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A review by drifterontherun
The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth
5.0
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.
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.