Scan barcode
graventy's review against another edition
4.0
I enjoyed what I read of this book, but it was just too hard to read in a reasonable time frame so I had to let it go. It is written in a pseudo-Old English that requires your full attention.
Buccmaster is a pretty great character though.
Buccmaster is a pretty great character though.
arciz's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
christine97's review against another edition
3.0
I admire the scope of this novel. The language is difficult to start with but not as difficult as you might think. Ultimately though it may be a case of style over substance.
matthewcpeck's review
5.0
The narrator of "The Wake" is a not terribly pleasant fellow named Buccmaster, a farmer living in the Lincolnshire fens with his wife and two teenage sons. Buccmaster has an inflated sense of his own greatness, a penchant for battering his wife, and a simmering disdain for the Church. In spite of all of this, he's a truly compelling character, and "The Wake" is a book that's difficult to put down. Even more impressive, this story takes place nearly a millennium ago – during the Norman conquest of England in 1066 – and Paul Kingsnorth wrote the prose in an invented pidgin of Old and Modern English, with very little punctuation and capitalization. "The Wake" fits in nicely with a number of dystopian/post-apocalyptic novels in invented dialects, like "Riddley Walker", "The Country of Ice Cream Star", and the middle section of "Cloud Atlas". There is a slight learning curve at first, but within a dozen or so pages I hardly noticed the odd words and spellings – a sign of a gifted writer. I finished it yesterday and I'm still seeing the world through an Anglo-Saxon lens, as I tac my mergan walc by the ea and treows and I locs at fugols in the heofens.
Most of "The Wake" takes place after Buccmaster's relatively stable existence is forever upended by the ruthlessness of the French invaders, as he wanders the forests with a band of resistance fighters. But he's too stubborn, humorless, and unpredictable to be a team player, and revelations towards the end put his entire story in new light. This is a book with enough machismo, mystic portents, swear words, and violent bearded Englishmen to fill a season of "Game of Thrones". But it's also a searing indictment of that same machismo, a comment on the futility of trying to exist apart from society with delusions of one's own superiority. And "The Wake" is a frighteningly vivid transportation to a distant time and place, a book that reads simultaneously as ancient epic poetry and 21st-century experimental literature.
Most of "The Wake" takes place after Buccmaster's relatively stable existence is forever upended by the ruthlessness of the French invaders, as he wanders the forests with a band of resistance fighters. But he's too stubborn, humorless, and unpredictable to be a team player, and revelations towards the end put his entire story in new light. This is a book with enough machismo, mystic portents, swear words, and violent bearded Englishmen to fill a season of "Game of Thrones". But it's also a searing indictment of that same machismo, a comment on the futility of trying to exist apart from society with delusions of one's own superiority. And "The Wake" is a frighteningly vivid transportation to a distant time and place, a book that reads simultaneously as ancient epic poetry and 21st-century experimental literature.
boggle's review against another edition
4.0
I was motivated to pick this book up after reading several interviews with Kingsnorth on his experiences with climate activism and the Dark Mountain Project. It's interesting to think about the story of The Wake as an allegory for aspects of the destruction caused by climate change and I think I will be checking out the rest of the trilogy before I comment much more on that.
I will say that while I enjoy the faux Old English style of the text, I personally found it very hard to focus on (perhaps an extension of reading in general being harder of late). The good news is that there is a fantastic audiobook performance of this available that not only helped me understand better, but really helped the story come alive for me.
I will say that while I enjoy the faux Old English style of the text, I personally found it very hard to focus on (perhaps an extension of reading in general being harder of late). The good news is that there is a fantastic audiobook performance of this available that not only helped me understand better, but really helped the story come alive for me.
sgrizzle's review against another edition
4.0
Wow. This book is a doozy. As I read the language became more familiar, but it was still a struggle throughout. It fits, as the main character struggles every page of the book, both physically and mentally. The authors language choice serves the story well, and though I enjoyed it and have found myself telling lots of people about it (and showing them pages!), I only recommend it to the most voracious readers.
edgeworth's review against another edition
5.0
As an Australian my knowledge of the mother country’s history is patchier than I would like. It was only this year, when I moved to Britain and started doing some more reading on the subject, that I discovered the astonishing fact that the Normans were not (as I had vaguely assumed) merely one tribe among many squabbling for turf inside Britain’s borders. Rather, they were an invading French force who successfully defeated the king and installed a new leader, and who were never really turfed out but rather absorbed – even today, British people who have Norman surnames are more likely to be wealthy than those who don’t. It was three centuries before England again had a king who spoke English as his first language. The violent dispossession of land and livelihood by the invading foreigners was one of the most traumatic and consequential events in English history.
Paul Kingsnorth’s novel The Wake, billed as “a post-apocalyptic novel set a thousand years ago,” follows a group of resistance fighters in the Lincolnshire fens who have seen everything they know destroyed in the Norman invasion – their homes burned, their wives killed, their freedom shattered. They are led by Buccmaster of Holland (Holland referring to a historical region of Lincoln, not the Netherlands), a crazed and violent son of England who thirsts for revenge.
The most notable feature of The Wake is its language. Kingsnorth says in the afterword:
I simply don’t get on with historical novels written in contemporary 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 do with them. To put 21st-century sentences into the mouths of eleventh century characters would be the equivalent of giving them iPads and cappucinos: just wrong.
Rather than write the novel in what we now call Old English, the actual language of the day which would unfortunately be “unreadable to anyone except scholars,” Kingsnorth has created what what he calls a “shadow tongue,” which represents the feel and sound of Old English while still being comprehensible to the modern eye:
in the mergen i was waecen by the sound of the wind in the treows and a great wind it was. blowan from a great height blowan with the strength of thunor this wind it mofd the great treows baec and forth and the sound was grim to hiere. i cnawan this was the sign of sum great thing that had been done or was cuman bit i cnawan not what. i cum out of our hus of stoccs and leafs and i seen that the mete we had tied ofer the fyre had cum down in the wind and was all ofer the ground.
The most obvious book this calls to mind is Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel written in a degenerated, phonetic version of English, to represent the warping of the English language two thousand years after a nuclear war. But the invented tongue is becoming a proud tradition: David Mitchell mimics Hoban in the post-apocalyptic segment of Cloud Atlas, parts of Will Self’s novel The Book of Dave feature another verbally debased apocalyptic community, and parts of Iain M. Banks’ Feersum Endjinn are written in a half-Scottish half-Cockney patter. (Interesting to note that these are all British authors.) Although strange to behold at first, Kingsnorth’s invented language is easy to come to grips with after a few dozen pages; lack of punctuation and capital letters aside, no more than one word in five is actually altered, and there’s a handy vocabulary at the back for some of the less intuitive words, such as “micel” for much and “fugol” for bird. A basic knowledge of a few Norse words like “fyrd,” “thane,” and “cottar” is also useful, which I handily knew from years of playing King of Dragon Pass like the nerd I am. The language absolutely succeeds in imbuing The Wake with a real sense of alienness; the narrative voice of Buccmaster is gritty and accented and sounds as though he’s telling his story from the other side of a campfire in a deep, dark forest.
And as with Riddley Walker, even beyond the etymological gymnastics, the story itself is excellent. (It’s hard to make this point without making it sound as though the invented language is a gimmick, which it’s not, in the case of both books.) Many a fine historical novel (Sacred Hunger, for instance) stumbles by having characters who conveniently share the sensibilities of a 21st century Guardian reader. Buccmaster of Holland is a wife-beating religious fanatic who never loses an opportunity to remind others that he is, by the eleventh century’s standards, a member of the landed gentry – even after his home has been razed and he’s sleeping rough in the woods with the other plebs. He is arrogant, vain, pigheaded and violent, flies off the handle at the slightest provocation, is prone to bitter jealousy when others speak of more well-known resistance fighters, and is given to dark suspicions and foul moods. As the novel progresses it becomes increasingly clear that he is at the very least a psychopath, and likely suffering from other mental issues as well. He is an unlikeable and unsympathetic narrator, and yet it’s hard not to pity him, because in the wake of the Norman invasion his life truly is a tragedy.
I saw The Wake at Waterstone’s back in summer, but was leery of it because it came from what I mistook for a vanity publisher (it’s not) and because a quick google revealed that while Kingsnorth was a published non-fiction writer, this was his first attempt at fiction. It was only after The Wake was longlisted for the Booker Prize that I picked up a copy. Some might say that’s a shame, that a reader might rely on awards or acclaim to judge worthiness, but I prefer to think of it as heartening – the system ensured that a book this good wasn’t keep in obscurity. (Also, I live in London, so I can’t afford to go around buying new hardbacks unless I’m assured they’ll be good.) The Wake is one of the best novels I’ve read this year, and certainly the most unique.
Paul Kingsnorth’s novel The Wake, billed as “a post-apocalyptic novel set a thousand years ago,” follows a group of resistance fighters in the Lincolnshire fens who have seen everything they know destroyed in the Norman invasion – their homes burned, their wives killed, their freedom shattered. They are led by Buccmaster of Holland (Holland referring to a historical region of Lincoln, not the Netherlands), a crazed and violent son of England who thirsts for revenge.
The most notable feature of The Wake is its language. Kingsnorth says in the afterword:
I simply don’t get on with historical novels written in contemporary 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 do with them. To put 21st-century sentences into the mouths of eleventh century characters would be the equivalent of giving them iPads and cappucinos: just wrong.
Rather than write the novel in what we now call Old English, the actual language of the day which would unfortunately be “unreadable to anyone except scholars,” Kingsnorth has created what what he calls a “shadow tongue,” which represents the feel and sound of Old English while still being comprehensible to the modern eye:
in the mergen i was waecen by the sound of the wind in the treows and a great wind it was. blowan from a great height blowan with the strength of thunor this wind it mofd the great treows baec and forth and the sound was grim to hiere. i cnawan this was the sign of sum great thing that had been done or was cuman bit i cnawan not what. i cum out of our hus of stoccs and leafs and i seen that the mete we had tied ofer the fyre had cum down in the wind and was all ofer the ground.
The most obvious book this calls to mind is Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel written in a degenerated, phonetic version of English, to represent the warping of the English language two thousand years after a nuclear war. But the invented tongue is becoming a proud tradition: David Mitchell mimics Hoban in the post-apocalyptic segment of Cloud Atlas, parts of Will Self’s novel The Book of Dave feature another verbally debased apocalyptic community, and parts of Iain M. Banks’ Feersum Endjinn are written in a half-Scottish half-Cockney patter. (Interesting to note that these are all British authors.) Although strange to behold at first, Kingsnorth’s invented language is easy to come to grips with after a few dozen pages; lack of punctuation and capital letters aside, no more than one word in five is actually altered, and there’s a handy vocabulary at the back for some of the less intuitive words, such as “micel” for much and “fugol” for bird. A basic knowledge of a few Norse words like “fyrd,” “thane,” and “cottar” is also useful, which I handily knew from years of playing King of Dragon Pass like the nerd I am. The language absolutely succeeds in imbuing The Wake with a real sense of alienness; the narrative voice of Buccmaster is gritty and accented and sounds as though he’s telling his story from the other side of a campfire in a deep, dark forest.
And as with Riddley Walker, even beyond the etymological gymnastics, the story itself is excellent. (It’s hard to make this point without making it sound as though the invented language is a gimmick, which it’s not, in the case of both books.) Many a fine historical novel (Sacred Hunger, for instance) stumbles by having characters who conveniently share the sensibilities of a 21st century Guardian reader. Buccmaster of Holland is a wife-beating religious fanatic who never loses an opportunity to remind others that he is, by the eleventh century’s standards, a member of the landed gentry – even after his home has been razed and he’s sleeping rough in the woods with the other plebs. He is arrogant, vain, pigheaded and violent, flies off the handle at the slightest provocation, is prone to bitter jealousy when others speak of more well-known resistance fighters, and is given to dark suspicions and foul moods. As the novel progresses it becomes increasingly clear that he is at the very least a psychopath, and likely suffering from other mental issues as well. He is an unlikeable and unsympathetic narrator, and yet it’s hard not to pity him, because in the wake of the Norman invasion his life truly is a tragedy.
I saw The Wake at Waterstone’s back in summer, but was leery of it because it came from what I mistook for a vanity publisher (it’s not) and because a quick google revealed that while Kingsnorth was a published non-fiction writer, this was his first attempt at fiction. It was only after The Wake was longlisted for the Booker Prize that I picked up a copy. Some might say that’s a shame, that a reader might rely on awards or acclaim to judge worthiness, but I prefer to think of it as heartening – the system ensured that a book this good wasn’t keep in obscurity. (Also, I live in London, so I can’t afford to go around buying new hardbacks unless I’m assured they’ll be good.) The Wake is one of the best novels I’ve read this year, and certainly the most unique.
mightythorax's review against another edition
challenging
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
smedette's review against another edition
5.0
This book has intimidated me for years. YEARS. It is written in a made up ‰ЫПshadow tongue‰Ыќ of Old English, and I felt too dumb to decipher it and would give up quite easily. This time, I powered through and am so glad it did.
After about 20 pages, I was no longer struggling (as much) with the language and things were making sense. I could read faster and found great pleasure in looking up old words and putting together the allegories and historical references. This book is incredible and I have been recommending it to everyone.
The story is set during the Norman invasion in 1066, and is narrated by Buccmaster, who has lost everything. Including his mind.
As soon as I finished this I read it again while listening to the audiobook (by Simon Vance), which I found very useful as the physical book lacks a pronunciation guide with its glossary.
I think I‰ЫЄm ready to tackle the remaining books of the Buccmaster Trilogy.
After about 20 pages, I was no longer struggling (as much) with the language and things were making sense. I could read faster and found great pleasure in looking up old words and putting together the allegories and historical references. This book is incredible and I have been recommending it to everyone.
The story is set during the Norman invasion in 1066, and is narrated by Buccmaster, who has lost everything. Including his mind.
As soon as I finished this I read it again while listening to the audiobook (by Simon Vance), which I found very useful as the physical book lacks a pronunciation guide with its glossary.
I think I‰ЫЄm ready to tackle the remaining books of the Buccmaster Trilogy.
domesticat's review against another edition
4.0
Wow.
Okay. It felt at times like everything from madness to academic literary exercise to ridiculously brilliant. I'm not sure that I'd ever read it again, but I'm glad I had the experience of reading it, and I'm glad that I went in with no knowledge of the character or the storyline. It's unlike anything I've ever read before while simultaneously feeling familiar, like an old story you studied years ago that has embedded itself into how you view history.
Okay. It felt at times like everything from madness to academic literary exercise to ridiculously brilliant. I'm not sure that I'd ever read it again, but I'm glad I had the experience of reading it, and I'm glad that I went in with no knowledge of the character or the storyline. It's unlike anything I've ever read before while simultaneously feeling familiar, like an old story you studied years ago that has embedded itself into how you view history.