Update: Doom Painting by AK Blakemore review – a dazzling epic of the Peasants’ Revolt

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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 report also notes that 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 is expected to 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

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