The Lost Book of Barkynge by Ruth Wiggins

 

The Lost Book of Barkynge Ruth Wiggins Shearsman Press 2023

 

‘’In his Historia ecclesiastica, Bede refers to a ‘libellus’ (or little book) complied at Barking abbey in the 8^th century which is now lost. When I first encountered the ruins of the abbey on the banks of the river Roding, I was overwhelmed by a sense of those lost voices.”

From the foreword.

 

If the book had my attention from the moment I heard about it, these sentences hooked me. It’s a familiar experience. Stand in the ruins, or in the old part of town, and wonder about the people who lived there,  not as characters conscripted into a fantasy for the screen, or dusty footnotes in an unread book, but as people like yourself living in a different place with different problems and victories.

 

It’s a thought that must flutter through the mind of anyone with any imagination who visits an historical monument, but mostly it keeps fluttering past and dies in the search for the tea shop or the exit. It’s all gone. 

The majority of people who lived and died in the past left nothing of their lives for those of us who’d like to know what it was like to live in the 12^th or 5^th Century. 

 

Fortunately, Ruth Wiggins didn’t let the thought go. To bring these voices out of the past, as her book attests, is not an easy task and requires a compulsion that must look strange to anyone who has never suffered from it. 

 

There are short cuts, you could always give a speaker an odd name and start writing, but the results would be unconvincing to anyone who knew anything about the period your speaker was supposed to inhabit. 

 

There has to be research. A lot of it. And then as a writer a willingness to get self out of the way and let the voices speak. The technical competence to vary form is probably essential too. An Anglo Saxon Abbess and a Tudor one may have shared certain problems, but their voices would have been markedly different.  

 

In the book the characters emerge briefly, never quite in focus, blurring a little into one another as time moves from foundation to dissolution, similar but also different, as they would have been. 

 

Wiggins supports them with prose passages that serve as fractured context, and more detailed notes at the back of the book. But her nuns and washerwomen queens, the sister of a martyr and assorted locals are convincingly created in what is an impressive attempt to write  the voices swirling round the ruin.