GUEST REVIEW: The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth
The newest Psmithling has just been born and your regular reviewers are taking a brief hiatus. In the interim, we present a few weeks of guest reviews, beginning with one from lawyer and weird fiction writer Thomas Casey over at The Journal of Anomalous Cognitions.
The Wake: A Novel, Paul Kingsnorth (Graywolf Press, 2015).
What if the apocalypse had already happened? Your friends and family dead, your home and city reduced to ash, your language erased, your gods forgotten, and your temples reduced to a few blocks of bleached stone scattered across a grassy field. Your world has ended.
That’s the case for countless civilizations, many of which faded into oblivion with more of a whimper than a bang. The death of any civilization involves more than the physical death of the people themselves. Populations can be decimated by war or disease only to bloom and regrow, sometimes profoundly changed by the experience of suffering but still culturally connected to their forebearers through language and cultural inheritance. The true end of a civilization involves something more, something spiritual or metaphysical, perhaps the obliteration of a shared narrative of a people that defined not simply their places as individuals in a community, but the anchoring of the community in the cosmos.1
There are estimated to be some 570 extinct languages (languages no longer spoken or studied).2 What died with them was not only a system of communication, organized around grammar and vocabulary, but entire narrative constructions of reality. Names of rivers, mountains, plants, and animals. Songs and stories. Founding myths. Religious mysteries. Rites of initiation and burial. All gone forever.
About an hour’s drive from my door lies the Moundville Archaeological Park, a frequent field-trip destination for Alabama school children. I’ve taken my family to visit a couple of times, most recently during the 2020 COVID pandemic. Moundville is one of the largest classic Middle Mississippian era sites in the United States, comprised of 29 mounds arranged around a central plaza along the Black Warrior River not too far from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The Mississippian people of Moundville thrived for 500 years or more before their apocalypse: Hernando de Soto and other Europeans brought disease and death to the Americas, and drought, crop failure, and warfare may also have taken their toll. By 1540, Moundville and similar large Mississippian sites were abandoned. Archeologists don’t know what language the Mississippian people spoke or what they even called themselves. We are left with little other than archaeological speculation based on fragments of pottery, tools, burial sites, and accumulated garbage.
An apocalypse is also the subject of Paul Kingsnorth’s first novel, The Wake. Buccmaster of Holland3 is a socman,4 a member of the wapentake,5 an owner of three oxgang of land,6 and fiercely proud of his standing in his community. Unfortunately, the year is 1066 and the world as he knows it is about to end.
Buccmaster knows something is coming. First, there was the strange bird with eyes of fire and fingers like a man flying over the village. Then there was the appearance of a hairy star in the sky. No one knew what these signs meant, and no one wanted to listen to Buccmaster.
What was coming, of course, was the Norman invasion and the end of Anglo-Saxon England. Buccmaster’s sons go off to fight for King Harold—first at Stamford Bridge and then at Hastings. They never come home. When Buccmaster and his neighbors refuse to pay tribute to their new Norman overlords, the village is burned, Buccmaster’s wife is killed, and all the animals are destroyed or taken. Buccmaster misses all this while away in the fens. He takes to the forest and lives as a “grene man,” a kind of Anglo-Saxon partisan looking for opportunities to strike at the Norman conquerors whenever opportunities present themselves.
It’s all hopeless, as we know from our own historical vantage. The Wake is not an exercise in alternative history. While fictional in its specifics, it is perhaps better described as a post-apocalyptic novel set within a real historical era. And, like JRR Tolkien,7 Kingsnorth does not hide his opinion that the Norman Conquest was a tragedy. The book’s power, therefore, does not rely on generating any suspense about the ultimate outcome: Kingsnorth kindles no hope in our hearts that the plucky Anglo-Saxon rebels might actually win this time. The Wake, instead, shares with us the perspective of men living in a dying world and what it means to lose hope, knowing that the invader will not just destroy your village but replace your words for things, obliterate your cultural heritage, and wipe out the remembrance of your gods.
aefry ember of hope gan lic the embers of a fyr brocen in the daegs beginnan brocen by men other than us. hope falls harder when the end is cwic hope falls harder when in the daegs before the storm the stillness of the age was written in the songs of men
so it is when a world ends
who is thu i can not cnaw but i will tell thu this thing
be waery of the storm
be most waery when there is no storm in sight
What you will immediately notice is Kingsnorth’s creative use of language. The whole book is like this. If it looks a little disorienting, it’s meant to. In a note at the back of the book, Kingsnorth explains he wanted to create a “shadow tongue,” a “pseudo-language intended to convey the feeling of the old [English] language by combining some of its vocabulary and syntax with the English we speak today.”
Why would he do this to the reader? Kingsnorth provides two justifications. First, he says that he simply dislikes historical novels written in contemporary language. The way we speak, he explains, is too much tied to our particular time and place. Our socio-political worldview is inextricably tied up in the words we use and the manner in which we use them. Second, he wanted to express the alienness of Old England before the Conquest. These were people who simply did not see the world the way we do (nor as the Normans did).
The good news is that it is relatively easy to catch on. After about ten to fifteen pages, I began to hear Buccmaster’s individual voice in my head, telling his story in his own words quite comprehensibly and fluidly. And by pulling off this trick, Kingsnorth is able to emphasize effectively how much of any civilization or culture is bound up in the words used to describe the world and the supernatural sea in which it floats. A civilization dies a death by a thousand cuts as its language is replaced by the words and thoughts of a hostile foreign invader.
i seen that the names of the folcs of angland was part of anglisc ground lic the treow and rocc the fenn and hyll and i seen that when these names was tacan from the place where they had growan and cast down on other ground and when their place was tacan by names what has not growan from that ground is not of it and can not spece its tunge then a great wrong has been done.
Buccmaster is aware that his ancestors were once the conquerors themselves. But that awareness does not kindle any feelings of empathy on his part for the Latinized Britons the Angles and Saxons conquered.
anglisc folc cum here across the sea many years ago. wilde was this land wilde with ingengas with wealsc folc with aelfs and the wulf. cum we did in our scips our great carfan scips with the wyrms heafod and we macd good this land what had been weac and uncept and was thus ours by right
It doesn’t occur to Buccmaster that the Normans might make the same argument. Perhaps, like death, apocalypse is something that always happens to other people. Buccmaster is himself what he would call an “esol”: he’s quick to take offense, always knows better than others, and his stubbornness and pride eventually contribute just as much to his downfall as the hated French. It’s notable that Buccmaster chose not to fight for King Harold at Hastings despite his feeling of dread at the coming of the French. Too many responsibilities. Too much work to do on the farm.
The Wake is also a story about religion. Although all Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were at least nominally Christian after the death of Arwald in 686, Buccmaster retains the old pagan faith taught to him by his grandfather. While it is perhaps historically questionable whether a man of Buccmaster’s particular time and social standing would retain an attachment to the old pagan faith—the Venerable Bede, writing in the early eighth century, seems to have assumed paganism had all but vanished in his day—the choice to identify Buccmaster as a recalcitrant pagan is narratively effective. Kingsnorth does make it plain that Buccmaster’s faith in the old gods is out of step with his community and is the source of family and social conflict, but the choice heightens the sense of world-shattering doom that hangs over him. Buccmaster is not only losing his family, his home, and the dominance of his own tongue; he is losing the supernatural superstructure that gives order and meaning to his reality.
Buccmaster associates the coming of the crist and his preosts with the Conquest. Over the course of the story, this association is heightened and intensified, up until to the novel’s tragic dénouement when things really unravel for Buccmaster — in large part due to the prompting of the ever-present voice of Wayland the Smith. Wayland, the master blacksmith of Anglo-Germanic legend, plays the part of a blood-thirsty Jiminy Cricket, appearing to Buccmaster, whispering to him, and goading him to violent, guerilla warfare on behalf of England and its old gods. Wotan also makes an appearance. Whether these voices and appearances are substantially real is left to the reader, but the impression of psychological collapse over the course of the novel is the same. By the close of the story, Buccmaster is a shattered man, one who can have no hold on reality because it has already slipped so far out of his grasp. The new world is unthinkable. Yet in his own mind he will always by Buccmaster, a socman of Holland, and owner of three oxgang of good land, even after those concepts themselves have lost any substantial or legal significance.
There is a remarkable scene of temporary repose late in the novel that serves as a swan song for Old England. Buccmaster and his companions, after months in the woods, happen across a secluded village—a “small place in a lea of the holt”—still untouched by the Norman conquerors. It’s summer and the village is preparing to celebrate “litha,” or Midsummer’s Eve. Buccmaster is welcomed into the village and invited to celebrate the old festivities, which center around the raising of the litha pole. But Buccmaster knows none of it can last. The Normans will get there too and the litha celebrations will end:
the pal reacced up to the heofon and grew greener as the yonge wifmen worccd on it and all stood locan on and a stillness cum down on this ham what had been so loud and we all loccd on at these yonge wifmen tyan the leafs and blosms to the pal and slow slow grew up a great treow and it reaccd to the heofen it called up it saed cum for we is in need in these grene daegs and through this pal then sum thing what i colde feel so strong that i colde almost see it climban up the pal up the stocc of the new treow. sum thing from erce sum strength it was climban and climban up from the ground and it gan up the pal and from the corona it spread out in to the heofan abuf this small ham abuf us abuf me and i colde see all the hues of it cumin
oh it was the last daeg of the world
Kingsnorth is less interested in describing the nitty-gritty, day-to-day practical reality of living in the woods, scrapping out some sort of survival, than in exploring these meta-narratives of meaning. Those scenes are there, but they lack something of the granular verisimilitude of a present-day post-apocalyptic novel like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which more effectively describes the painful details of living hand-to-mouth in a blasted wasteland. The Wake drags a bit at times when the narrative focuses on Buccmaster and his band sitting around a fire, somewhere in the woods, squabbling over what their next move should be or debating the veracity of rumors carried their way. But illustrating these sorts of pedestrian details isn’t the point of the book.
Similarly, a historian might quibble with the details of the Anglo-Saxon world Kingsnorth paints or take issue with his portrayal of the abruptness and finality of Norman culture eclipsing the Anglo-Saxon world. In truth, it took decades, if not centuries, for the Normans to remake England in their own image and much of the old Anglo-Saxon culture survived and carried over into the English culture that would emerge up until another, entirely different, apocalypse refashioned England yet again after 1348-1349. But telescoping the entire experience of Norman cultural domination into the experience of one man over a much shorter window of time effectively focuses the mind on the scope and significance of that change and amplifies the sense of cultural death.
The Wake carries an unmistakable mood of cosmic horror. It is not simply the physical destruction of people and things that pushes Buccmaster over the brink of madness, but the profound disorientation and alienation that overtakes him as the familiar waypoints of life and the cosmos disappear. The stars he once used for navigation suddenly blink out of existence and the new sky of an alien world unfolds above him in the heavens.
What is perhaps most unsettling about a little apocalypse like his is that it is not the Apocalypse—the final end of all things. There is an unspoken longing that if our world should end, it should also mean the total end of everything. For the world to roll on, indifferent to the annihilation of all we hold dear, is perhaps the most horrifying thought of all. If our doom is only the prelude to the final apocalypse and end of all things, at least it gives our own demise some sort of cosmic significance; if the end of our civilization is little more than a speed bump or footnote in the annals of time, it’s just too much for the mind to bear.
As I’ve said, The Wake is preoccupied with the death of a world, an apocalypse occurring in a particular time and place. Part of what makes the telling of it so effective is that Kingsnorth permeates the work with a sense of contemporary urgency. The reader intuits that this is no ordinary exercise in art or speculation. The Wake is a warning to us too. You see, apocalypse had been on Kingsnorth’s mind well before he ever picked up pen and paper to begin drafting this tale.
In 2008, Kingsnorth co-authored a lengthy manifesto that became the founding document of the Dark Mountain Project. The manifesto itself was born out of the civilizational anxiety that many of us probably felt to some degree following the 2008 financial crisis, but it was not simply a Bernie Bro screed about global finance capitalism (although you will find some of that in the text). Rather, the manifesto is much more concerned with the conceptual framework of our civilization, the assumed realities we share and take for granted before we step out of the door in the morning.
It thematically relies on the ideas of Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and the poet Robinson Jeffers more than any Marxist economic theories or environmentally minded platitudes. If I were to summarize the underlying message of both Conrad and Kipling, for example, I think it would be something like this: the ordered civilization that we enjoy was hard-won, easily lost, and painful to restore. That also comes through in the manifesto, at least so far as the authors of the manifesto share Kipling and Conrad’s awareness of the fragility of civilization:
The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.
….
There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us.
The influence of Jeffers adds to this a chilling element of cosmic indifference: his poetry is used in the manifesto for its decentering of human experience and warnings about the hubris underlying our conquest of nature and ourselves.
… Jeffers knew what he was in for. He knew that nobody, in an age of “consumer choice,” wanted to be told by this stone-faced prophet of the California cliffs that “it is good for man … To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.”
Jeffers also developed something of a governing philosophy, that of “inhumanism,” which he described as:
a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to notman; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence…This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist … It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy… it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.
It's strange stuff, but it provides much of the underlying motivation of the manifesto and Kingsnorth’s call for a new kind of “Uncivilised writing,” intended to “accept the world for what it is and to make our home here, rather than dreaming of relocating to the stars, or existing in a Man-forged bubble and pretending to ourselves that there is nothing outside it to which we have any connection at all.” Behind all this, it seems to me, is a yearning for transcendence, for the Real real that lies just behind civilization, something whispered between the woods and the water.
The manifesto identifies a shared narrative as the ordering center of any civilization, and as that shared narrative begins to lose its appeal or credibility, the civilization it supports begins to crumble with it. And the centering narrative of Western civilization, according to the manifesto, is Progress—the limitless economic, technological, and moral progress and perfectibility of man based on human reason.
The myth of progress is to us what the myth of god-given warrior prowess was to the Romans, or the myth of eternal salvation was to the conquistadors: without it, our efforts cannot be sustained. Onto the root stock of Western Christianity, the Enlightenment at its most optimistic grafted a vision of an Earthly paradise, towards which human effort guided by calculative reason could take us. Following this guidance, each generation will live a better life than the life of those that went before it. History becomes an escalator, and the only way is up.
It is this narrative that the authors of the manifesto believe cannot be be sustained. And with its fall, Western Civilization as we know it will inevitably fall too. These are the background concepts that gave birth to The Wake, and with this in mind, we should read it as a warning.
But that is not the end of the story. Anyone who has followed his Substack or listened to any of his recent interviews or talks will know that Kingsnorth’s life was profoundly changed in 2021 when he was baptized into the Orthodox Church. I don’t believe this involved so much of an outright rejection of his previous opinions but a reorientation of them towards a new centering narrative, a narrative more intimately connected with the Real real than socialism, environmentalism, or economics.
The choice of Orthodox Christianity seems particularly appropriate for Kingsnorth. As he explains in a lengthy essay on his journey from atheism to Orthodox Christianity:
In Orthodoxy I had found the answers I had sought, in the one place I never thought to look. I found a Christianity that had retained its ancient heart—a faith with living saints and a central ritual of deep and inexplicable power. I found a faith that, unlike the one I had seen as a boy, was not a dusty moral template but a mystical path, an ancient and rooted thing, pointing to a world in which the divine is not absent but everywhere present, moving in the mountains and the waters. The story I had heard a thousand times turned out to be a story I had never heard at all.
Orthodoxy, knowing no Renaissance, Reformation, or Enlightenment, is not centered around an abiding belief in endless Progress, which Kingsnorth believes is the Achilles heel of Western Civilization (including, perhaps, western expressions of Christianity). Orthodoxy has also known, and survived, its own apocalypses—including most significantly the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium and the Russian Revolution. And in both of these cases, the grene men of Orthodoxy survived, even if they emerged on the other side profoundly changed by the experience.
Because I share his faith, I have the same abiding supernatural hope in the survival of Christianity and its perennial power to renew civilized life, its wellspring being something that lies deeper than the façade of any given civilization. Neither Kingsnorth, nor you, nor I can know what the future holds or the inscrutable working of divine providence. But we should be ready for anything, because something may be coming.
So what are we supposed to do? The Wake provides something of an answer. Midway through the story, Buccmaster has a vision of a white stag with gold horns. The stag is standing on great hill “high higher than all things abuf it only heofan under it all the clouds that stands abuf the eorth.” Buccmaster sees a small child approach the stag, taking the stag by the horns, and speaking to it:
when will i be free saes the cilde to the stag
and the stag saes thu will nefer be free
then when will angland be free
angland will nefer be free
then what can be done
naht can be done
then how moste i lif
thu moste be triewe that is all there is
be triewe
be triewe
What is an apocalypse? The OED defines it as “a disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment.” The term means something closer to a “lifting of the veil” in Greek and is often understood in Christian terms as a revelation of supernatural truth. There’s an interesting tension between these understandings. The former implies the negation of meaning while the later implies the revelation and consummation of ultimate meaning.
There is an important distinction between a dead language and an extinct language. While an extinct language has no more spoken or written use, a dead language may have secondary speakers or other written or liturgical use.
Not that Holland. Holland was a portion of Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire in the fens of East Anglia.
A socman was a kind of tenant holding a socage, a freehold tenure that did not involve feudal duties.
A unit of local government.
An oxgang roughly corresponded to the amount of land that could be ploughed using one ox in a single annual season.
 | A guest post by
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Congratulations to both of you!
If the guest reviewer, the host reviewers, or any readers appreciate the odd style of The Wake, I'd also recommend checking out Riddley Walker for a similar work, also set in an apocalyptic England.
Congratulations!