Quirkiness and intensity … AK Blakemore. Photograph: Sophie Davidson
This recklessly ambitious doorstopper follows the 16 days of England’s medieval uprising from a vast array of viewpoints, and in startlingly rich prose
AK Blakemore’s third novel tells the story of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when commoners of all classes – not only peasants, but merchants, servants, smugglers, and some local lords and officials – rebelled at the imposition of a poll tax and rampaged through southern England, burning records of debts, killing their oppressors and laying waste to their homes. The book closely follows the events of the rebellion’s 16 days, employing a vast array of points of view, including the young king Richard II, several of his courtiers, dozens of elements of the rebellious Commons, a porpoise and a runaway horse. The title suggests the novel’s portrayal of these events as an inevitable reckoning; a “doom painting” was a picture of the Last Judgment on the wall of a medieval church.
As a book of this scope must be, it’s a doorstopper. As any novel by Blakemore will be, it’s dazzlingly rich in lexical glamour, and this is likely to be any reader’s lasting impression of the book. Sometimes it feels as if the author is out to use every word in the English language in a startling, aestheticised, puckish way that expands both the word and the world. The result can be joyously silly. Who else would give us slugs that “blurb their elementary forms from out of the undergrowth to begin a dank and toothless festa ”, or “lunar-brilliantined mud”? But there is also gravity and passion here, especially when she intimately imagines the lives of the commoners: “they rise, to fry eggs in butter and pork fat; they rise, to whet knives on scarred stone; they rise, to braid the manes of their draught horses; they rise, to count arrows; they rise, setting aside their glitchy dreams of hairy stars and blue-skinned devils; they rise, fearful and powerful, into the bright day.” The cheekily anachronistic appearance of “glitchy” in this medieval scene is typical of Blakemore’s method. All forms of language, high and low, archaic and modern, are here. Her use of detail to convey a historical scene is also extraordinary: the barber’s chair where “a crowd has gathered beneath the ribboned pole to watch the draining of a cyst”; the brewer with “a grotty beard, chlorotic with hops, [that] hangs down almost to his belt”; or “the horseflies waltzing over the liquefying flesh of severed heads”.
skip past newsletter promotion
Blakemore is less successful in the traditional novelistic areas of plot and character. The primary figure throughout is legendary rebel leader Wat Tyler. Historical accounts of Wat are few and unreliable, so a novelist has a lot of latitude. Blakemore makes him a mercenary traumatised and brutalised by the wars in France, and the details of this history fit well and feel appropriate. However, his actual personality fluctuates from scene to scene. Mostly he’s a coarse, unlettered bruiser, lovable for his simplicity. However, when he’s alone, he’s given to sensitive introspection, spending a lot of time assigning psychological explanations to his choices. In this mode, he’s completely apolitical, and his leadership feels like a tragicomic fluke. In other scenes, though, he expresses strong and coherent political convictions, and occasionally it seems his simplicity is only a mask he assumes to achieve his objectives. Other characters are similarly inconsistent or undefined, and while this doesn’t ruin the story, it does blunt its emotional force. We can’t feel that deeply about how Richard II was transformed by these events if he never came into focus for us in the first place.
Another problem is that much of the dialogue feels like action-movie banter in medieval clothing. People say things like: “Is that a scruple? And here, I thought you thoroughly divested of those,” or reply to, “I’d sooner die,” with a jaunty “You very well might”. The tone is occasionally anachronistic enough that it feels like a wink to the reader, as when Wat says, “We’ll sleep when we’re dead”, or turns to a confederate to say: “Your auld mum certainly seems to think so … Because I swived her, see.” Blakemore imagines a romance between Wat and another storied leader of the rebellion, Jack Straw; this could have gone to interesting places if it were made more real. But the execution is cursory enough that it carries a whiff of “shipping” – the demand of 21st-century fandoms to see the heroes kiss. Since the book is generally meticulously realistic and historically appropriate, I was left unsure how these elements were meant to land. In some places, the gorgeous language masks any clash of tones or realities; in others, the narrative fails to meld.
Despite these cavils, I very strongly recommend Doom Painting. If you have any sensitivity to language, you can romp around in its prose; if you have any political sensibility, the sweep of the revolt will draw you in. It recreates historical events extravagantly well and must have taken a colossal amount of research, yet it wears its scholarship lightly.It’s a beast and a challenge; in its quirkiness and intensity, it couldn’t be more interesting. In an era of safe bets and timid choices, here is a work of reckless ambition.
