If you read only one pagan novel this year, let it be Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake.
The emergence of post-apocalypse narrative in early “twenty-first” century fiction, cinema, and television is an intriguing and suggestive phenomenon, offering rich possibilities for satire, cultural critique, and reflection on direction for possible futures. (I have written previously about the genre in modern pagan fiction.)
But of course, as every pagan knows, when it comes to Apocalypse, we've already been there and done that. In human history, Ragnarok comes again and again. This is how Kingsnorth can characterize his novel, now newly released in the US and currently long-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize, as “a post-apocalyptic novel set 1000 years in the past.”
Imagine that you've lost everything: your home, your possessions, your family, your culture itself, even your gods. This is the tale that Kingsnorth tells in The Wake. The year is 1066.
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I definitely think the book speaks a warning for modern times, in the voice of the distant past. Reading between the lines, so mu -
Glad to hear it, Nancy, and good reading to you. It's an honest book, emotionally difficult, and the fact that Buccmaster is no gr -
Thank you for this review! I bought the book and started reading it last night. Already I can tell what a masterpiece it is. I
