, after all, he has been a victim of brutal invaders. His position as a man holding to 'the old ways' (as he imagines them from his grandfather's tales), while the world has moved on around him, seems poignant. We expect, as the story progresses, that he might find redemption in some way, whether through justice or spirituality.
Instead, the reader finds Buccmaster's character thrown into increasing doubt. Finally, we see an outside opinion of him. These revelations trigger a crisis point, where events of the past and Buccmaster's current decisions combine for a finale that's quite horrific.

From a linguistic perspective: I don't think I've ever read a historical novel that did a better job of bringing the reader into the mind and culture of a character. Kingsnorth has created a vocabulary for this novel based on the language of the time. It's not Old English - but it's influenced by it. At first, it makes the reading slow going. I normally read very quickly, but I found myself lingering over each word, thinking about the tones and rhythms of the language, imagining how the words would sound from the mouths of the characters.
It's not only the spelling - the author is careful not to use words or concepts that his characters would not be familiar with.
I thought I might find the artificiality of the language tedious, but I actually found it extremely enjoyable, and ultimately successful.

I've read a lot of historical fiction, and this is far from the first story I've read that illustrates the religious shift in Europe from indigenous beliefs to Christianity. This book avoids falling into any of the common tropes of that type of tale.

It also does a fantastic job of describing a time of historically momentous events in a way that vividly conveys what it was like to be a 'regular person' in a time before news media.

The details of daily life, as portrayed here, seem completely convincing and well-researched - but this is more than a vehicle to educate readers about 11th century England. Buccmaster is not simply an example of a man of his time - the novel fully works as an exploration of one individual's character.

This is a unique and significant work, and one that will stick with me. Highly recommended.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Unbound for the opportunity to read this excellent book. As always, my opinions are solely my own.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 – 4 stars

When we think of post-apocalyptic fiction we tend to think specifically of science fiction (or at least I know I do). Our vision is usually either of a near-future survival thriller about the fall of current human civilization into ruin (most often as the result of a nuclear holocaust, an ecological disaster, or more recently due to those pesky zombies), or of the far-future as we witness the after-effects on a society that has fallen into utter barbarity and ruin. We tend to see the apocalypse, understandably, as truly world-ending on a global scale wherein the entirety of human civilization has been laid waste, but what about an apocalypse that is more restricted in its geographical extent? What about one that impacts ‘only’ a single nation or a culture? What about an apocalypse that happens not in the future or near-present, but one that lies in the distant past? We think, or hope, of apocalypses (apocalypsi?) as rare events, something so inconceivable that it could only happen when the blue moon shines, but when we broaden our definitions just a little and look beyond only those events that shatter the globe and also turn our vision from the future to the past we may start to see a world that was riddled with apocalypses; a world where cultures thrived and died on a regular basis. It would seem that in many ways the apocalypse has been a fact of life for humanity since our infancy. Countries, cultures, whole civilizations were destroyed as a matter of course throughout most of human history and Paul Kingsnorth’s _The Wake_ is a tale of one such apocalypse.

1066 is a famous year. Even those ignorant of many ‘major’ historical events likely know that this was the year that William (alternately ‘the Bastard’ and ‘the Conqueror’) of Normandy invaded England and defeated then-king Harold Godwinson and subjugated a people. This subjugation was particularly harsh, even in an age known for the harshness of war, and ultimately involved the destruction (or was it a transmutation?) of a people through the decimation of their language, their rights, and, ultimately for many, of their lives. The Anglo-Saxon culture that then held sway (admittedly itself a race of conquerors on the island) was overcome by the culture of France and a way of life was seemingly decimated almost overnight. Landowners lost their rights and privileges to a crown with new and far-reaching powers; speakers of the Anglo-Saxon tongue found themselves ruled by a people that neither knew, nor cared to know, their language or ways; nearly the entire ruling class was decimated and those beneath them learned that even the yoke they once bore was perhaps not so bad a thing when compared to the new one. What is less well known is that there was, for several years, a guerilla war waged on the Norman invaders by some of the remaining Saxon population. This war, while ultimately fruitless, was the last hope of many for retaining their way of life and it is the story of one such rebel that we are told in Kingsnorth’s novel.

One thing to note before this review goes any further is that Kingsnorth has basically created his own language in this novel and it could be a stumbling block for some. He calls this language a “shadow tongue” since it is a fabricated version of English that incorporates many Old English words and grammatical structures in an attempt to incorporate a sense of verisimilitude with the era in which the story takes place without actually writing it in Old English. It could thus be compared to what Russell Hoban did in Riddley Walker, though I would argue that this is a bit easier to slide into (esp. if you have any background in basic OE syntax and vocabulary). There is also a helpful glossary at the back of the book for some of the more opaque words and terms used in the text. I think, as with Hoban’s use of an invented language, Kingsnorth’s experiment is not merely a gimmick and ultimately succeeds. I find far too often that historical fiction fails due to being little more than modern characters dressed up in historical drag. I wouldn’t say that attempting to recreate a dead language in a way that can (mostly) be read by modern audiences is the sole solution to this problem, but in this case it definitely went a long way towards immersing the reader into what is effectively a different world, and certainly a different mindset. When we have to meet the narrator on his own terms due to the language used we are forced to leave many of our preconceptions at the door. Of course the fact that I have at least a smattering of Old English definitely helped me in acclimating myself fairly quickly, but I would strongly encourage any readers, even without this background, to still put in the effort. Once you’ve picked up the gauntlet dropped by Kingsnorth I think you’ll find that after a few chapters the words that were previously giving you headaches start to roll naturally off the tongue.

We open on the eve of the Norman invasion and are introduced to Buccmaster of Holland (a region of eastern England, not the Netherlands) our stalwart narrator and a “socman a man of the wapentac [who] has three oxgangs” which ultimately translates to “an important man of influence and means beholden to none” (a fact of which he is eager to remind us every chance he gets). Buccmaster tells us his tale of tragedy and woe as he recalls the day that everything started to go wrong and all of the events that followed in its wake. It was, as is usually the case, a day much like any other aside from the fact that he witnessed an omen, a strange bird in the sky, that led him to believe that changes were in the air. His feeble attempts at warning others fall on deaf ears and we soon learn that Buccmaster is an atavism amongst his own people, a man of the old ways as taught to him by his grandfather who has rejected the “hwit crist” and the wave of change that has already come and significantly changed the traditions and beliefs of his people. As a result he is not only something of an outcast and recluse in his own small community, but also already in a position of bemoaning the lost past of his people even before the great apocalypse that will truly decimate his culture has arrived.

It is interesting to note that despite the tragedies that we come to see befall Buccmaster: the loss of his position, the burning of his home, the disappearance and probable death of his sons, the rape and murder of his wife, Buccmaster never becomes a sympathetic character. He is a man, we quickly come to realize, who is neither likeable nor trustworthy. His words always serve a specific purpose - his own perceived best interest – and while it seems fairly clear (to me at least) that he is not deceiving us on purpose it is equally clear that his entire perception of reality and the events that go on around him are skewed. Ironically it is his own words that betray him. As we hear the constant justifications, the repeated assurances of his own worth, power, and rightness, the continual complaints about the wrongs to which he has been subjected (by both his enemies and his friends) we begin to question Buccmaster’s grasp on reality. As Buccmaster falls further and further from his position of relative comfort and influence, or as obstacles to his unquestioned authority arise, we start to hear the voices in his head. These voices whisper to him that the old gods have returned and hand-picked Buccmaster himself to bring back their ancient ways to his people and overcome the invaders. Unable to accept that he is no more than an outcast and outlaw living like a beast in the forest, Buccmaster must instead see himself as the ordained saviour of his people and their ancient way of life.

You might wonder how book with a main character whose catalogue of faults and crimes matches that of Buccmaster could be readable, let alone enjoyable, but I found _The Wake_ to be both. Buccmaster is no saint, he’s not even a likeable sinner, but his story of loss, decline, and madness is a compelling one. As we are given more and more glimpses of both past and present events and the story of his life begins to unpeel like the skin of a rotting onion we start to see the full tragedy of Buccmaster’s life and understand that the last greatest calamity of the overthrow and destruction of his people was simply the final nail in the coffin - the last straw in a long line of sins, disappointments and defeats. It sounds an utterly gloomy tale, and while it certainly isn’t full of a lot of chuckles, I still found it to be compelling and not so much depressing as harrowing. The apocalypse of the Norman invasion may have left the globe at large much as it had been before it occurred – changes in regime happen every day after all – but it was no less world-ending for that to the people that lived through it and came out the other side into a world, a reality, which they could no longer understand.

_The Wake_ is a fine piece of historical fiction that not only incorporates a truly intriguing narrative technique and linguistic structure, but also proves to be a powerful meditation on loss, culture, and the ways we define ourselves as both individuals and members of a wider community. Definitely recommended, though not for the faint of heart.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding novel about a landowner in Lincolnshire – Buccmaster of Holland – set in the years 1066-1068. Buccmaster, even before the Norman invasion, is apart from his fellow fen dwellers, still, like his grandfather but not his father, a follower of the Old Gods and a rejecter of the Church; also someone convinced he has through his Grandfather been chosen and marked out by the legendary blacksmith Weland (whose sword he believes he owns).

At the start of 1066 he believes he sees various ill omens – he refuses to participate in the fights against either the Danish or Norman invasion, his children do fight and are killed in the second and shortly after (as reprisals for not paying taxes to the French and while Buccmaster is absent) his farm is burned down and his wife killed. He escapes to the woods, joining up with a servant and then a young boy – initially avoiding the French, the boy’s hero worship challenges him into killing a French knight (leading to vicious reprisals on the village) and in turn gathering a small band of outlaws around him. His band kills various Frenchmen over time, but Buccmaster is clearly reluctant to commit actions to match his words and even his self-image, he is challenged verbally by his band (keener to join up with Hereward the Wake) and in his head by conversations with Weland Smith. As the book draws to a close the gap between Buccmaster and his followers grows, particularly when his embrace of the old Gods lead to try to carry out a ritualistic killing on a French knight – we also find out (as do his followers) that after having been expelled by his father for attempting a pagan style bural for his Grandfather, he returned several years later and likely murdered his father and sister in an “accidental” fire.

The book is written in a “shadow tongue” – a version of Olde English updated to be readable but respecting many of the rules of that language. Crucially this adds seeming authenticity to Buccmaster’s first person tale and it’s clear that the constraints of the language force the author to more closely imagine the actual thoughts and attitudes that Buccmaster may hold. This relates to a wider theme which its clear Kingsnorth feels strongly about and which he puts into Buccmaster’s mouth, that the true soul of a country is completely bound up in its land, its farming, its language, its ways and the interactions between those – Buccmaster often states that the foreign ways and names for things which change England for ever, that Christianity is destroying the uniqueness and essence of Englishness (themes similar to the author’s non-fictional polemics around the commercialisation of English town centres and villages).

What is perhaps most interesting about it is that Buccmaster himself, despite representing the author’s views, is a self-obsessed and delusional character.

I am not sure if is self-aware or self-delusional that a character who clearly represents the author’s views is themselves self-delusional.

A clue may be that a self-proclaimed English nationalist and follower of traditional pre-Christian English rituals actually lives in the West of Ireland and says he is a Zen Buddhist.

[K.J. Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astounding.

Written in a shadow version of 11th century English which is incredibly evocative, this is stark and brutal and magical. An invaded country, groups of men driven to the woods and fens, a land haunted by dying gods where Christianity is the first invader. Told by a magnificent creation, buccmaster of holland, an inarticulate, rage-filled, brutal man consumed by paranoia and self-doubt that expresses itself in visions of Odin as Wayland Smith.

This is a magnificent book. The author has tried to restrict the vocabulary to pre Norman English and the poverty of language is incredibly expessive - the struggles for expression, the grinding repetition. It's a difficult, struggling, dying language like the story it tells.

deop in the eorth where no man sees around the roots of the treow sleeps a great wyrm and this wyrm what has slept since before all time this wyrm now slow slow slow this wyrm begins to mof

It's pretty hard work at first and takes slow reading, but my God, it's worth it.

[Antonomasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

[4.5] I've always wanted historical fiction written like this. To feel like I was reading something of another, older world, but not hard work like Chaucer or Beowulf.

So I'd probably have read The Wake anyway, regardless of the Booker Prize - it's just that I only heard of it a day or two before the longlist announcement, via, I think, a Guardian comment from book blogger John Self (who has since reviewed the novel for The Times - behind paywall, haven't read it). At that point, when I looked at the Goodreads book page, I was delighted to see an average rating of 4.28 and several reviews: clearly the book was already being found by the right people... And as I expected, with it being longlisted, people who don't like it and can't read it are now trying it and giving 1 and 2 stars - it surprises me how many people don't read a few pages before buying a book. (But is it better to have a grateful niche audience and less money, or higher sales including people who [noisily] don't appreciate a work plus a few extra fans?)

That "not hard work"... As mentioned in a few other reviews, I generally just don't bother with fiction where specialist knowledge helps if I haven't got it. Things that helped here included: knowledge of the relevant history including pre-Christian religions, familiarity with accents and dialects of Northern England and southern Scotland, ("beornin" heard in an old Durham accent made sense instantly) understanding of the general patterns of Old English without actually knowing the language. (Germanic languages would help a lot too.) And a thing which must have a proper name, switching gears where language is concerned and understanding it through feeling and sound more than thinking: this felt the same as reading paragraphs of text speak and youth slang, except that I was more interested. (I've always had a knack for silently working out slang based on context and instinct, which is very useful if you're an easily embarrassed kid who doesn't want people to know you're easily embarrassed.)

The Wake is best read in big chunks - and when fairly awake - so you stay inside its idiom and remember the vocab; it gets faster as you go along. Also, read the afterwords first, and if you're on an e-reader, print out the glossary (unless your OE / German / Dutch / Scandinavian is good enough that you won't need it).

Having been vaguely interested in Paul Kingsnorth's non-fiction already, it maybe wasn't so surprising to find a writer with views I'm very sympathetic to. (Have recently read several of the articles on his website.) He also had mystical feelings about landscape from an early age, and studied history, someone who likewise hankers for a vivid felt sense of the past whilst having come to understand that we can really only see it through ourselves and our own time. The "shadow-tongue" in which The Wake is written panders skilfully to the feeling of "what it was like", but it's not authentic, it's a twenty-first century constructed pidgin of modern and Old English - although nearly all of the words are of Anglo-Saxon origin. This combination of ancient and modern shares the ethos of neo-paganism. Pedants familiar with Old English may find it annoying, but knowing OE wouldn't necessarily preclude a reader from enjoying the writer's creative games with language.

Likewise, there are contradictory layers to the narrator, Buccmaster, and his story. This is a "post-apocalyptic historical novel" - whose phrase that was I can't remember - and Kingsnorth mentions in his afterword that few British people know how awful the aftermath of the Norman Conquest was. (He points out the effects on land ownership and the class system - but the Harrowing of the North still has its effects today in the North-South economic divide.) A cheesy, obviously didactic historical novel would set out to show this using sympathetic characters. Buccmaster pre-Hastings is a self-important Lincolnshire sokeman, or yeoman farmer, easy to imagine as a burly Daily Mail reader, forever complaining about taxes and red tape, always expecting something to be done about things without contribution from him and his perfectly able household - and also something of a Walter Mitty dreamer, all talk and little, sporadic, action. He's not exactly central casting's budding rebel outlaw type, nor does he experience a chrysalid transmutation of personality at his country's hour of need.

No sensible reader would expect a man of the eleventh century to be PC and peaceful, but he's more unusual among his contemporaries for being, essentially, pagan. His grandfather remained secretly loyal to the old gods and was a great inspiration to Buccmaster. The narrator's conversations with Weland and visions of Woden echo Robin of Sherwood's relationship with Herne the Hunter - given Kingsnorth's age I'd bet he watched the series as a kid / teenager. (There are various other echoes such as Lincoln[shire] green [men], a Little John-like giant etc.) I'm deeply sympathetic to this pagan aspect and viewed it as a positive side of Buccmaster's character. (I also rooted for the Wicker Man people... I don't like violence but it was some kind of satisfying counterbalance to all the conversion and martyrdom stories from a Catholic perspective I read as a child.) I'd guess the author has pagan leanings too. But the book is well-constructed such that a more negative interpretation of this side of the character is equally possible; as his contemporaries do, a reader could also see Buccmaster's paganism as inevitably connected with his episodes of madness. Whereas I consider his main problem is egotism and tyranny, and that as far as the old gods are concerned, he's merely guilty from time to time of that very English fault to find, taking things a bit too far. (One has to also take into account that the supernatural was an accepted part of every day life before the age of reason - although that doesn't mean that all dreams and visions were automatically accepted, as the reception of Margery Kempe and Joan of Arc indicate.)

Alongside the moments of too-modern religious doubt (of all religions), this story of the once well-established man become an outlaw on the run is a common motif in several of this year's Booker longlisted titles, a comment on creeping authoritarian aspects of contemporary life. Kingsnorth, a former road protestor and environmental journalist, evidently means something along those lines, also re. globalisation. (He may be another white middle class man as many have said there are too many of on the list, and an Oxbridge one to boot, but he seems the sort who seriously mucks in and sees how it is, perhaps not quite in so much depth as Orwell, but same ethos.) But he is circumspect enough to consider in his narrative why resistance seems futile, or even harmful, to some. And hidden under Buccmaster's veneration of the old gods and concept of pre-Norman, pre-Christian England as somehow the real deal - a popular idea at least since the Victorians - is the knowledge that before the Anglo-Saxons there were the wealsc - now inhabiting the far west - whom the Germanic invaders conquered, and that there were other people before the wealsc too. He is outraged that people like himself are made thralls; the geburs and thralls his own people held are mentioned, made obvious and human to the reader, but to Buccmaster they remain beneath him. Love of the English countryside and history is abundant in the writing, but not without knowledge of the potential for xenophobia within these sentiments. I admire the sense of balance in this novel, that it passionately understands why something is worth fighting for, but simultaneously what might be wrong about that or about the way it's done - and that any one time is just part of a long cycle of takeovers and oppressions, and the mythical past of perfect freedom always was mythical, even if certain aspects of life were or are better at one time or another. It combines the historian's long view with the political activist's immediate outlook - and seriously creative use of language as rarely found in books of that sort.

Another post here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Fiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

I suspect if I read this again, it might get an extra star. I've certainly been thinking about it enough in the three weeks since I finished it. I tend to like the idea of experimental novels more than I like the execution, so this was a welcome exception to that. I thought it was marvellous.

When I look over my reading habits, they tend to ebb and flow in certain directions: The Wake for me hit the end-ish of a phase of playing with storytelling conventions, and the early blossoming of an enthusiasm for old and middle English. I've got a book on King Arthur going on in the background, my non-fiction reading has tended to the millennium-old of late, and - oh yes, twenty points if you guessed it - I've finally managed to nick a hardback copy of The Buried Giant off my friend. (More on that as I inevitably start cooing over it.) The point is that I was in the right headspace to be thinking about a novel set just after the invasion of Britain in 1066, and really, that's what kept me going. The language in The Wake creates a sense of place like I've never seen it before. I can only imagine how tough it was to write, how many knots it tied Paul Kingsnorth's brain into. After a few hours of reading this, you start conceptualising the world differently. It did something to the pace of my day, and I'm not sure what. Sometimes it was exhausting or disconcerting, but either way it's stuck with me.

It's tempting to say that the point of The Wake is the language, but I don't think that's true. The language is certainly what jumps out at you, but the content of the story is still the thing. Buccmaster of Holland, his name (as I correctly guessed and Kingsnorth apologetically confirmed in the afterword) a bit of an anachronism in itself, is a man out of time. Desperate to be taken seriously, he remembers the stories his grandfather told him about the old days, the time before, when men were heroes. When the French come, killing his family and peers and taking everything he has, he struggles to regain and keep the place he used to have in the world.

It's his place in the world that he's had taken from him. It's the esteem of others that he wants, or needs. Buccmaster is, bluntly, a little shit, and all of the other characters have an awful lot of patience. But there's something sinister under the attitude: something just below the surface, all the way through. Like the best of detective novels, when you get to the end, you can look back and point to all the clues. As you're going along, it's another matter. When the moment of truth comes, it doesn't come where or how you expect. I was shocked. It was signposted everywhere, but I was shocked. I love being taken for a fool by an author who knows what they're doing.

About the author. Paul Kingsnorth has another project that I've been following for the last nine months or so, the literary journal called the Dark Mountain Project. Partly, I love getting beautiful hardbacks full of tales of the apocalypse in the post. Partly, though, the Dark Mountain Project confuses me: it's got a high esteem for how things used to be, and the things we as a society have ostensibly lost. I sympathise a whole lot, I do - for all that I love, and make a living from, being really connected to a lot of the world, all of the time and at high speed, I do sometimes miss the times when I didn't have internet access, and didn't feel anxious about it. I joke about knitting and spinning and darning and the various accoutrements of my Girl Guiding days as being part of my post-apocalyptic skill set, but I still have one eye on making sure that Me-Without-Electricity is not Me-Without-A-Hope.

For all Paul Kingsnorth's sheep farm and articles about missing middle England, I still think: mate, you've just crowdfunded your book. You probably got half your research, and your audience, via the internet. And, reading The Wake, I think he's more aware of this fact than I gave him credit for: even in 1067AD, Buccmaster of Holland is already pining for the old days, when men was men and giants walked the earth. That glorious past where everything was right is an imagined village: it never existed. If we want it, we need to go to it, not go back to it. But just because a collectively imagined (or in Buccmaster's case, individually imagined) history never happened, doesn't mean it can't mean something. We've just got to be a bit careful of it, that's all. If nothing else, The Wake has something to say about that. And you may believe me when I say that it is not messing around.

So here you go: a great story, interestingly told, curiously produced by people who are obviously bibliophiles, and with something important and unusual to say. Don't be put off by the language: if you managed Trainspotting, this'll be a breeze. You won't have read anything else like this lately. It'll get the old cogs grinding, and if you're anything like me you'll really enjoy it.

[Tom Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, that was quite a leap. Can't say I've ever gone from one star to five before. But I revisited and finished this book, and it turns out to be the impressive achievement that its fans claim. It's a masterful stream of consciousness narrative told by a deeply unreliable narrator and one of the most compelling and chilling depictions of mental illness that I've ever read. It's also a beautifully crafted example of authorial subtlety -- not so easy from the first-person perspective -- that deploys foreshadowing with grace and artfully conveys revelations to the reader while keeping our narrator unaware of them.

I think this book could easily wind up being used in high school English classes: it's well-constructed, harrowing and short. But there's another reason: the experiment with language. As noted everywhere, Kingsnorth tells the story in a "shadow language," a readable but still deeply alien tongue meant to reflect elements of Old English (while not striving for accuracy). As you'll see below, I initially found it deeply frustrating.

And I still think there are elements of the experiment that are a bit self-indulgent. What was gained by my not understanding, until the afterword, that "scramasax" means "dagger" or that "socman" is a class of free farmer?

Kingsnorth's afterword says that his intent was to more accurately portray the thought patterns of people separated by time and culture, and that language is an essential part of this. I'm not sure I buy it, at least for the purposes of a novel. Still, the language inarguably affects the experience of reading the book. It works your brain differently -- I found myself getting sleepy much faster than usual, weirdly -- and it changes how you perceive Buccmaster's language, with its limited vocabulary and lack of structure. There's a revelatory element, too, as the book progresses and one begins to wonder where the lines exist between Buccmaster's ignorance and his mania. It both introduces distance and sweeps you in to a place where you have no choice but to accept the flow of language. All in all a neat trick, and one that I'll grudgingly admit was essential. But it is certainly not without its frustrations.


ORIGINAL REVIEW FOLLOWS:

Boy. Screw this. When authors write in dialect the subsequent conversation is often tinged with difficult racial dynamics. Well, here the dialect is a made-up approximation of Middle English as the narrator describes the devastation of the Norman invasion in a stream of consciousness. It's annoying as fuck. I made it 3% through. An example, laboriously typed through autocorrect:

i will tell thu of this time my grandfather toc me trappan the ael i was a cilde a lytel cilde but my grandfather he wolde sae that the ways of the fenns moste be taught yonge or will nefer be cnawan

So yeah, okay: I don't really get to weigh in on this book because I didn't give it a proper chance. There are some people who will enjoy the artfully added layers and the alienness of the chosen tongue. For the rest of us, the dialect will be a superficial gimmick and a substantial obstacle to connecting with any emotional core that the book might have. And we will be inclined to punish the author with one-star reviews for wasting our $9.

Honestly, I loved Jim Crace's Harvest, from the last Booker class. That novel was a historically informed first-person rumination on the destruction of a kind of pastoral idyll in England. I was primed to really like this book. I am not going to struggle through this silly, showy stunt, though. Get bent, Mr. Kingsnorth.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) This has just won the Bookseller book of the year award; I wish I could say I appreciated it more. Kingsnorth calls his Booker-longlisted fiction debut “a post-apocalyptic novel set 1000 years in the past.” Written in the author’s own version of Old English, the story traces the English guerrilla resistance movement that followed the Norman Conquest. This novel is hard work, requiring patience and effort from any reader. Prior experience of or interest in Old English chronicles would certainly be an advantage.

The Wake resulted from crowd-funding via Unbound – perhaps the first Booker Prize nominee to arise from non-traditional publishing? So, for its publication journey as well as its linguistic ambition, it was always going to stand out. However, for me it was more an interesting experiment than a readable book.

(See my full review at The Bookbag.)

[Book Riot Community]

Kingsnorth’s novel was on the longlist for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, and it seemed to me the most interesting book in the bunch. I waited and waited for a US release until I couldn’t stand it any longer and ordered a copy from the UK–well worth the trouble. It tells of the aftermath of the Norman invasion of England in 1066, and it does it in its own “shadow tongue,” a modernized and easily intelligible version of the Old English that was spoken before our language got all Frenchified and Latinate. It’s a sophisticated way to recapture the primitive brutality of the era, and the results are powerful indeed. The Wake has all the post-apocalyptic oomph of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and carries all the historical weight of Beowulf. Luckily, Graywolf Press is bringing the book to American audiences in September. — James Crossley


from The Best Books We Read In May: http://bookriot.com/2015/06/02/riot-r...



____________________




I’m reading this in bits in between others. I’m fascinated by the pseudo Anglo-Saxon the author created to tell the tale. After a few sentences, you really forget it’s not in “modern” English and you’re absorbed by the story.

-Kristen McQuinn



from The Best Books We Read In July 2016: http://bookriot.com/2016/08/01/riot-r...

[Brian Yatman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Wake was a deeply satisfying, completely immersive reading experience for me, and despite my growing realisation that the narrator was a bully, a liar, a coward, and probably a paranoid schizophrenic, I was kind of sad to leave the hate-filled confines of his head.

Buccmaster is a Dark Ages Travis Bickle, a self-styled visionary cast adrift in the ruins of Anglo-Saxon England after the Norman invasion. He talks to the old gods, plots revolution, procrastinates, struts about with his grandfather's sword, and rhapsodises about the natural beauty of his homelands, and it becomes apparent that he hates everyone and everything. Hints of Cormac McCarthy here, but the language is entirely the author's own.

[Ian Mond · Rating 4 out of 5]

A month ago I decided that I wasn’t going to bother with The Wake.

After skimming the opening pages, and coming across words like “blaec” and “micel” and “fugol”, I’d concluded that I didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to deal with 100,000 words of pseudo Old English. As a compromise, I decided I would spend one day reading the book so I could write the sort of review that says less about the novel and more about the reviewer’s failings.

But when the day came and I started reading the novel I discovered that, while the odd word tripped me up, there was a rhythm and tone to the book that was both accessible and engaging. In spending three years developing his “shadow tongue” Paul Kingsnorth had achieved what he’d set out to do. Mimic Old English but make it understandable for the modern reader.

Understandable is one thing, making a novel enjoyable is a completely different challenge. The Wake could have been a dry account of what happened as a result of the Norman invasion of England in 1066. With the introduction of the belligerent and cantankerous Buccmaster, a “socman with three oxgangs” (a phrase repeated so often it’s a wonder I didn’t start muttering it in my sleep), we gain a personal insight into what the invasion meant for those being conquered.

The Battle of Hastings means very little to me as an Australian whose ancestry is Jewish. We were never taught it at school and what little I do know about the Battle comes from the Doctor Who story The Time Meddler. (A lovely 4-parter featuring William Hartnell as the Doctor. Set in 1066, it involves Vikings and the introduction of the Meddling Monk, a rogue Time Lord who plans to change history by helping Harold defeat the Normans at Hastings). It’s only in reading The Wake that I realised that the Battle was more than the sort of petty power struggle you’d expect from 11th Century Europe. It was an act of colonialism.

Having read Hild earlier this year I was aware that Christianity already had a strong foothold in England. From a spiritual perspective then, the Norman invasion reinforced a religious way of life that was already being practised. However, Buccmaster remains a believer in the old Gods (the one’s now made famous by Marvel Studios). It’s an interesting narrative choice by Kingsnorth because Buccmaster’s beliefs immediately separate him from the other towns-people, even before the invasion. His vision symbolised by a bird, that something terrible is coming, is mostly ignored. It’s not until a “hairy” comet appears in the sky, a genuine omen of change, that Buccmaster’s warnings gain some credibility.

Buccmaster’s beliefs are representative of the broader change that is coming. While the Old Gods might have already been shown the door, it’s unlikely that the towns-people expected the sudden power shift that resulted in the Norman invasion. Men who were once free, like Buccmaster, were now no better than the average peasant. What’s worse, those in power not only looked different (they shaved their heads) but they didn’t speak the same language. I was surprised to discover that it would be another three centuries before English – or at least a version of it – was again spoken at Court.

The loss of religion, the loss of language, the loss of culture. Buccmaster’s story is familiar because of how aware we’ve become of the post-colonial narrative. Symptomatic of this narrative is a focus on those being colonised and their struggle to keep their culture alive. Buccmaster’s decision to hide in the forest, following the death of his wife and the burning down of his property, is as much a move to avoid the French as it is an attempt to maintain a connection with the old Gods who dwell in the fen. Buccmaster’s wielding of his grandfather sword, apparently, forged by Wayland Smith, a legendary master blacksmith of Norse and Germanic mythology, is also symbolic of a culture under threat.

Given the post-colonial narrative it would have been easy for Kingsnorth to characterise Buccmaster as the one true hero of Anglo-Saxon culture. But what becomes clear is that he’s a petty little man, not willing to accept any challenges to his authority. As the novel progresses and he finds himself at odds with the men in his posse, his paranoia and jealousy flourish into outright madness. In his delusions the old Gods turn their back on him, more inclined to support Hereward, a historical figure who fought to push back the Norman invaders. As it happens both men failed to stop the inevitable. In the case of Buccmaster, though, his own flaws as a person, as distinct from an Anglo-Saxon, were what eventually led to his demise.

It’s easy to see why this novel caught the eyes of both the judges for the Man Booker and Goldsmith Prize. The novel provides a unique perspective, a post colonial narrative, on a moment in Western history that’s more remembered for when the pivotal battle occurred then the subsequent outcome of that battle. Kingsnorth clever use of language, his shadow tongue, not only gives us a taste of Old English but reminds us that the way we speak, the way we dress, the Gods we believe in and the laws we follow are often a product of military invasion and cultural domination.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brave and difficult novel, not merely for its use of a partially-reconstructed Old English as its narrative voice, but in making its central character so utterly unsympathetic. In his own mind a hero of the resistance effort against the invading Normans, "buccmaster of holland" is arrogant, self-pitying, deceitful, petty, vindictive, sadistic, boastful and cowardly. He's also almost certainly insane (the only possible alternative being that the ancient heathen gods of England, who he believes have chosen him for glory, are really terrible judges of character). Readers expecting an account of the heroic exploits of Hereward the Wake (who doesn't appear in person, but whose popularity and success Buccmaster views with seething envy) should look elsewhere.

This is one of my two main reservation about the book. The language is a challenge at first, but becomes easier with practice (especially given all the repetition). Buccmaster's company doesn't, and one would be forgiven for thinking it would be more fun and more interesting to be spending all this time with Hereward.

My second, and more major, reservation about the novel is its modernity. Kingsnorth protests in his afterword that putting 21st-century words in 11th-century mouths would be a misrepresentation on a par with giving his characters "iPads and cappucinos". This is fair enough; but in structure Buccmaster's narrative has almost nothing in common with Anglo-Saxon texts and almost everything in common with 21st-century literary fiction, with italicised dream-sequences, internal (or divine) dialogue represented typographically without textual explanation, and strategically interspersed flashbacks building up to a telling revelation about the central character's backstory. If allowing Buccmaster to say "dagger" instead of "scramasax" would be handing him an iPad, surely making him the author of a postmodern narrative is putting him behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius.

This makes me doubt either Kingsnorth's understanding of his material, or the sincerity of his literary endeavour, and makes the deliberate difficulty of the novel's language look suspiciously like a time-wasting game.

Where this novel is gloriously successful, though, is in evoking the horror of invasion and colonisation -- the murders, rapes and burnings, the systematic confiscation of property and disempowerment of native authorities, the utter unconditional subjugation which still -- at nearly a millennium's distance -- underlies the historical justification of the British monarchy. Buccmaster's view of these events is partial, of course -- he's more concerned with his own loss of status than the sufferings of his fellow "anglisc folc" -- but he nonetheless describes them vividly, and the novel aroused in me what felt like a rather more righteous indignation.

The primary interest of The Wake, in the end, isn't its style, but its identity as a genuine British postcolonial novel, about a very real and traumatic event in Britain's deep past whose long-term historical results include our later becoming colonisers every bit as ruthless as those shown here. (Admittedly the novel can hardly examine these, but the image of Buccmaster, abused and brutalised as a child, becoming the cruel and vicious wreck he is in later life, surely reflects it.)

I wasn't sure such a thing could be written, and by that, at least, I'm impressed.

[Rod · Rating 5 out of 5]

the night was clere though i slept i seen it. though i slept i seen the calm hierde naht only the still. when i gan down to sleep all was clere in the land and my dreams was full of stillness but my dreams did not cepe me still

when i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all time. a great wind had cum in the night and all was blown then and broc. none had thought a wind lic this colde cum for all was blithe lifan as they always had and who will hiere the gleoman when the tales he tells is blaec who locs at the heofon if it brings him regn who locs in the mere when there seems no end to its deopness

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


This beautifully wrought, unsettling novel serves as an excellent companion piece to Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, an obvious influence in its use of an invented language. Written in what Kingsnorth calls a "shadow tongue," the language is a combination of Old English and the English that we know, giving vivid life to a culture that was gone long ago.

Taking place in the aftermath of the Norman invasion of England in 1066, the narrator is Buccmaster, a well-to-do landowner who takes up arms against the occupying French, forming a ragged guerilla resistance group. Wrathful and self-important, Buccmaster is not a likable character, and it's possible he's quite mad. At the very least he is dishonest—with other characters, with the reader, and possibly with himself, making him a quintessential "unreliable narrator." One constantly has the feeling that there is more to Buccmaster than he lets on—or, rather, less. He is, however, sympathetically rendered and his tale is never anything less than riveting, a great part of that being due to the language, which immerses you in the feeling of living in this world where people, although familiar, think and feel in a different way than we do today. In fact, I became so immersed that I started to think in the Old English spellings of words even in my everyday life, and a day or two later I still haven't quite recovered. Highly recommended for historical novel enthusiasts who love the sound and feel of archaic languages.

For a taste of the book read out loud, see this nice promo video featuring the author:

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

"when I woc in the mergen all was blaec through the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all time. a great wind had cum in the night and all was blown then and broc. none had thought a wind lic this colde cum for all was blithe lifan as they always had and who will hiere the gleoman when the tales he tells is blaec who locs at the heofan if it bring him regn who locs in the mere when there seems no end to its deopness"

Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake, published in 2014, was longlisted for the Booker and was part of a very strong shortlist for the, in my view more discerning, Goldsmiths Prize. It won the Gordon Burn prize for "novels which dare to enter history and interrogate the past...literature which challenges perceived notions of genre and makes us think again about just what it is that we are reading" - which is a perfect description of the novel. And also the Bookseller Book of the Year, up against one of the most varied lists I've seen for a book prize e.g. David Walliams's Awful Auntie, H is for Hawk, Piketty's Capital and the vlogger Zoe Gugg's Girl Online.

The Wake tells the story of the Anglo-Saxon "resistance" in the wake of 1066 and the Norman conquest. And most distinctly does so in a language that attempts to replicate the Old English of the time - the language of England that pre-dated the arrival of Norman French.

Although it is not written in Old English ("that would be unreadable to anyone except scholars") but rather a pseudo-language of Kingsnorth's own invention. The effect is striking, authentic, atmospheric, powerful, odd but comprehensible:

"aefry ember of hope gan lic the embers of a fyr brocen in the daegs beginnan brocen by men other than us"

It forced me to read more carefully as I has to sound out the words, at least in my head, in a way that I wouldn't normally do when reading. Indeed a quick trial showed that my 8 year old daughter actually found the book easier than I did, since reading words phonetically was more natural to her. The task certainly gets easier after a few pages as one gets into the swing; I expected it might at the same time get tiresome after 300+ pages, but it didn't.

To give one example, a riddle in Kingsworth's version of Old English:

"my stem is hard he saes in a bed it is standan proud

i is haeric under neath

sum girl she tacs me in her hand she holds me hard she runs her hwit hand along my hard stem and she peels me and she tacs my heafod in her mouth

and lo I will mac that girls eages water"

What am I? Answer - "a leac" (onion).

The novel is narrated by buccmaster of holland "A socman of the blaec fenns a free man of the eald danelaugh"
(socman being a free tenant farmer under the Danelaw in Eastern England) and, unusually in Christian 11th century England, an adherent of the "eald gods of angland" (Wodan, Frigg, Erce) and no friend of Christian priests "before the crist cum our folcs gods was of anglisc wind and water now this ingenga god from ofer the sea this god he tacs from us what we is."

After buccmaster's ham is razed by the French invaders, as punishment for refusing to pay them the demanded gold, he sets out to become one of the green men, a guerilla resistance movement against the Normans. But he doesn't join the established risings of
Eadric, Hereward or the sons of Harald in the North (all real historical figures featured in the novel) but instead takes control of his own small band of motley followers.

Kingsnorth clearly has something of a political axe to grind both historically and in the present day. In an afterword he describes the Norman occupation as "probably the most catastrophic single event in this nation's history" and blames the "Norman Yoke" (which he admits most modern historians sniff at) for many of today's modern ills 1050 years later, such as uneven land distribution ("this is all the more regrettable as the effects of Guillaime's invasion are still with us").

In his non-fiction work, Real England Kingsnorth railed against "a new England: a smoke-free, health-conscious, well-dressed designer nation whose values are those of its new ruling class, the city bourgeoisie. The country is being remodelled and made safe for urban 4x4 drivers, gastropub diners, the owners of investment properties and the wearers of clean wellies". As someone who ticks most of those boxes - except the well-dressed - I'd would call that progress, but for Kingsnorth this is the loss of the "Real England" and, in a link to The Wake, his greatest ire is reserved for the replacement of traditional smoke-filled inns ("the English pub - perhaps the best marker of our national character - English ale from the Saxon ealu") by family-friendly smoke-free gastropubs (again - I'd regard that as a great achievement of modern society).

And he puts similar sentiments into the mouth of the narrator, buccmaster. He hits out at the confiscation of land by the Normans ("as wulmaer theyn was cwelled feohtan under the flag of harald godweison who was thief of the corona of angland his land will be gifen to geeyome cing and with them all lands in his thegnage"), the likely introduction of French words and names into the English language, castle-building, foreigners generally and, as above and despite the fact it predates the French arrival, Christianity.

However, to be fair to KIngsnorth, buccmaster is no hero, except possibly in his own distorted view. Although he claims to have seen and told others what was happening ("why does they not lysten why does they not see"), he refuses to go to fight for harald at Stamford Bridge and then Battle and tries to stop his sons doing so.

After the Conquest he believes himself to be chosen for greatness by the old Gods and great men of England ("i specs for the wilde for the eald gods under the blaec waters in the drencced treows. i is the lands law over men i is eorth not heofon leaf of treow not leaf of boc. i is raedwald i is beowulf i is harald cyng last of the anglisc i sceal be").

But even when he forms his mini-resistance movement he spends much of the time hiding in the woods and the fens. Indeed his delusions extend to an ongoing dialogue, in his mind, with the historical-mythical Weland Smith, who acts as a form of ongoing challenge to him (e.g. asking why he is "weac like a wifman in thy warm hus eatan and sleapan while angland beorns").

And in a disturbing end to the novel, we see both the truth of buccmaster's family history and his real attitude to his small band of followers: "and did they thinc i wolde stand did they thinc i wolde stand and die with them these esols these cwellers of angland these wifmen who has not been triewe to me".

buccmaster is exposed him for what he is, a self-obsessed, delusional, character. And this in turn at least makes one question, if not ultimately reject, his views - a brave authorial choice.

Highly recommended.

[Brendan Monroe · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a truly immersive experience, I highly recommend "The Wake". Paul Kingsnorth's extraordinary novel practically begs to be adapted into a film by Mel Gibson. All the classic Gibsonian qualities are here.

1. Characters speaking a dead language? Check.

2. Story of the decline/fall of a people? Check.

3. Post-Norman Conquest English Kings cast as treacherous villains? Check.

Think "Braveheart" crossed with "Apocalypto" and you've got "The Wake".

As an English Major, I had to take a class that required us to record ourselves reading passages of "Beuwolf" out loud. The professor then graded us on the quality of our pronunciation. I'm not exactly sure what this taught me, as I remember almost zero words in Old English.

The author notes at the end of the book that while his characters would have been speaking Old English, the book itself isn't written in Old English as that would have made this unreadable to anyone who wasn't a scholar. So while "The Wake" brought some Old English words back to me, it's actually written in a "shadow tongue" intended to give the feel of the old language in a way that modern-day readers are easily able to comprehend.

Initially, a book written entirely in this "pseudo-language" struck me as a bit jarring. But I found myself getting used to it rather quickly. Maybe that class really did pay off.

This all makes "The Wake" a refreshingly original read. It's not so much the story itself that is special, but the way it's told. It would be a good book if it were written in modern English, but the fact that Kingsnorth wrote it this way makes it an extraordinary one.

I don't think I have been as excited about the language in a book since I first read "A Clockwork Orange". The language is everything here, and you can't help but feel like you are in England in 1066 while you're reading.

Books that seek to innovate deserve our attention and admiration. That "The Wake" manages to innovate and tell such a good story at the same time makes it particularly worthy of our admiration.

Would England have been a better country were it not for the Norman invasion? Kingsnorth presents a strong argument that it would have been. The invasion of the Normans was, in Kingsnorth's words, "probably the most catastrophic single event in this nation's history", bringing "slaughter, famine, scorched-earth warfare, slavery and widespread land confiscation to the English population, along with a new ruling class who had, in many cases, little but contempt for their new subjects."

That England failed to have a king who spoke English as his first language (the Normans spoke French) until 1399 is stunning. Kingsnorth goes on to point out that many of the precedents established by the Normans remain in place even today, and their influence is widely felt in, among other things, the fact that 70% of English land is today held by a mere 1% of the population — an inequality of land ownership that's second only to Brazil's.

"The Wake" makes you mourn for the loss of a people and a culture. It also makes you mourn for what might have been.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not efry man the boc wolde lic, for it is deorc lic a holt in a night with no mona and blaec and deop lic the mere ofer the stoccs of treows hwer the eald gods lifd befor the hwit crist cum.

I must admit that I was somewhat skeptical of a novel written in a "shadow language" meant to produce the feeling of Old English without the frustrations of having to master its complex grammar, unfamiliar phonology, and obscure orthography. The more I read, however, the more comfortable I became with the artifice and the more involved I became with the narrative. By the time I finished, I was quite impressed by the accomplishment. The author succeeded in imagining the personal Weltbildung of an 11th century Anglo-Saxon land-owning farmer, a damaged man of his time, whose world was totally broken by the Norman invasion of 1066. The interior dialogues (monologues?) framed in the form of Anglo-Saxon poetry were masterful. The gradual revelation of the personal history of the narrator through reminiscences and overheard gossip was brilliant. Although I found the novel overlong, I enjoyed the challenge and felt rewarded in finishing it. To those who have found the narrator, buckmaster of holland, a despicable man, I would beg to differ. He was a man, shaped by his experiences, true to his beliefs, but flawed as a human being. From our perspective on this side of history, we can see him as a delusional maniac on the path to madness with no hope of realizing his dreams, but from his perspective, he is merely fulfilling his “wyrd” to the best of his (admittedly limited) abilities. Just because the voices in his head may be imagined, it does not follow that they are wrong . Just because the Anglo-Saxons did not prevail against the Normans, it does not follow that their cause was unjust. Just because the protagonist (ironically from our point of view) regards the native Britons as foreigners in their own land does not mean that he does not have a true love for the land to which his ancestors came as invaders and a valid reason for defending the land against the newly invading Normans. Likewise, for those who would accuse the author of historical inaccuracy in his use of the “shadow language,” I would say that Anglo-Saxon itself is, at least as we know it, somewhat of a shadow language comprised of bits and pieces of Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and West Saxon dialects with a soupҫon of Old Norse, standardized in the Winchester standard literary language of the late tenth century (“Late West Saxon”). The Wake not a book for everyone, but for those who have the patience to “lysten,” they may well be “waecend” by a “triewe” tale and one worth the telling.

[Caleb CW · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, that was different.

The entire story is in a form of phonetic English if you read it rather than listen to it as I did. It follows a man named Buckmaster, who, during the entire course of the story, remains a massive egocentric twat. England gets invaded by Normandy and defeated. As a result of this defeat, the English are forced to pay tithe to the victors. This doesn't sit well with Buckmaster, and so he tells the whole lot to eff off. Which doesn't sit well with Normandy, who comes and destroys his village with every kind of indecency. Now, do I think he should have paid? Nay. Do I think he should have been a little more diplomatic to an invading country that just bent his king over the table and read him his rights with every inch of a sword? Yeah. Anyway, so his village is destroyed, family killed, and his wife (whom he didn't appreciate and, in fact, was quick to wind up his arm any time she told him boo)... was violated in a rather horrific manner. So, our Buckmaster becomes a green man he does to try and put it to the Norman invaders, cool. What's not cool is that anyone who disagrees with him either gets whacked or all of a sudden gets threatened with a sword his grandfather owned. Or get killed... or gelded. Or whatever the Buckmaster is feeling. Needless to say, our petulant child of a narrator feels like he is gods' gift to man, and everyone should listen to him because he's always right, and if you don't, he'll just feckin' kell you. Dude, mellow out, man.

This wasn't a bad story. I just gave zero kinds of shit for the main character and felt sorry for everyone around him. To him, everything and everyone is against him and, therefore, a threat. There can be no dissension. There can be no discussion, do as he says, or pull your sword. I guess that happens when you don't have any kind of empathy.

The ending is. It just is. You know those game-nights where you invite some folks over, and they just can't handle losing at all, so they toss the board or become biligerent assholes? That's the ending. The ending is the spoiled brat who doesn't know how to lose throwing a fit and ruining it for everyone. Except with swords and death.

I really wanted to like this more because it's definitely in my wheelhouse, but man could the main character have used something to redeem him. I'm going to read the other books in the series despite my griping about the main character because the surrounding events are interesting. The bird, the hairy sun, and an apocalyptic medieval (freaking a) are neat. Don't let me discourage you from reading this. It is interesting. I highly recommend the audio book. The narrator (Simon Vance) does an incredible job, and I'd listen to more of his work.

There it is and there you have it.

[Stephen Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

What's strangest about this book isn't that it's written in an ersatz extinct language, it's that the narrator ends up being the most unlikable character in the entire novel. The "shadow" Anglo Saxon isn't just a gimmick; this isn't merely an historical account of heroic Anglo underdogs fighting against Norman invaders--no simple RETURN OF THE JEDI set in twelfth century fenns. No, Kingsnorth overturns such a premise and instead crafts a rather complex and thought-provoking examination of imperialism, xenophobia, justice, religion, war, and class division. Rather than serving merely as a marketing ploy or as a poetic flourish, the otherworldly language serves to get us directly into the mind and emotions of Buccmaster of Holland, even as we slowly realize that he himself is a despicable fuccan esole. Such a tension causes us to question both sides of the war and in turn question similar fighting that has happened more recently.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would have never believed that I would enjoy reading a book taking place during the Norman invasion of Britain AND it's told through a modified form of Old English.

The Buccmaster of Holland is living well. He has two sons, a lot of land, a huge house and a loving wife. Then after the Battle of Hastings, he loses everything and decides to put together a band of mercenaries to kill all French citizens.

However there are some problems, the main one is that The Buccmaster is stuck to the old ways i.e believing in pagan gods and old fashioned rites and refuses to keep up with the the current (1066) mentality of his kinsfolk, coupled with a dodgy past which is revealed slowly throughout the novel and you have got a riveting read.

Whilst reading The Wake I couldn't help comparing the Buccmaster's attitude to last year's 'Brexit' campaign. Think of this. One person does not want foreign people in England in order to keep it pure and tries his utmost to get rid of them. Sounds familiar? I do understand that the Norman Invasion was a time of rape and pillaging but there are some similarities with the mentality.

A good number of reviews seem to point out the language but honestly after a couple of pages the language becomes poetic and fun to read, there is a glossary for the more obscure worse and the Kingsnorth does give an explanation on pronunciation so reading The Wake is not a chore. If one can cope with books such as Trainspotting or A Clockwork Orange, even Shakespeare then there's no reason why this book should be a turn off.

The blurb of my copy states that The Wake could easily become a modern classic. Although such statements bother me, I have to agree with this one as it hits all points: creative, slightly funny, dashes of mythology and pagan rituals, and more importantly, a strong story.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Protagonist Buccmaster is a farmer living with wife and two children in 1066, when Guillame, Duke of Normandy (William the Conqueror) crosses the sea to defeat King Harold II and his Anglo-Saxon forces at the Battle of Hastings. The Norman invasion vastly changes the old ways of life. Buccmaster’s world is crumbling around him, and he feels impelled do something about it. He becomes the leader of a band of resistors (“green men”) seeking to drive out the invaders. He is fearful and angry. He is also suffering from delusions and grows increasingly unstable.

The elephant in the room is the manner in which it is written. The author employs what he calls a “shadow tongue.” It is more comprehensible to a modern reader than Old English but still requires a quite a bit of work to decipher. For example:

“aefry ember of hope gan lic the embers of a fyr brocen in the daegs beginnan brocen by men other than us. hope falls harder when the end is cwic hope falls harder when in the daegs before the storm the stillness of the age was writen in the songs of men so it is when a world ends who is thu i can not cnaw but i will tell thu this thing be waery of the storm be most waery when there is no storm in sight.”

I would have enjoyed reading this book more if the invented language had been toned down a bit. This is obviously an artistic choice by the author, but I think it will be off-putting to many readers. The advantage is that it definitely puts the reader into a different time and place, but I have read other novels that simulate an older language more successfully. I switched from e-book to audio and found listening a much more positive experience so if you are an audio fan, it is definitely the way to go.

This is a character-driven story, and the main character is extremely unpleasant. Buccmaster is boastful, vulgar, violent, self-centered and, I presume, mentally ill. I do not mind a flawed protagonist, but there is not much positive in his personality (or in the entire story). I assume Buccmaster is supposed to be an anti-hero. The other characters serve as foils for Buccmaster – no one else is developed to any extent. It gets points for creativity, and I was curious to find out how it ends. I am glad to have read it but also glad to be finished.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘The Wake’ is a demanding novel to read and, honestly, I was tempted to give up on it after fifty pages. It wasn’t so much the language, but the fact that nothing much occurred except the narrator Buccmaster seemed annoyingly UKIPpish. Once William came a-conquering, however, the narrative became darker and more eventful, and Buccmaster much more interesting. It’s Kingsnorth’s invention of a hybrid old English, though, that makes this a distinctive and beguiling read. As he states in his afterword, ‘I wanted to be able to convey, not just in my descriptions of events and places but through the words of the characters, the sheer alienness of Old England’. He succeeds admirably in this, as his Oldish English is as strange yet comprehensible-with-concentration as that of Riddley Walker. (Possibly more so, I read that many years ago.) I became accustomed to Kingsnorth’s rhythm and vocabulary, to the point of finding it curiously addictive. Although I was intrigued to find out what would happen to Buccmaster, the main appeal was the experience of reading rather than the narrative itself. An arbitrarily chosen passage:

i seen that the names of the folcs of angland was part of anglisc ground lic the treow and rocc the fenn and hyll and i seen that when these names was tacan from the place where they had growen and cast down on other ground and when their place was tacan by names what has not growan from that ground is not of it and can not spece its tunge then a great wrong has been done. then sum thing deop and eald had been made wrong and though folcs wolde forget cwic the eald gods and the eald places the eald trees and the eald hylls these things wolde not forget what had been broc and how things used to be and sceolde be and one daeg though not in our lifs one daeg all will be made right again

This odd patchwork of familiar and unfamiliar words, largely without punctuation, feels more like reading poetry than prose. It undoubtedly creates a striking sense of largely doom-laden atmosphere. The story is one of disaster and hopeless resistance against invasion in the years after 1066. The blurb describes it as ‘a post-apocalyptic novel set a thousand years ago’, which convinced me to read it and is essentially accurate. This is a novel of catastrophe, genocide, and loss, with a memorably unreliable and alarming narrator. Once I stopped trying to find Buccmaster likeable, 'The Wake' became much easier to read. He is a compelling and deeply ambivalent figure.

I am curious about Kingsnorth’s inspiration for ‘The Wake’, given what I’ve read of his non-fiction in Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays. Themes of fatalism, retreat, and connection to nature run through both. Despite its weirdness, the fictionalised world of 1066 offers some parallels with efforts to protect the environment from the rapaciousness of capitalism. Buccmaster is unbalanced, violent, and dangerous, yet often the reader cannot help but see his point. When he commits murders, the novel is asking - do you think this is justified? When other characters doubt him, you wonder whether they just don’t see as clearly how bad things are. Then again, his intense self-involvement and paranoid messianic tendencies show what terrible extremes a sense of conviction can result in. All very relevant to our own times.

I’m very glad that I persisted with ‘The Wake’. It takes perhaps 80 pages to get going, but beyond that it becomes a unique, disquieting, and memorable experience.

[Laura Hutchinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never read anything like this book before - except in my university days when I laboured over pages from the Anglo Saxon Chronicle which made little or no impact on me. The concept that Paul Kingsnorth has come up with - to devise a 'shadow tongue' somewhere between Anglo Saxon and modern English, is extra-ordinary, and makes the book feel instantly more real than hundreds of pages of description setting up life for a farmer in the Fens in the 11th century.

It's not just the language which is the major coup of the book though. For me, it was also the way that Paul Kingsnorth had managed to somehow inhabit the mind of the Buckmaster, with all of the limitations and ... for want of a better word....simplicity he has. It's even more impressive to rouse the sympathies of the reader so much at the beginning, in the devastating scene in which the Buckmaster gets home one day to find his village on fire, his wife dead, and his animals slaughtered, and then to gradually peel away the layers to reveal a more complex character, utterly self-obsessed, driven by anger and hatred, but ultimately weak and not a hero at all.

I found the depictions of the 'Old gods' particularly interesting and enjoyed the links back to the Dark Ages and a time in England's history which we know next to nothing about. A truly superb book - although I wish I'd read it in a pub in the middle of nowhere during winter, rather than, slightly incongruously, on a beach!

[Jenny (Reading Envy)]

I tried getting into the pattern of this faux Middle English but my head had other things in mind. Headaches, mainly.

It's an interesting gimmick but I have started thinking there should be a separate award for experimental fiction and linguistic inventions. And it shouldn't be the Booker.

ETA:

I recently read The Elements of Style Illustrated and here is one fast and relevant rule:

"20. Avoid foreign languages.

The writer will occasionally find it convenient or necessary to borrow from other languages. Some writers, however, from sheer exuberance or a desire to show off, sprinkle their work liberally with foreign expressions, with no regard for the reader's comfort. It is a bad habit. Write in English."

:)

[Nicholas Kotar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disturbing, violent, terrifying... and utterly transformative. Keep an eye on Kingsnorth. He's our generation's Dostoyevsky.

[kari · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to push this book into the face of everyone who ever tried to write historical fiction with stylized language. I want to shout THIS, THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE DONE. See, I hate when writers try to give the language a historical feel by peppering the narrative with anachronisms. It just doesn't work. It comes off as shallow and unnecessary. But "The Wake"? Excuse me when I'm jumping around in enthusiasm for this linguistic feast. "The Wake" conveys the (assumed) way of thinking in Old England. It doesn't shy away from alien-ness of that time and place, from social differences, or hierarchy of values. And if linguistic delight isn't enough, there's the plot - deceptively simple at first, then pulling the reader into a narrative of apocalypse, and annihilation of a whole culture. In the endnotes, Kingsnorth draws a comparison between the Norman invasion and great wars of 20th century. And I'm convinced he's right - "The Wake" felt like the end of the world indeed.

[bobbi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Capsule Review: A testament to the brilliance of this book is how readable it is despite the fact that you’ll be all like “wut is this shite?” when you first try. Don’t worry, 20 pages in and you’ll be riveted. But I could barely turn the last 10 pages, they were heavy as my heart:

- oh, thu Buccmaster, what yfel is this?

[Dustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

boern angland.
most notable for its style (give it about 25 pages to sink in), the anger at loss of identity really had an affect on me. the story could have been better to match the powerful language. still quite an experience.

[Margaret]

And I thought "Wolf Hall" was a load of pretentious crap! It's got nothing on this one.