Wakenhyrst

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In an additional similarity to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the element of the supernatural in Wakenhyrst is never made explicit – instead only making an appearance in the character’s dreams and visions. This appears to serve multiple functions, largely to make obvious Edmund Stearne’s poor grasp on reality, to illuminate the ludicrous religious and superstitious phenomena experienced by the inhabitants of Wakenhyrst, but also so as not to undermine the stark, natural power of The Fens.

Wakenhyrst – Michelle Paver

We meet Maud as a child in the repressive isolation and secrecy of Wake’s End as she grapples with the loss of her mother and struggles under her father’s commanding presence. Maud is isolated in more than just location; as the oldest of her much younger siblings, she is alone in her daily life, alone in grieving her mother, alone in her understanding of life at Wake’s End and the desire to be out from under her father’s rule. As her father’s only daughter, she is also isolated as the only female member of her family left—unimportant, incapable, and harmless as any other woman in her father’s eyes. We move through periods of Maud’s childhood as she grows into her teenage years, as she carves space for herself within Wake’s End. She grows to realize that she can grant herself little freedoms, that her own beliefs may lie somewhere outside of what everyone else in Wakenhyrst believes, that perhaps the only thing worth believing in is the one thing she holds most dearly: the fen. There’s a richness to this story that is enhanced by its unhurried pace, by the fact that readers get to sit still within Wake’s End as threads of intrigue, mystery, and building suspense are woven steadily around us as we come to know Maud, her father, and Wakenhyrst itself throughout years of her life. Wakenhyrst is a framed narrative set in Edwardian Suffolk, at the Sterne family’s ancestral marshland home of Wakes End. The story follows the life of Maud Sterne and her account of the mysterious events leading up to a gruesome murder committed by her father. We see Maud mature into adulthood while simultaneously watching her father, Edmund, descend into madness. The book fo Alice Pyett is basd on the Book of Margery Kempe. Like Alice, Margery Kempe was married in her teens, had an unconscionable number of children and ended up longing for chastity.

I really enjoyed the elements of folk-horror Paver used in the novel. Images of swamp demons with wide mouths and frog-like eyes, impish creatures with swampy green horns, they paint a very different picture to the antiquated Christian red-skinned devils so often depicted in medieval dooms.

Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver | Goodreads

To her the fen was a forbidden realm of magical creatures and she longed for it with a hopeless passion. In the gripping new novel by the author of The Fourteenth Letter, a lawyer in Victorian London must find a man he got off a murder charge - and who seems to have killed again . . . One of my favourite things about Wakenhyrst is that it uses a distinctive medieval European depiction of nature, in this instance, the Suffolk Fens. The Fens are presented to us as this wild, unromantic, untamed space that transcends social boundaries (see Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Marie de France’s Lanval). Even Wakes End’s patriarch, Edmund Sterne, with all the power that his status and gender affords, is at the mercy of the marsh. Only in this space can Maud be her true self, unrestricted by the social expectations of a landowner’s daughter. Only here can she pursue a romance with the working-class under-gardener, only amongst the mud and reeds can she exist without being sexualised or undermined for being a woman. The Suffolk Fens are to Wakenhyrst what the Yorkshire moors are to Wuthering Heights, the feral beauty of the marsh is to Maud Sterne what the unbridled heathland is to Catherine Earnshaw. Spanning five centuries, Wakenhyrst is a darkly gothic thriller about murderous obsession and one girl’s longing to fly free by the bestselling author of Dark Matter and Thin Air. Wakenhyrst is an outstanding new piece of story-telling, a tale of mystery and imagination laced with terror. It is a masterwork in the modern gothic tradition that ranges from Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Neil Gaiman and Sarah Perry. Maud’s father’s discovery of an unsettling, grotesque painting of devils marks a shift in life at Wake’s End. Always a controlling, but logical, man, Edmund Stearne has changed since first setting eyes on the painting—and Maud notices. Paranoid and erratic, Edmund’s work as a historian comes to intersect with the history of the painting—the Doom—and his obsession becomes Maud’s mission to understand. The life of Alice Pyett, a woman who claimed God spoke through her centuries ago, has absorbed him as the focus of his work, but now her diary entries, which Edmund is translating and which readers are able to read, fuel his own paranoia. Through firsthand journal entries, readers—and Maud—come to know Edmund’s thoughts intimately as he faces what he fears he set loose in discovering the Doom. Something ancient, something uncontrollable, something evil. The atmosphere and folklore of the fens comes to life, the utterly compelling story unfolding in a way that is impossible to look away from. There are secrets at Wake’s End and secrets her father keeps and Maud will have them unraveled before her. But as the story unfolds, not all is clear; is it madness or is history repeating itself? Is Edmund paranoid or has something actually been wakened? Is there truth to the local superstitions of the Fens? Though a quietly told tale, Wakenhyrst rises to a thrilling crescendo that is unsettling and surprising.Time heals old wounds and dissipates old illusions as a new generation of Caskeys ascends to power. The most impressive nov­el of the year. It’s an utter triumph of a book, a pitch-perfect evocation of the stories of M.R. James and A.C. Benson filtered through a 21st-century sensibility. In Edwardian Suffolk, a manor house stands alone in a lost corner of the Fens: a glinting wilderness of water whose whispering reeds guard ancient secrets. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father.