Wat Happened
.
Doom Painting, A. K. Blakemore, Granta, 2026, 672 pages, £20.00
.
In the afterword to her 2023 novel The Glutton, A. K. Blakemore explains that her fictional treatment of the real life of Tarare – the ‘Bottomless Man’ of eighteenth-century France who ate cutlery, corks, stones, snakes, eels, dogs and cats (‘alive’), as well as a small child – was intended ‘not to present a truth, but to offer the most believable (and therefore compelling?) iteration of a myth.’ Now Blakemore has continued this mythopoeic project with her latest novel, Doom Painting, a near-seven-hundred-page epic that takes as its subject the Peasants’ Revolt of May and June 1381. Led by the enigmatic Wat Tyler, about whom comparatively little is known, the Revolt was the largest ever rebellion against feudalism in England. Thousands of commoners from Essex, Kent and East Anglia joined the cause, angered by a new poll tax and still reeling from the Black Death, that ‘Great Mortality’ that had in three decades killed half the population of England: as one character puts it, these surviving rural workers were a ‘wretched orphan cohort’. Told hour by hour across sixteen days, the novel follows the rebels as they capture Rochester Castle, storm the archbishop’s palace at Maidstone, take Canterbury Cathedral and sack London, in doing so breaching the Tower and blowing up the Savoy Palace, the enormous residence of the boy-king Richard II’s uncle, John of Gaunt (‘you mean John of Cunt’).
Because so little is known about the real Wat Tyler, Blakemore constructs a fictional Wat, creating a backstory where none exists. In Doom Painting he is Robert Crane, a sellsword and hardman who chooses the name ‘Wat Tyler’ (with its variants ‘Wat the Tyler’ and ‘Waulter le Tieulier’) as his nom de guerre. In Blakemore’s telling he is a veteran of the Hundred Years’ War, which has left him with a ‘misdoer’s burn-scar’ on his left cheek and terrifying images seared into his brain: ‘bloodied hands and stumbling in the barn; flesh slipping like snowmelt from the bones; labyrinths dug beneath high-walled cities; rotting cabbages and human heads bobbing down a brown river, side by side.’ Those military experiences have made him into a brilliant fighter (he takes Rochester Castle almost single handedly, accompanied only by his white horse, the Holigost), but by his own admission he is not a hero: he describes himself to the rebels who follow him as ‘near enough a devil and with no competencies besides those brute kennings as come from killing’ and further tells them that he has ‘misused’ his freedom (mostly by ‘[f]ollowing his cock and filling his pocket’). And yet Blakemore takes this brute, this large man who ‘smells like horses and fighting’, and elevates him. The real Wat Tyler was always a key player in the Revolt, alongside the Lollard priest John Ball and the equally mysterious Jack Straw, and he represented the rebels at Smithfield on the 15 June, when he spoke directly with the King. But Blakemore makes Wat entirely central: Wat captures Rochester, Wat masterminds the forced entry into the Tower, Wat beheads the Archbishop of Canterbury, and so on. It is even Wat who saves the King’s teenaged cousin Henry Bolingbroke from the other rebels in the Tower, shoving the future King Henry IV into a closet so that he can evade capture and certain execution. Blakemore has therefore made her Wat more historical than the real Wat Tyler ever was, and yet she has managed to do so without producing Forrest Gump in tights. In part this is because Blakemore’s Wat is a charming troublemaker with little time for the plans and schemes of the other rebel leaders. When the City merchant and smuggler Thomas atte Raven asks before a raid, ‘Is any here uncertain of his part?’ Wat replies, ‘It’s not pretty […] But it’s always got the job done.’
Blakemore describes her fictional narrative as an ‘interpretation’ that she has ‘collaged liberally’ from medieval sources, mainly the Anonimalle Chronicle and accounts by the chroniclers Henry Knighton, Jean Froissart and Thomas Walsingham. Much of the vocabulary of Doom Painting apes the language of these sources, with loanwords from Old English, Old French and Latin. In an alleyway in Dartford the ‘plaintive yeddinge of a drudge wafts from an opened door’. The boy-king Richard’s physicians are ‘dour chirurgeons’. The reveller Will Gildborne ‘sheds a lonesome tear’ for the sweetheart not of his childhood but his ‘pueritia’. (At times this style has confounded even the proofreaders at Granta: twice ‘Brentwood’ is given as ‘Brentford’, London ‘lies to the east’ of Eltham Palace, and so on.) Many of the similes are also of the time: Wat is ‘as dourly muscled as the forehalf of a bullock’; John Ball hallucinates words of scripture that appear to him ‘as brightly pigmented as a Doom painted on a chancel arch.’ But Blakemore tempers this archaic language with playful anachronisms: the fugitive Richard Bellyng hides in the ‘malodour of his lodgings – ejaculate and fried onions’; the adolescent Wat remembers how ‘the fact that he lived alone, in concatenation with a precocious bumfluff beard, had bestowed upon him a wholly specious aura of maturity’. When the one-eyed rebel leader Johanna Ferrour says that her husband is named John, she adds ‘There must be many such cases’, a reference to an internet meme based on a phrase used by Donald Trump in a 2014 tweet claiming vaccines cause autism. This bathetic doubling between high and low, then and now, the world-historical and the fleeting, the numinous and the mundane, is remarkably well balanced, and recalls the linguistic ebullience and brilliance of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Blakemore uses this stylistic anachronism to present a continuity between the Revolt and contemporary British socialism. At the climax of the novel, right before Wat and the rebels meet the King and his retinue at Smithfield, John Ball reassures Wat and tells him, ‘we are many, and they are few’, a phrase derived from Shelley’s masterful poem ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, written in response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, and used by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party as the title for their 2017 manifesto. Two years earlier, the socialist filmmaker Ken Loach unveiled a large slate plaque memorialising the Revolt at Smithfield, where Tyler was killed. Judith Barker argues in her 2014 book England, Arise that while the medieval chroniclers saw the rebels to be ‘a bestial mob, ignorant, illiterate, barely capable of cogent language’, the demands presented by Tyler and others at Mile End and Smithfield (foremost among them an end to serfdom) comprised ‘a radical political agenda’ that ‘anticipated the French Revolution by four hundred years’. Like Barker, Blakemore emphasises the radical politics of the Revolt, presenting it as a rebellion against ‘the velvet hand that has held the whip for centuries’. In the afterword, Blakemore explains the living significance of the rebels’ radical demands: the power imbalances of the fourteenth century ‘persist […] right up to the present day’, not least because ‘nearly a third of land in England belongs to less than 1 per cent of its population – the aristocracy and the royal family.’
Blakemore further emphasises this persistence of the past upon the present by having her narrator regularly intrude upon the action being narrated. When Wat falls asleep at the plague village in Beselduna, the narrator shifts to Maidstone by invoking ‘the privileges of the deity or drone pilot: up and away.’ When the fishermen unloading the barges at Erith take their shirts off in the sun, the narrator observes: ‘England then as England now, the Virgin’s especial dower (and the lightest touch of clement weather sufficient to denude her sons).’ When Wat says a silent prayer for Corpus Christi, asking to be granted the grace to understand his death, the next paragraph reads:
[Wat Tyler Road, Greenwich / Wat Tyler Walk, Colchester / Wat Tyler Way, Maidstone / Wat Tyler House, Swindon / Tyler’s Causeway, Hertford / Wat Tyler Country Park, off the A13.]
When the rebels storm the Savoy, and a drover pockets a pair of the Duchess of Lancaster’s emerald earrings, that ‘gaudy ornament becomes a seed’, as the narrator explains:
[T]he drover does not know it now, but thanks to his light fingers his sons will learn to read, and the daughters of those sons will marry merchants, and the sons of those daughters will serve – unfortunately – kings, and the daughters of those sons will give their sons to poorer women to breastfeed, and within the space of only sixteen generations the descendants of this drover will have spare bedrooms and private schooling and rowing machines and tasteful cosmetic interventions.
Rather than distancing us from the action, these proleptic narrative intrusions bring the present directly into the events of the past. This does not straightforwardly ‘immerse’ the reader in the action of the novel (that sort of thing doesn’t really exist), but it does emphasise the proximity of the present to the past and the social, cultural, political, emotional and aesthetic associations that go on existing between then and now. Blakemore flags this idea throughout the novel, such as when Wat’s friend Jack is reminded that, ‘everything, everything and everyone, is bound up in inextricable association’, or when Wat himself is present at the baptism of a newborn: ‘as the baby is immersed he pictures sin as a glistering rope of flesh, stretched back from navel to navel, all the way to the son of Eve.’ The central achievement of Doom Painting is not to show how the past has shaped us (an obvious enough move for any historical novelist), but rather to emphasise how far the present lives within the past. By extension we will go on to form the pattern of the future, just as the yet unmade future lives somewhere within us now. We are all there and here, then and now. A glistering rope of flesh.
.
.
Joseph Williams is reviews editor of Critical Quarterly.
To read this and more, buy our latest print issue here, or subscribe to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.