A cold and crusty middle-aged antiquarian. Unseen horrors, half-animal, half-spirit, lurking in a fen. An unearthed relic from the ancient past, a Last Judgement painting which fuses Christian and pagan symbolism into a Hieronymus Bosch-style nightmare.

Together with its rural East Anglian setting, these elements seem to belong to a story from M.R. James (1862-1936), perhaps Britain’s most admired writer of ghost stories.

But the antiquarian in Michelle Paver’s novel Wakenhyrst (2019) does not belong to James’s world of confirmed bachelors. Emotionally frozen though he is, Paver’s Edmund Stearne is a man of lustful appetities and incessant demands. Without a shred of remorse, he sleeps with his underage maid and drives his wife into multiple miscarriages and ill-health by insisting on his ‘conjugal rights’ every night regardless of her situation. 

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His hunger for arcane knowledge is equally obessive, especially when it comes to a lost fifteenth century manuscript relating to one Alice Pyett, mystic and saint.

Commandeering his undervalued daughter Maud to act as his secretary, Stearne prepares his modern translation and exegesis on the Pyett document. Stearne notes how literate and efficient Maud is compared to his slower son. But he regards her obvious capabilities with amused irony. In true Schopenhauer form, he believes nature has mistakenly bestowed some limited intellectual powers to a woman, who, by virtue of gender, will lack the depth necessary to use them. He also disparages the memory of the wife once he’s driven her to the grave, suggesting that her mediocrity “was holding [him] back.”

But in the case of Maud, the joke is on him. We experience Stearne’s thoughts through the ‘secret’ diary Maud has discovered. Stearne’s daughter has ideas of her own, as well as her own particular loves which include the surounding fen with its mysterious night calls, its swamps and eels, as well as her pet magpie, Chatterpie, and the undergardner, Clem.

Stearne is unnerved by the ancient Doom (Last Judgement) he encounters by accident the tries to conceal. “The man who painted that Doom,” he notes, “believed in Hell as completely as he believed in his own existence.” In fact, he decides, “there is nothing sacred about it, and that it possesses a quality of the infernal.” 

Hieronymus Bosche, the Dutch painter Stearne thinks of when he sees the ‘Wakenhyrst Doom’.

The parrallels with M. R. James are quite striking, in particular with the The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral in which an overly ambitious cleryman, Archdeacon Haynes, senses the carved figures in the Barchester stalls becoming imbued with a distinctly unholy presence.

In its depiction of a stuffy patriarchial world, its lurking malignity and its Suffolk setting, Wakenhyrst might be considered a riff upon James’s universe. But it’s also an inversion.

James was an extremely male author and he was also a writer for whom working class people were most often comic relief. Here, Maud, the overlooked daughter, Stearne’s mistreated wife, and the working-class Clem are the characters with whom the reader most identifies.

And the pyramid is also inverted in terms of the supernatural themes.

Malign forces creep stealthily through James’s eccentric characters and comedic situations until the supertural threat becomes the most real and unsettling aspect of the story. In Wakenhyrst, the living fen, vivid and mysterious, is a constant presence but the most monstrous agency by far is entirely human. 

Wakenhyrst begins with a newspaper account of a journalist’s meeting with the elderly Maud sixty years after the main events in the novel. So the reader knows in advance that the story in the past is leading to bizarre and inexplicable violence. Intriguingly, we are invited to piece togther from Stearne’s research and his diary the motivations which lay behind the infamous event.

One of Michelle Paver’s recurring themes, explored also in Thin Air (2016) and Dark Matter (2010), is a sinister or threatening environment that reflects something about dysfunctions of the characters and the times in which they live. The aforementioned titles address the last gasp of the era of exploration in the 1930s. For those yearning for an Edwardian horror story yet also long to see the genre revisited through a progressive lens, Wakenhyrst is the perfect tonic.

Paul Butler is the author of the newly-released Mina’s Child  and 2017’s The Widow’ s Fire

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