Your regular reviewers are busily tending to the newest Psmithling and will return anon. In the interim, we present a guest review by Thomas Casey. 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 is 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.
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.
I really liked this review, and should I ever get round to reading The Wake, the context given here will be of great help in orientating myself to Kingsnorth's imagined world.
The review also made me think a little deeper than I previously had about what civilisational replacement means to an individual unconvinced by usurpers' assurances that the new world they are foisting upon him is indeed better than the old one he felt so at home in. One need be neither a racist nor a Luddite, merely normal, to prefer the world one grew up in to a shiny new, alien world.
Congratulations!
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.
I really liked this review, and should I ever get round to reading The Wake, the context given here will be of great help in orientating myself to Kingsnorth's imagined world.
The review also made me think a little deeper than I previously had about what civilisational replacement means to an individual unconvinced by usurpers' assurances that the new world they are foisting upon him is indeed better than the old one he felt so at home in. One need be neither a racist nor a Luddite, merely normal, to prefer the world one grew up in to a shiny new, alien world.
Ditto 😊