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A review by matthewcpeck
The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth
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.