2019/18: Wakenhyrst -- Michelle Paver

I'm still conscious of that staring from the fen. I can't shake off the feeling that something has been let loose -- and that it's out there now, biding its time. Waiting to come in. [loc. 2698]

The framing narrative of Wakenhyrst is set in 1966. Dr Robin Hunter is keen to contact the elusive Maud Stearne, daughter of esteemed medievalist Edmund Stearne who, fifty years earlier, murdered a man in broad daylight as his teenaged daughter watched. Since then, Maud has lived in seclusion at Wake's End, the family home, deep in the heart of the fens. She refuses to publish her father's notebooks -- which Dr Hunter believes may contain observations about the Wakenhyrst Doom, a sixteenth-century painting now on display in the village church -- or his unfinished work on medieval mystic Alice Pyett.

The main body of the story takes place in the early years of the twentieth century. Maud grows up adoring her mother, who is frequently pregnant, and longing for her remote father's approval. What a shame that, though brighter than either of her younger brothers, she is female! As Maud grows older, she begins to question her father's rules, even whilst acting as his assistant. When she begins to read his notebooks, she is merely hoping to find something about herself.

Edmund Stearne is the archetype of a particular type of misogynist -- one I've encountered several times in recent novels. He views his studies as a form of seduction -- 'Pyett will prove a coy mistress, very hard to read, but already she is yielding riches. It will take months to lay bare all her secrets' [loc. 1350] -- and is thoroughly dismissive of Maud, despite her intelligence and interest. It's not just his daughter: Stearne has little time for any woman unless he finds her sexually attractive. He dismisses the family doctor's suggestion (after yet another stillbirth) that he might have sex with his wife slightly less often, or perhaps use contraception. And he is profoundly opposed to superstition -- though he has some eccentric rules of his own.

Maud, meanwhile, is learning a great deal about the world from the superstitious 'common people' she encounters: Jubal Rede, a vagabond who lives in the Fen; Clem Walker, the good-looking under-gardener; Ivy, the pulchritudinous housemaid. Each of these helps her to understand an aspect of what is happening to her father. What she does with that knowledge is a different matter.

This novel didn't terrify me in the same way as Paver's earlier horror novels, Thin Air and Dark Matter. In those novels, I was struck by the sheer claustrophobia of the great outdoors. Here, the claustrophobia is more literal. Maud seldom ventures beyond the house, except to visit the fen, a haven of wildness and freedom. She is terribly isolated, but not alone. And perhaps Wakenhyrst lacks immediacy: we are shown the force or entity that afflicts Maud's father through his notebooks, but that narrative is interspersed with Maud's own, more mundane (though also horrific) story.

There is a great deal of subtlety to Wakenhyrst, and it definitely repaid rereading. But even after rereading, I'm still not clear on whether Maud made peace with something, or whether that something pursued Edmund and inspired his paintings.

Paver's afterword confirms the influences and inspirations that I thought I recognised: Alice Pyett is based in part on Margery Kempe, and St Guthlaf (to whom the village church is dedicated, and after whom the fen outside the house is named) owes a lot to St Guthlac. I confess I didn't make the connection between Edmund's paintings and Richard Dadd.

I received a free review copy of Wakenhyrst from NetGalley in exchange for this honest review.