The eye that fears a painted devil

Roof boss of the Devil eating Judas, Southwark Cathedral © C A Lovegrove

Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver.
Line illustrations by Stephen McNally.
Head of Zeus, 2019.

“‘Tis the eye of childhood, That fears a painted devil.” — Macbeth Act II Scene II, 64-5

Michelle Paver’s historical novel, a combined murder mystery, Gothick fantasy and supernatural thriller, is a rich blend of psychological drama with elements of folklore, local dialect and period details, set in the East Anglian fens near Ely during the years leading to the Great War.

It’s also a tale of class divisions, domestic abuse and coercive control, set on an estate on the cusp of great changes, environmental as well as social. In addition to looking forward to the future – principally the 1960s, when fashions and attitudes had altered beyond all recognition – Wakenhyrst draws heavily from a past characterised by superstition and perilous existence.

And for those who love words and their meanings Wakenhyrst is chock-full of puns and allusions which can further enrich the reader’s enjoyment or, alternatively, merely add to the mysteries surrounding our young heroine Maud.

© C A Lovegrove

Wake’s End is a manor house somewhere, we surmise, in the vicinity of Wicken Fen and Soham Mere, except that it’s just over the Cambridgeshire border, in the northwestern corner of Suffolk, with access to Ely and Bury St Edmunds. In 1967 interest focuses on the house’s reclusive spinster Maud Stearne because three surreal paintings by her father, completed while an inmate at what now is Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, have suddenly achieved iconic status. What is the story behind his incarceration after he admitted committing a murder at Wake’s End in 1913? And what further light can Maud, as the sole witness then aged 16, throw on the crime?

Wakenhyrst thus gives us a mystery to ponder, answers to which are frustratingly but deliberately revealed only through layers of narrative: newspaper reports and letters from the 1960s, a third person chronological account (beginning in the first decade of the 20th century) interspersed with extracts from private diaries and notes, and quotes from a typescript of a medieval account in modernised English. This technique gives us access to a handful of viewpoints, thereby revealing psychologies but also forcing us to consider different motives, different scenarios, different solutions.

But it is primarily the relationship between the teenage Maud and her cruel, misogynistic and humourless father Edmund – Stearne by name and stern by nature – that is our focus; that, and, in an age when premature death was commonplace, the succession of premature demises brought about through multiple miscarriages, seeming misadventures, and murder. Where does the malevolence come from – pure psychopathy, something supernatural, or both?

I got so much from this hugely enjoyable novel, not just because of the disturbing but credible characters but because Paver has given huge thought (as her Author’s Note confirms) to the historical backgrounds in which she has embedded her narrative. The fenland was and is indeed a shifting landscape of wonder and secrets, and motifs included within the pages allude to the Norfolk mystic Margery Kempe and the late medieval Wenhaston doom painting near Blythborough, down on the Suffolk coast.

To these we may add (as I surmise) the legend of a witch’s curse uttered before Ely and deflected by the Anglo-Saxon warrior Hereward the Wake, whose epithet must surely have inspired the name of Wake’s End (as Wicken Fen may have suggested Wakenhyrst). Then there are subtler echoes – such as the fictional mystic Alice Pyett, whose name etymologically relates to the chatterpie, local dialect for a magpie and a bird which features prominently in the novel.

Do we learn everything, and are all mysteries solved? No: for there remains the baleful influence of a painted exhibitionist devil who lurks at the corner of our perception. Does it have agency (as the paranoid Edmund fears) and is it responsible for the unaccountable incidents that appear periodically? Is there truth, in fact, in the belief that poltergeist activity may manifest in the vicinity of pubescent girls and disturbed young women? Paver isn’t at all explicit, leaving matters open for us to use our imagination; but there’s no doubting how inventive her own imagination comes across in this marvellously wrought Gothick tale.

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@WyrdAndWonder Flying witch artwork by astromoali, magic portal artwork by Tithi Luadthong

Read for Wyrd & Wonder 2023

Here is a helpful illustrated webpage that allows us to examine the Wenhaston Doom painting which Paver notes as a major influence on her novel: https://www.blythweb.co.uk/features/wenhastondoom/

https://wp.me/p7GrCV-19Q

In Bookforager’s picture prompts I’ve selected the skeleton image for Michelle Paver’s Wakenhyrst. This follows the books icon (for Borges’s ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, the pistol (for Jo Nesbø’s Midnight Sun), the tree (Astrid Lindgren’s Ronia the Robber’s Daughter) and the castle (the graphic novel of Scott’s Ivanhoe).