Paul Kingsnorth isn’t a linguist. And he has never formally studied Old English. But not long after he began to write his novel, “The Wake,” set in 11th-century England, he decided something wasn’t quite right about his narrator, Buccmaster, a farmer wandering in a ravaged landscape after the Norman Conquest.  “There was a false note about it,” Mr. Kingsnorth said. “I realized that the reason was he wasn’t speaking his own language.”  The author, consulting an Anglo-Saxon dictionary, began dropping Old English words into the narrative. (Old English is the language of Beowulf; it is essentially unintelligible to those who haven’t studied it.) But that didn’t work.  Then he had a thought: Would it be possible to write a book that contained only words that had existed in Old English? The answer was almost.  Mr. Kingsnorth invented what he calls a “shadow tongue”—a kind of middle ground between Old English and the language we use today. He ended up using mostly, though not exclusively, words that originated in Old English. He spelled them using the alphabet of 1066. That is, no “k,” “v,” “j” or “q.” And he used no capitalization or punctuation, save for a period every few sentences.  Then he wrote his whole novel in it.  “I remember looking at this and thinking, ‘No one is going to publish this, obviously, because no one can read it besides me,’ ” he said in a phone interview from his home in Ireland.  “The Wake,” released in the U.K. last year by the crowdfunded publisher Unbound and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, will be published in the U.S. by Graywolf Press on Sept. 1. “The Wake” is the first in a loose trilogy; the second book will be set in the present, the third 1,000 years in the future.  A film adaptation is being developed by Mark Rylance—the former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and star of the PBS series “Wolf Hall”—with his wife Claire van Kampen and Colin Callender, a key producer of “Wolf Hall.” Mr. Rylance, who said he was a backer of the book when it was published by Unbound, added that he hoped to play Buccmaster.  Graywolf is a small publisher in Minnesota that gained attention last year with hits including “On Immunity,” “The Empathy Exams,” and Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen.” It has a history of backing challenging, experimental works. Now its lead fall fiction title is a book that asks readers to learn a new language.  “It’s just not like anything else that’s out there,” said editorial director Ethan Nosowsky, who acquired the book. “This felt very original and new and ambitious. I felt there was something really urgent about the book.”  “The Wake” is a word puzzle. There is a brief glossary at the back, but readers must sound out most words for themselves. A note explains the language’s quirky phonetics. For example, the letter combination “cg” is pronounced like “dg,” as in “edge.” “Eages afyr” is pronounced “eyes afire” and so on.  Booksellers said they would pitch the work to readers who are up for a challenge, who are interested in languages, experimental fiction or even J.R.R. Tolkien. Some words in “The Wake”—orc, ent, shire—will be recognized by fans of Tolkien, a scholar of Old English who drew from the mythology of this period.  The first few pages are slow going. But many readers say that about 20 pages in, they start to feel fluent. And the narrator’s voice—rhythmic, angry, darkly funny and at times poetic—begins to shine through the prose. Though the language is experimental, the story line is conventional, hewing closely to historical events. Buccmaster, a character who has visions of the gods, narrates how he and other guerrilla fighters rise up against England’s merciless new French rulers.  The author said he didn’t intend “The Wake” to have a message. But the book shares themes with his nonfiction, which has focused on globalization and climate change. “You can see this great thing coming over the horizon,” he said. “You don’t feel there’s anything you can do about it… But you have to live through it.”  Mr. Kingsnorth, who is 42 years old, was raised in the outskirts of London and southeast England. As a child, he developed a close relationship with nature on long walking trips around Britain with his father. While studying history at Oxford University, he says, he became “a radical green activist.”  He was deputy editor of the Ecologist magazine, wrote poetry and two unpublished novels. His first nonfiction book was about the anti-globalization movement. His second, titled “Real England,” was about the homogenizing effect of globalization on English culture.  In 2009, disillusioned with activism, he founded the Dark Mountain Project, a network of ecologically minded writers and artists. He wrote a manifesto calling for writers to re-examine their role in light of changes he believes are looming in the environment, technology and society.  Last year, he and his wife bought 2½ acres in County Galway, Ireland, where they are home-schooling their children, ages 7 and 4, and growing their own food. He spent one recent afternoon mowing his meadow with a scythe, and is considering raising alpacas. He no longer considers himself an activist.  Mr. Kingsnorth didn’t set out to write a postapocalyptic novel, but he ended up turning the genre on its head by writing a historical one.  The idea came to him in an Oxford book shop where he happened upon “The English Resistance” by Peter Rex. He said he was struck by the “notion that the whole country had been turned upside down.”  “I’m not a big fan of post-apocalyptic novels. They seem too easy to me,” he said. “This tendency for a blasted landscape with a few heroes. The harder thing is one in which things fall away but we have to get through it.”  After developing Buccmaster’s language, Mr. Kingsnorth started writing differently. The language demanded its own rhythm, a sort of repetitive drumbeat.  “I found the words were much starker,” he said. “It’s a more brutal language because it’s a more brutal time.”  The author Kazuo Ishiguro grappled with a similar dilemma. For his recent novel, “The Buried Giant,” set roughly 1,500 years ago, he struggled to find the right language, throwing out his first draft before settling on dialogue in pared-down contemporary English.  “The Wake” has some readers returning to long-gone practices. “I had to read it aloud,” said David Enyeart, assistant manager of Common Good Books in St. Paul, Minn. “I sat on a bench and sort of muttered… It’s like solving a puzzle. It feels really good.”  Graywolf has acquired Mr. Kingsnorth’s next nonfiction book, called “The Meadow and the Machine,” drawing from his experiences living off the land in Ireland. The book will explore rapidly advancing technologies, and what it means for humans to be divorced from the natural environment.  Graywolf also expects to publish the next two books in his fiction trilogy. Each will feature a protagonist who is descended from the flawed hero of “The Wake.” The author said he was close to completing the second, called “Beast.” Set on the moors of western England, it is written in contemporary English, though it isn’t a conventional realist novel, he said.  And for the third—which Mr. Kingsnorth noted wouldn’t be post-apocalyptic —might he invent a futuristic language, as Russell Hoban did in his 1980 science-fiction novel “Riddley Walker”? “It is certainly a possibility,” he said.  Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com
Paul Kingsnorth’s new novel, ‘The Wake,’ imagines a farmer wandering through 11th-century England after the Norman Conquest. The entire book is written in a made-up language and comes with just a short glossary for readers.