Published through the crowd-funding publisher Unbound, Paul Kingsnorth’s extraordinary novel set in 11th-century England has been a huge success – longlisted for the Man Booker, winner of the Gordon Burn prize, it’s now being made into a film. Little wonder, for it is a vivid, linguistically innovative chronicle of the aftermath of the 1066 Battle of Hastings and the early days of the Norman occupation.
Our narrator is Buccmaster, a free farmer of the Lincolnshire fens, who has lost everything he most loved including his wife and home to the invading Normans and his sons at the Battle of Hastings. Frightened and angry, he gathers a band of “grene men” to resist the invaders. It is also a passionate paean to a threatened natural world.
But it’s the strange, beguiling language of this novel that makes it so distinctive; in a “note on language” Kingsnorth describes the “shadow tongue” he has invented, partly based on Old English: “a pseudo-language intended to convey the feeling of the old language by combining some of its vocabulary and syntax with the English we speak today”. It demands patience to decipher and varies between opacity and moments of intense lucidity as in Buccmaster’s lament for “a world brocen apart”, a time when “all is open lic a wound unhealen”.
Some of the finest passages rise to a lush lyricism when conjuring a land awakening from winter: “it is early in the mergen it is gan eostur now when the land waecens from winter all the land is cuman open all is grene and waecnan”.
That “waecnan” is not only in the land, but in language too: The Wake reawakens our awareness of the power of words, as it explores the connection between language and identity, prose and place. Set in a period of history that pre-dates typographic printing in Europe by almost 400 years, the novel uses “one of the earliest and finest roman printing types”, a note about the typeface explains. In that striking typeface Kingsnorth not only depicts the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings but also the most subtle linguistic, emotional, and psychological battles.
The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound, £8.99). To order a copy for £6.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
