Review - Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver #Blogtour #NetGalley

Wakenhyrst
Michelle Paver
Head of Zeus, 4 April 2019
HB, 359pp, e-book, audio

I'm grateful to the publisher for inviting me to take part in the Wakenhyrst blogtour and for providing a free advance e-copy of the book via NetGalley.

Having loved Paver's previous two supernatural-tinged novels, Dark Matter and Thin Air, I was delighted to see Wakenhyrst coming - and then to be able to take part in the tour.

Like Dark Matter and Thin Air,  at the heart of Wakenhyrst is the social structure of early 20th century England (England not Britain). I say that despite the fact that the previous books were not set in England: they still explored English notions of class and the way that English arrogance impinged on, and fell foul of, other cultures and places.

Wakenhyrst is, very much, set in England (with one short diversion to Brussels) and the English upper class scorn for the beliefs of the 'natives' that featured in Thin Air is here turned back on itself as a dilettante Edwardian gentleman, researching the obscure fifteenth century mystical biography of one Alice Pyett, goes to dark places despite (or because of?) his rejecting the beliefs of the 'lower orders'.

Edmund Stearne is a man 'of spotless reputation' but, to his daughter Maud, a forbidding and pernickety father ("You know my dislike of manhandled newsprint") who enthusiastically administers physical punishment. To his Belgian wife he is a tyrant ('It was Father who had decreed what Mama ate, read, did and thought...') As a girl, indeed as a woman, Maud is slighted, discounted, disregarded. Edmund knows what he wants - his wife pregnant (she suffers an endless series of miscarriages - Maud comes to dread 'the moaning'), his daughter silent in the nursery, and servant girl Ivy at his disposal ('Nor did he regard what he regularly did with Ivy as anything but the satisfaction of a lawful appetite'). Allegedly a religious man, it would be overgenerous even to label the contents of the diary we're allowed to read here as hypocritical. Indeed there's a vein of outright misogyny in Edward ('Women are all the same. Devious, hypocritical, corrupt') and also in his pals the local doctor and the Vicar. The subordinate role of a young woman in that time and place is made very plain: when she seeks their help in a crisis, Maud is threatened, told to stop being hysterical sent on her way. Throughout the book, Ivy and Maud are at odds, seeking to undermine one another, even though the cause of their problems is not their own relationship but the stultifying, patriarchal, power of Maud's father.

But this isn't just a story of how bad things were in the past and how much better they have become. Paver is shrewder than that. The book opens in 1966 with a quoted newspaper article which is, in its own way, just as patronising, just as set on keeping women in their place, as Doctor, Parson and Squire at their worst. Describing the discovery of some sublime artworks created by Edmund in his later life, it introduces the academic who first recognised them thus:

' "My hair stood on end," shrills Dr Robin Hunter, 36, a mini-skirted redhead in white vinyl boots...'

That article portrays the elderly, reclusive Maud, still living in her decayed childhood home out in the Fens, as at best, a bitter old maid, at worst, a murderer and witch - and naturally, as in conflict with another woman, her cook. Plus ca change... Initially unwilling to share the real story, despite the calumny directed at her, Maud eventually relents  (a storm has damaged the roof, she needs money) and admits to her confidence that same Dr Hunter.

We then hear Maud's account, interspersed with entries from her father's diaries. This is where the real story begins - of a lonely girl with a strict father, growing up amidst the wildness of the Fens. Young Maud's life is marked by contrasts, for example between the different customs, of her father and of the villagers, which she must or mustn't follow (sometimes she can't remember which is which). There's the language itself - while the elderly Maud speaks with a 'cut glass accent' it's clear that she is or was perfectly fluent in the local dialect:

' "D-don't fret thysen,' she stammered, unthinkingly lapsing into village talk. "I told thee I wanted to go babbing..." '

In keeping with that, it's clear that everyone - not just the working people but Maud, her mother, Edmund himself - has recourse at one time or another to the potions and remedies of the village wisewoman.

There is the contrast between the entitled, complacent world of men (principally her father) and the second class existence of women.

And between the buttoned-up public attitudes of the trinity who preside over this world and their secret behaviour.

Above all, the story contrasts Edmund Stearne's public reputation as 'a rich landowner and respected historian' with a private dread that he has committed a terrible sin (even if he protests to his diary that he can't remember what it was, and that anyway it wasn't his fault). His fear drives an obsession with Pyett's text, which seems to him to parallel his own case. This is an aspect of the story that only surfaces gradually (there is a lot submerged in the Fen) and indirectly, and saying too much would spoil the effect. The slowly emerging picture does, though, underly a growing atmosphere of menace which makes this book truly Gothic. Paver signals what may be going on with language that alludes to the master of this genre, MR James, from details (toad-like carvings on a pew, Stearne's almost tripping as he comes downstairs, his feeling as if he had been bitten) to turns of phrase ( '...whoever painted that picture painted the demon from life') and overall themes (the fear of a hairy thing that has been let loose, the story's focus on a lone scholar and its being told, in part, looking back some fifty years through a manuscript account). We could be reading one of those stories where an accusing spectre haunts the guilty, slowly driving them over the edge of sanity.

Michelle Paver (photo: Anthony Upton)

Whether that is, in the end, the case - well, I won't say any more about that. You should read the book and make up your own mind. But it is clear that there is much more going on than in a classic ghost story, even though Paver uses that form expertly. Apart from the theme of patriarchy, I think there's also an exploration here of the creation of memory, of the importance of story - most obviously of course in older Maud's desire to control the narrative, as one might put it now, but also for example in the way that Stearne says in his diary that he remembers something 'though I didn't before' - he is a most unreliable narrator indeed and seems to me to be reinventing his life and outlook under pressure of - well, of whatever it is.  Maud sees Edmund's story take shape and come to life - and eventually realises how it threatens her and those she loves. And in the end she has to take control and make her own truth.

In describing how Maud does that, Paver has, in a sense, to go beyond the supernatural and show how some horrors are actually worse - because more universal - than the shades haunting remote mountain peaks or isolated Arctic bases and which her previous books turned on. Wakenhyrst depicts a sense of unearned entitlement, the systematic application of privilege and the embrace of hypocrisy, both in the Edwardian summer and the topsy turvy '60s, which to me is actually much more chilling than a vengeful ghost keening in the Fen.

It is a powerful, enthralling book which I'd encourage you to read. If you need any more urging, it's also a beautifully designed thing, the cover tactile and brooding, the endpapers leafy and glorious, the pages crawling with the life of the Fens - the design by Stephen McNally really enhancing the experience of reading this book (yes, I was sent an e-copy, yes I have bought the hardback - there was no way wasn't going to have this on my shelves). And there's much, much more than ice been able to cram into this review: the teeming wildlife of the Fens, Maud's later life - only sketched but Paver does it so well that we can join the dots - and even some romance.

This will definitely going to be one of my standout books of the year.

The blogtour continues - see the poster below for other excellent reviews - and you can buy Wakenhyrst from your local bookshop, including via Hive, from Blackwell's, Waterstones or Amazon (and doubtless other places besides).

Thin Air

Image from www.orionbooks.co.uk

Thin Air
Michelle Paver
Orion, 6 October 2016
HB, 240pp
I'm grateful for an advance e-copy of this book through NetGalley.

This book makes a perfect companion piece to Paver's previous ghost story for adults, Dark Matter. Superficially, they are very similar - both are about men (this is the Imperial 30s: yes, it's all men) pitting themselves against a harsh environment (the Arctic cold or the thin air of the high Himalyas) in a very late Empire spirit of derring-do the culmination of which was perhaps Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's successful ascent alongside the 1953 Coronation.

And both ponder how the dark, and the cold, and the essence of desperate men driven to extremes, might not let in something frightful - providing fruitful ground for real, spine tingling horror.

There are other similarities too, such as the presence of an outsider (in the case of Thin Air, the protagonist, Stephen) or relative outsider on the tightly knit group of Boys' Own types. But most of all, the note of a true horror story - compared with a mere ghost story - which is that the horror never really ends. This is encapsulated here by Tennant, survivor of an earlier expedition to 'conquer' Kanchenjunga who in early scenes is clearly haunted by something he met on that trip.

It's all done brilliantly and works well as a ghost story. Stephen is climbing with his brother Kits as part of a expedition to reach a previously unclimbed peak. Earlier expeditions have met disaster - how, and why, is slowly unravelled as the story unfolds, building tension (Paver uses a technique of studied vagueness - it's not immediately clear for example exactly what the composition of one of those expeditions was, making its members already somewhat ghostlike and blending reality with fiction). As the mountaineers approach the lower slopes, they seem to delight in ridiculing the superstitions and beliefs of the local people they describe as 'coolies' (another foreshadowing of trouble to come!)

This is one with the general attitude to 'natives'. Stephen, the expedition's doctor, speculates about what makes these people so able to bear the harsh climate and high altitude, but he discusses them in terms that might almost fit animals. The expedition leader has boots for them, but withholds these till as late as he can - and their views about the best way to proceed are pretty much discounted, indeed a number of times they're effectively compared to children. Paver is good on this attitude of late Imperial arrogance (pride coming before a fall, of course - the book is set in the mid 30s so this stuff had very little time left to run). Another way this is underscored is the military language used to describe the expedition - the mountain is assaulted, besieged, attacked.

The presence of these essential helpers also illustrates something which I hadn't really appreciated - how expeditions of two or three celebrated men reaching some peak are in reality the work of countless others, dozens or even hundreds of climbers, shuttling up and down what are described here as 'highways' i.e. surveyed routes on the mountain, piling up stores at the successive camps. It really wasn't (isn't) the heroic, solitary effort you might think - even if the 'sahibs' (as they describe themselves) do, as here, reek of high Edwardian amateurism. We're told of the disdain for oxygen bottles and 'climbing irons' and of how the white men disport themselves in their 'canvas hats, motoring helmets, cricket sweater, fishermen's jerseys, Varsity mufflers, breeches, trousers, gaiters and puttees'. There's a comedy in this, even if a dark comedy, almost as though a  bunch of PG Wodehouse's characters has wandered into the wrong book.

That only serves to highlight the tension and despair, of course, as things begin to go wrong. I won't say too much about that because I don't want to give away the story, but I think there is a sense in which what comes down on the expedition is a reflection of what they take up the mountain: Stephen's hatred of his brother, for example, perhaps stirs something up that is sleeping amidst the ice and snow, a legacy of that previous expedition Tennant was part of.

In that respect, while comparable to Dark Matter, this is I think very much the better book - in a way which I can't explain in detail, the ecology of its horror is much more complete: while lacking none of the horror of the other book, it is all more satisfying. And in exploring (no pun intended!) Imperialist attitudes and their interplay with the past and future, Paver makes some serious points about the wider story that was the Empire - perhaps even that, like any true horror story, we are still haunted by it.

Finally, if, like me, you first heard of Kanchenjunga through Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, and you would like to know more about why those kids named their unclimbable peak after it, then you'll find all you could want to know here and perhaps even gain a little admiration for those who first climbed these peaks - despite their all too visible flaws.