posted on 27 Jun 2019

Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver

Boy-o-boy, Michelle Paver knows how to write a decent spooky story. I’m a big fan of her two previous adult tales of uncanny goings on, Dark Matter and Thin Air which walk a delicate and entirely spine-chilling line between the tangibly physical and the much more scary psychological terrors we create in our own minds-eye.

In Wakenhyrst Paver is having a ball with just about every Edwardian horror trope ever invented by M.R. James. Dank, foggy fenlands, repressive patriarchal religious zealots, superstitious villagers, mysterious diary entries, a precocious teenager, Devilish dealings and a trip to the madhouse – they’re all here in a glorious melange. But this isn’t writing by numbers – Paver is a genuinely skilful storyteller and she knows just how far to go to keep you turning the page with a little hint of dread.

The story opens in 1966 with a journalist’s feature piece about the recently deceased Edmund Stearne who has become famous for the paintings he produced while in an asylum. The journalist reveals that Stearne has been committed since he was declared insane following his brutal murder in 1913 of one of the gardening staff that worked for him at the manor house in the Suffolk village of Wakenhyrst on the edge of the fens. Stearne’s daughter, Maud, now 69, still lives as a recluse in the now decaying manor and it is her story that the journalist is determined to uncover despite Maud’s initial hostility to the idea.

In the end, though, and for reasons that become clearer and significantly more tragic, Maud relents and decides to tell the whole tale. And so the story unfolds retrospectively through the eyes of Maud and takes us from her early childhood to her later teenage years when her father eventually commits the bloody deed. This isn’t a who-done-it but a why was it done and Paver is cunning enough to weave a tale that, even once told, remains ambiguous. Were there really devilish, supernatural forces at work here or is this an intimate portrait of a mental breakdown?

In many ways this is a novel about the insidious impact of repression and what happens when powerful emotions get channelled into aberrant behaviour. In a world heading towards the a cataclysmic war that will change everything forever, Stearne still lives in a world of inflexible Victorian religious morality and he runs his household on those principles. But it’s a morality that has gone rotten to the core – he’s an abuser, a bully and a hypocrite who ruins the lives of everyone he has dealings with. He rejects but is fundamentally fascinated by the old lores and superstitions that the local people live by and gets drawn into a study of a Christian mystic who, he suspects, battled literally with demons. Slowly he becomes convinced that it is his holy mission to take his turn to battle the demonic spirits of the fens that he has unwittingly released from their imprisonment in a Medieval Doom painting that is discovered on his land.

His daughter, Maud, grows up witnessing all of this and herself getting drawn into the maelstrom of her father’s spiral into delusional madness. She longs to break free of the constraints she has grown up with but is frightened to move out of the safety zone of the class and gender expectations that bind her. She is not a classically pretty girl and suffers from an form of eczema that disfigures her hands but she falls in love with the handsome Clem, a gardener/groundskeeper working on the estate and this will be the defining relationship of her life. It will also be the root of the tragedy that will engulf her.

I’m super-conscious that this is a book that needs to have no spoilers in a review of this sort. The power lies in the unfolding of the plot and the teasing line Paver draws between the solid and the supernatural. What I will say is that just as you decide that this is a tale of a mind unhinged, a doubt is introduced and you’re left to wonder whether the paintings of demons Edmund Stearne obsessively paints in the asylum are, after all, only a product of his fevered mind.

 Just where did those strands of damp fenland grass found on his pillow actually come from?

This will make a really high class holiday read if you like a bit of a supernatural tingle. Highly recommended.

 

Terry Potter

June 2019