The Return of Buccmaster

Sum thing is cuman

the night was clere though i slept i seen it. though i slept i seen the calm hierde naht only the still. when i gan down to sleep all was clere in the land and my dreams was full of stillness but my dreams did not cepe me still

when i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all time. a great wind had cum in the night and all was blown then and broc. none had thought a wind lic this colde cum for all was blithe lifan as they always had and who will hiere the gleoman when the tales he tells is blaec who locs at the heofon if it brings him regn who locs in the mere when there seems no end to its deopness

none will loc but the wind will cum. the wind cares not for the hopes of men

the times after will be for them who seen the cuman

the times after will be for the waecend

---

It has been sixteen, or maybe seventeen, years since I wrote those words. I’ve never written anything like them again. I don’t know where they came from, or how they arose.

This is the introduction to my first novel The Wake, which appeared in 2014. The Wake is the story of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, narrated by a fenland farmer. It is a very strange book, which got quite out of hand. The book I began writing was not the book I ended up producing. What started as a novel featuring multiple voices from different periods in history reflecting on the conquest (very post-modern, I know) ended up being the first-person narrative of a strange, disturbing, determined man, featuring an array of pagan gods who stuck their noses into my writing process and demanded access. Most unplanned of all, the whole thing ended up being written in an invented version of Anglo-Saxon English.

I never thought anyone would publish The Wake, given all this, but I wrote it anyway because I was enjoying myself. The older I get, the more I understand that this is really the only reason to write anything at all. The English novelist John Fowles, asked for writing advice, once said something very similar:

At heart, write always for yourself, not for family and friends, for admired teachers, for reviewers or publishers; but make sure you write from your real self, not that one besotted by vainglorious dreams of a future self. One day you will realise that the true rewards of writing lie inalienably in the writing itself.

The fact that Fowles was once very famous and is now mostly forgotten seems to back up his wise advice.

Anyway, Fate has a sense of humour, and so The Wake, on publication, ended up being longlisted for the Booker Prize. It was published by Unbound, a startup publisher which used crowdfunding to finance its books, and this fact made The Wake the first crowd-funded book to be listed for the prize, which meant it got a lot of attention for about five minutes.

Lots of people liked The Wake¹. Philip Pullman said it was ‘extraordinary’, Adam Thorpe in The Guardian called it ‘a literary triumph’, Geoff Dyer said it was ‘an astonishing accomplishment’ and novelist Eleanor Catton called it ‘a masterpiece.’ It still didn’t get shortlisted, though. Like I say, it’s all about the writing in the end, though writers reserve the right to do a bit of boasting on the side.

Why am I talking about this book twelve years after it was published? Because it is being reborn into the world this summer. Sadly, its original publisher, Unbound, went out of business last year, which meant I got the rights to the book back². It is now being re-released in a new edition by John Murray Press, the oldest publisher in Britain. The reason I went to them is that they promised to publish the book in their new ‘classics’ range, and every author wants to have written a classic, especially if it appears before he’s actually dead.

This year’s range of John Murray Classics looks like this:

That’s The Wake on the top line, next to Wuthering Heights. I can now die happy.

This new edition of The Wake features an introduction by the actor Mark Rylance, who was one of the early adopters of the book. Mark currently owns the film rights, and I’m hoping to be writing a script for a potential film later this year. We’ll see what happens with that, but Mark’s introduction is a very lovely launchpad for the experience of the book itself. You can see him reading from the book the year it came out here.

So, that’s The Wake: probably my best book, and certainly the one I feel most bound up with imaginatively, for some reason. Sometimes people ask me if I will ever write a sequel. I always prevaricate in my answer, because I don’t know. But I do know how the story continues, and the idea pulls at me sometimes. We’ll see. My main concern is that if I disappear into that world again I may never come out.

The new edition of The Wake is published on the 16th July, but you can pre-order it here now. Come on: why wouldn’t you? It’s a classic. Did I mention that?

1. Others found it bemusing or irritating. Reviews on Amazon seem to divide into either five or one star, with nothing in-between. I regard this as a marker of success.

2. Unbound published the British edition of The Wake. In the US, it is still available in an edition published by Graywolf Press.