Hieronymus Bosche, the Dutch painter Stearne thinks of when he sees the ‘Wakenhyrst Doom’. ” In fact, he decides, “there is nothing sacred about it, and that it possesses a quality of the infernal. “The man who painted that Doom ,” he notes, “believed in Hell as completely as he believed in his own existence. Stearne is unnerved by the ancient Doom (Last Judgement) he encounters by accident the tries to conceal. 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. We experience Stearne’s thoughts through the ‘secret’ diary Maud has discovered. He also disparages the memory of the wife once he’s driven her to the grave, suggesting that her mediocrity “was holding back.”īut in the case of Maud, the joke is on him. 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. But he regards her obvious capabilities with amused irony. Stearne notes how literate and efficient Maud is compared to his slower son. 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.Ĭommandeering his undervalued daughter Maud to act as his secretary, Stearne prepares his modern translation and exegesis on the Pyett document. 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.

Emotionally frozen though he is, Paver’s Edmund Stearne is a man of lustful appetities and incessant demands.

James (1862-1936), perhaps Britain’s most admired writer of ghost stories.īut the antiquarian in Michelle Paver’s novel Wakenhyrst (2019) does not belong to James’s world of confirmed bachelors. Together with its rural East Anglian setting, these elements seem to belong to a story from M.R. An unearthed relic from the ancient past, a Last Judgement painting which fuses Christian and pagan symbolism into a Hieronymus Bosch-style nightmare. Unseen horrors, half-animal, half-spirit, lurking in a fen. A cold and crusty middle-aged antiquarian.

Wakenhyrst novel