THE WAKE
I think it’s safe to say that
Paul Kingsnorth’s novel will not be for everybody. It is written in what
Kingsnorth describes as a “shadow language—a pseudo-language intended to convey
the feeling of the old language [Old English] by combining some of its
vocabulary and syntax with the English we speak today.” (353) Here’s an
example:
“The night after that daeg i gan to sleep in the
small hus in the holt with the swine and with tofe and grimcel slepan near and
again I was dreaman of the fyr scip. i stood on the strand and the great scip
was before me right by me and the fyr was so hot it was macan me want to go
baec and scaps mofd agin in the fyr and i did step baec and then from the fyr
cum a man and he stood before me and this man was my grandfather.” (146)
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| Paul Kingsnorth |
The passage says how the next night
he (Buccmaster, the story's narrator) went to sleep in the pig sty in the forest with Tofe and Grimcel, two of his
companions, and there he dreamed of a “fyr scip” (fire ship) which is a boat
holding the body of a deceased person that is then set on fire to cremate the
remains. The burning boat floated by as he stood on the shore, so close that he
wanted to step back because of the heat. He saw “scaps” (shapes) in it that
moved, and then he did step back, until there emerged from the fire a man—his
grandfather.
So, it’s something that takes a bit of getting
used to, in addition to the text’s non-capitalization and lack of modern
punctuation. Kingsnorth provides a partial Glossary at the end which is helpful,
and in terms of story-telling, his pseudo-Old English slows the pace at times, as
I painfully translated some words and phrases, and puzzled over others. But that’s not necessarily a negative. Yes,
it is more work, but it adds to the development of a believable setting and
provides insight into the mindset of the characters. In The Wake*, words matter. Labels, titles and names matter. The main
character who narrates the story is called “buccmaster”, a “socman of holland.” (10) He is Buccmaster,
a free tenant farmer living in the “ham” (hamlet) of Holland in the fen district
of Wessex along the English Channel. Buccmaster, throughout the novel, often
will mention his social status, his ‘label’, informing the people he meets, or
reminding his “werod” (war band), that he is a socman and the owner of three
teams of oxen! He continues to do this even when his village has been destroyed
and his home, his wife and all his property are gone. That he clings to his
past in such a way is indicative of who he is—someone who will not accept
changes to his society or his more privileged position in it. He is a proud, arrogant
and inflexible man and we learn he has been so all his life.
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| The Green Man |
The story is set at a momentous
moment in England’s history—the eve of the Norman invasion in the fall of 1066.
The novel opens with Buccmaster, who is out one day walking in the fens, when he sees a
hawk fly overhead and for some reason he takes this for an omen: “see I had cnawn yfel
was cuman when I seen this fugol glidan ofer” (9) (See, I had known evil was
coming when I’d seen this bird gliding over.) Some days later, a comet appears
in the sky confirming his belief that something was coming. And whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
Kingsnorth provides background to Buccmaster, describing his life and his relationships,
and some of his family background. He lives on a prosperous farm in a quiet
English (“anglisc”) village with his wife and two grown sons, and several
labourers. Then word arrives from a travelling storyteller, a “gleoman”, that
the new king Harold is going north to defend the kingdom from the invading
Danes. Chaotic times come to the village and to Buccmaster when his sons defy
his wishes and join up with the king’s forces. After the Battle of Hastings and
the successful repulsion of the invaders, his sons return, only to leave days
later when invaders from Normandy arrive on the southern coast and begin to
establish their sovereignty. This time Harold is defeated and Buccmaster will
never see his sons again.
Sometime later, “frenc” (French) officials
arrive in the village, proclaiming they are the new “thanes” (rulers) and
demand “geld” (gold) as taxation to be paid. Buccmaster and others pointedly
refuse to comply, and soon the village is attacked and burned, and most of its
inhabitants are slaughtered by the Norman overlords. Buccmaster, returning from
one of his many sorties into the fens, fishing for eels, discovers his house
destroyed and his wife murdered. He leaves Holland after burying his wife and
begins his life as a “grene man of the “holt” (“green man of the forest”), and
the leader of a small war band.
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| Landing in England scene (Bayeux Tapestry) |
However, it needs to be said
there is much that is engaging about Buccmaster, at least initially. He
believes in the old ways and the traditions of ancient England that he has
learned from his grandfather, and much of the novel has Buccmaster recalling
the stories and myths his grandfather told to him as a boy. He sees the fens
and the woodlands as rich in lore and secrets and hidden powers. He sees
himself as being “ceosan”, as a “chosen” one who will carry on the old ways and
traditions. The idea of his using the wisdom and insight that such a history
gives him in order to combat the scorched-earth tactics used by the invading Normans, is
compelling. Such lore seems elemental and empowering, and his connection with
the land, his observations about the changing seasons, the weather, the “wights”
(creatures) living there are admirable. But there is something
‘off-putting’ about Buccmaster. He is arrogant and quick-tempered. He beats his
wife. He has contempt for those he perceives beneath his social status. He
argues with his neighbours and is harsh in his judgements of others. He is
generally disliked and feared in Holland. (Or at least his neighbours are wary
of him.) After the invasion, he forms a small following of men who want to
fight the “ingenga” (foreigners). We see Buccmaster often communing with nature
and asking the “eald” (old) gods what he should do as he leads his men through the
wetlands and forests of Wessex. He sees himself as a heroic saviour of the
English, one who wields a proud, heraldic sword in its defence. At first, the
reader assumes he will become a hero in the “Robin Hood” tradition, and that that’s
where Kingsnorth is taking us. Not so.
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| The god Woden |
One of the important themes explored in The Wake is
isolation. There is a strong sense of isolation and disconnect in the story. Hams
are small and nearly invisible in the landscape, with travelling gleomen the only real link and provider
of news from other parts of the kingdom. (There are shire councils, of
which Buccmaster is a member, as well as tax collectors, but in the story they play
little part in the everyday life of the villagers.) Buccmaster, himself, is
isolated from his fellow villagers; his family has always kept to themselves
(and by the story’s end we learn the ugly truth why.) And we watch as he
increasingly becomes isolated from reality, as his thoughts spiral inwards,
until by the story’s end he is alone and apart from everyone and everything
he has known.
As the story progresses, the
reader begins to ask, “when is he going to learn?” Instead, we witness how he
compromises, equivocates, acts rashly, acts with cowardice, and becomes
increasingly more and more out of touch with reality, lost in visions of
himself as a mythic hero, trying to resurrect the heroic past of the old gods who
seem to speak to him. Two of his followers—his former labourer, Grimcel and
Tofe, a young boy, give him opportunities to develop a more communal and
sharing manner, a more open
personality and outlook, but he rejects them, as he ultimately rejects
everyone. In the end we see him shamefully betraying and abandoning his small group to their
fate as he flees into the woods when Norman knights advance on their position. He
is convinced he is right and that everyone else is wrong and “agan” (against) him.
He will trust no one, ever again. We would call such a person today
sociopathic, psychotic even, but I prefer an older word—“yfel” (evil).
A final note on this theme of
isolation: Words can be kept ‘isolated’ as well. As with the example of the difficulty
of reading Kingsnorth’s text, unless words are ‘free’, in a sense, their meaning
will remain unclear. To understand something you must know what the words mean
and how they fit into their context. Old words eventually lose their context
and thus much of their meaning. In the story, Buccmaster often will say: “I
will not speak of this.” He says for others to stop talking about, for example,
his family. He will not have his servants or workers, who are of a lower class,
talking and gossiping about his affairs. And in the story there are times when the
characters sit silently, staring at their campfires into the night. Silence and
meditation, listening to the unspoken, can be venues for discovery and insight.
But they can also represent isolation and repression. Buccmaster uses his
social status and aggressive personality to enforce a ban on discussing certain
topics. One is the topic of his family. At the novel’s climax, his followers
speak openly among themselves about Buccmaster and his family. They are no
longer isolated from each other. They have ‘freed’ their words. They have
broken the ‘shackles’ of Buccmaster's prohibition on their speech. In doing so,
they come to understand who Buccmaster really is, as they discover his secret,
and how undeserving he is of their loyalty.
In his afterword, Paul Kingsnorth
says there were rebellions against the Norman invaders by Englishmen such as
Buccmaster, as well as more large-scale conflicts that lasted for several
decades, with the English ultimately succumbing to the Normans. One wonders what
England would have been like had Harold been successful in repelling the invaders from
his southern territory in 1066. I’m not sure whether Kingsnorth thinks the
Normans invading England and conquering it was for the best or not. But his
descriptions of isolated villages, each concerned exclusively with their own
problems, and of villagers like Buccmaster concerned only with their own
immediate family suggests such arrangements are problematic, and it makes the reader think that turning
away from the old ways to the new is the only way to go. (After all, Buccmaster
is likely from Germanic stock and the product of migrations of just a few
centuries earlier. Before that it was the Romans, on whose antique “straets” they walk
along from village to village. There is a core, an original stock of native English
going back to stone age occupation, of course, but my point is that
Buccmaster’s ‘old’ ways are not that old, and the old gods he prays to are, in
fact, Scandinavian imports. With this heritage, what exactly does Buccmaster
mean when he calls himself “angslic”?)
I guess, ultimately, I was
disappointed he was not a hero, that he couldn’t call upon a reserve of ancient
lore and wisdom to help him beat back the Normans, at least for a time. But Buccmaster is a deeply
flawed individual and his chief character trait, his mistrust of others, means
he cannot learn from them or from new experiences and circumstances. He will
only trust in the “auld” (old) ways. We learn at the end why he cannot trust
others—he lives with a “daoercness” (darkness) that must remain hidden. His
appeal to the old gods and the old ways is inauthentic and self-serving. He
seeks an ancient past because he cannot learn from, or bring to light, his own.
Is there power and wisdom in the land, and in the place you were born and know
best? Yes there is. But if you cannot reach beyond the boundaries of yourself to embrace
others, or to step beyond the confines of your village or land, then at some
point you stop growing. Eventually, change comes for all of us, just as the Norman invasion forever changed England.
It is doubtful that Grimcel, Tofe
and the rest of their band will survive the onslaught of the approaching French
knights, but at this climatic moment, their stand for England—and for each other—unites them in a common purpose shared with their fellow English. They
have grown larger than the sum of their individual selves, while Buccmaster, on the other hand,
grows smaller as he fades into the fens of his childhood where he'd thought
he would walk among giants.
Cheers, Jake.
*The “wake” refers to the painful childhood memory Buccmaster has of his grandfather’s wake
and how this event shaped the rest of his life.
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