“scarcity echoes the destruction brought about by the Norman Conquest of 1066. A farmer who struggles to find eels symbolizes the invaders’ power to create a world in which deprivation will become the new normal.”
“The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth’s deliriously experimental imagining of the Norman Conquest as both natural and cultural apocalypse, is rather like Buccmaster’s fens.”
“Neither the language nor the history is, in this novel, exactly “accurate” (more about that later), but intended to call up the Anglo-Saxon world whose disappearance it chronicles.”
“Kingsnorth makes it clear that he views the Conquest as a catastrophe that changed England forever, arguing in his historical postscript that it set the stage for a concentration of wealth in the hands of a few that persists to this day.”
“He knows his presentation of the Conquest’s effects is not always in line with current scholarship, but he rejects what he sees as academic fashion in favor of an uncompromising picture of conquest as apocalypse.”
“The Norman castles, built on “wounds” in the ground and seen by the uncomprehending English as alien structures from hell, can be read as foreshadowings of industrial blight and agricultural dislocation in later ages.”
“Kingsnorth writes that his goal was to suggest “the sheer alienness of Old England,” and he succeeds brilliantly, not least because of his riveting protagonist. At the same time, this alien past is clearly linked to our burdened present. The backward look is both cautionary and premonitory.”
“Kingsnorth’s “shadow tongue,” as he calls it, is key to the experience of the novel, and here I cannot help but feel that knowing Old English was a hindrance rather than a help. Kingsnorth never claims to be writing an authentic form of the language, but rather, to be drawing on it to create a sense of an alien time that has passed. He confines himself to words of Old English origin, but, he freely admits, he hammers and mutates them as seems required.”
“Sometimes the results are sublime and oddly authentic. When Buccmaster and his band of green men stumble upon an isolated forest village celebrating the arrival of summer, they are greeted by maidens who offer them branches and garlands: “grene withigs for grene men they saes for sumor is in angland and angland will be again in sumor.” Old English verse, structured around alliterative half-lines, often makes strategic use of repetition, and in this example, the crossed figure (summer / England / England / summer) achieves a force whose poignancy is all the greater for being an isolated moment of stillness and hope in the midst of darkness.”
“Familiarity with the literary form of Old English did allow me to fall into the rhythm of the novel’s language quite quickly, but often the experience was rather like watching a subtitled film in a language one knows just well enough to be constantly checking on the accuracy of the translations.”
“The incorporation of bits and pieces of Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature might, similarly, work differently for readers for whom the material is new. At one point, I recognized the Exeter Book riddles told by the travelling gleoman, one of the novel’s minor characters, and so much of the fun of being fished by the apparently ribald content was undercut — like the sour Buccmaster himself, I had heard these before.”
“On the other hand, finding myself unexpectedly aligned with Buccmaster was amusing and chastening in equal measure.”
“It is as if the English names were the true names, while the French names are impositions. But the novel also recognizes — though perhaps not Buccmaster — that Britain was mixed, linguistically and ethnically, before the Conquest. In the beginning of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (c. 731), Bede remarked that Britain had five languages: English, Welsh, Irish, Pictish, and Latin. Buccmaster’s sense of Englishness is not necessarily reflective of even his immediate reality.”
“I have already noted that Kingsnorth draws an explicit connection between the Conquest and the current ownership of resources in Britain.”
“The novel’s plot also intersects with modern concerns about migration and multiculturalism. What appears at first to be a story about the genocide of one people by another is rapidly complicated by Buccmaster’s response to that genocide.”
“Early in his life in the wood, Buccmaster falls in with a boy called Tofe. Tofe is of Danish extraction — not surprising, given that the novel is set near the Danelaw, that area of the north invaded and then settled by Vikings from the ninth century onwards. Buccmaster’s rage at the French invaders frequently generalizes to a condemnation of any who might be classed as a foreigner, and Tofe more than once expresses his anxious belief that the Danish settlers of the north count as “us” rather than “them” — we are all English now, he says.”
“The historical backdrop to Buccmaster’s experience of the Conquest includes the campaigns in 1069 and 1070 in which Sweyn II of Denmark, the Saxon Edgar the Atheling, and Malcolm of Scotland attempted to wrest back control of the north.”
“But Buccmaster’s view is resolutely local, so local that almost no one is truly English enough. He asserts that he is like a tree, grown from the ground of his land; the old gods he worships are gods, he has learned from his grandfather, of English wind and water.”
“And yet Buccmaster’s grandfather has also taught him that the Saxons are the descendants of folk who came from across the sea to find a land that was wild with “wealsc folc with aelfs and the wulf” (Welsh people, elves, and the wolf). The Saxons, he says, tamed this wild land so that it became theirs by right. The view of the native Welsh as creatures of the wild, waiting to be subdued, surely displays the logic of the conqueror, and it is ironic that Buccmaster cannot imagine how the English might appear to the Welsh.”
“Medieval Welsh prophetic poetry is often devoted to imagining the days when the hated English would be cast out: in Yr Afallennau (The Apple Trees), for example, the speaker anticipates “slaughter of Saxons on ashen spears / and playing ball with their heads.” The Welsh presence in the novel, then, haunts Buccmaster’s imagining of Englishness.”
“Buccmaster’s grandfather’s stories remind us that the lines between native and foreigner are not clear-cut, however they may seem to Buccmaster.”
“Buccmaster has little time for books. Books bring the laws that the libertarian Buccmaster sees as encroaching on his freedom, and books bring Christianity, to displace the old gods. He says that leaves (of trees) are better than leaves (of books). But the very last pages of the novel evoke its bookness explicitly, and positively, with a note about the chosen typeface, Jenson. This is a gorgeous 15th-century Roman font designed by the French printer Nicolas Jenson in Venice in 1470, first used in an edition of the works of Eusebius. The note adds that the blackletter font used for the titles is based on handwriting from Jenson’s era. This is a handsomely designed book, clearly conceived with much attention to the appeal of the page.”
“Like the novel itself, the design is complex, but the clashes it produces are potentially productive. The choices made throw together manuscript conventions (the blackletter titles but also sparing use of punctuation and the absence of uppercase letters), the resolute orality of Buccmaster’s first-person voice, and Jenson’s association with Humanism and its crucial companion, the printing press.”
“The book materializes as a reminder that history comes to us only in highly mediated ways, through flawed witnesses like Buccmaster, imaginative writers like Kingsnorth, and makers like Jenson and his modern-day descendants at Graywolf.”