English Mystic: Paul Kingsnorth and his book, ‘The Wake’

The Norman invasion’s shadowy and elusive properties allow a multitude of activists to discover ever new dimensions in the Saxon world.

‘England is become the residence of foreigners and the property of strangers…they prey upon the riches and vitals of England; nor is there any hope of a termination of this misery.’

- William of Malmesbury, 1125

So was recorded the Norman invasion of 1066, an event seismic in its consequences and devastating in its assault on the social fabric of the country, sundering the people from their land, lore and language.

Generations of scholars and artists have found in this doom a myriad of symbols and possibilities: reformers an Anglo-Saxon Church pristine in its doctrine; Levellers an arcadia of communal rights; liberals a lost constitutional freedom.

It’s shadowy and elusive properties allow a multitude of activists to discover ever new dimensions in the Saxon world offered as a critique of a fallen present.

Paul Kingsnorth offers perhaps the most interesting submersion into this haunting twilight yet undertaken this century.

Written as the first instalment of a trilogy, ‘The Wake’ is ‘a post-apocalyptic novel set a thousand years ago’ and explores an England on the cusp of occupation.

His protagonist, Buccmaster, a fenland farmer experiences the portents of disaster emanating from the natural world (a comet appeared before the invasion seemingly foretelling catastrophe) and the fearful miasma they spread amongst his people.

Trusting both to the power of English arms and his superior nature Buccmaster remains aloof. He venerates an ineluctable communion of land and tradition that can endure beyond even divine agency, an atavistic shield of the local.

His own forays into an extinguished paganism make Buccmaster a liminal personality between an ancient order and a Christian present which both exalts and marginalizes him.

As the trauma unfolds it is for this reality that Buccmaster will fight the resistance.

However it is the linguistic structure of the book that fully defines its atmosphere and potential; written in a simplified Anglo-Saxon lexicon excluding Latinate or French words, the narrative estranges us from the intervening centuries and gives us the voice of the lost.

Though disorientating, a glossary provides partial explication and hidden rhythms in the prose, gradually assembling a familiarity, meaning committed readers with patience can approach the text.

It is this defiant obstruction to easy consumption that forms the works radicalism, dissenting from the British tradition.

Established by Sir Walter Scott, the historical novel has become a dominating genre. Its range inexhaustible and its dramatic elements ever reinvented for new sensibilities. Yet at its core this project has a deeply conservative tendency - to validate and assure the present.

In ‘Waverly’ Scott draws the reader into the turmoil of the Jacobite uprising of 1745 in which his hero adopts the Stuart cause. Though he is defeated his honour and integrity permit reconciliation and ultimate belonging in the new regime. Tragedy has turned to romance.

Such treatment of the problematic or subversive as exotic allowed the public to support established authority while accepting insurgency as a heroic folly. It was the pacification of a myth.

This benediction of progress aligned with a new generation of ‘Whig’ historians for whom the past was predestined to move towards an ever brighter more prosperous future. Capturing this mood in 1848 Thomas Macaulay wrote in his ‘History of Engand’:

‘The history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.’

Real developments notwithstanding, much of this advance rested on processes of finite energy, resources that depleted and technologies that could devastate as well as ennoble the societies that produced them.

By the middle of the twentieth century, any lingering accordance between virtue and evolution had been shattered in the minds of those surveying the horrors of technocratic genocide.

Culture rapidly responded to this generalized malaise in the guise of satire, protest and existentialism and the historical novel searched for new moorings.

Kingsnorth approaches this predicament with a distinctive vision of place and civilization. As a former ecological activist he saw the natural world reduced by logic of growth that has supplanted all other values.

His reaction to unchecked development has broadened into a defence of the particular and the inherited. There is a tightening alignment in his work between the destruction of the environment and the failure of the social and communal ecosystems that can withstand the atomisation and effacement of hyper globalization.

For him the machinery of oppression, whether operated from Norman keeps or corporate headquarters, can only be challenged by a move away from consensus with power and progressive dogmas. History itself must be ‘rewilded’ to preserve its stock of mystery and strength.

Like Buccmaster we find ourselves in a breaking world where vast occult forces seem growingly entrenched. Now more than ever we need his lessons of survival.