All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well
By Tod Wodicka
Jonathan Cape £11.99, 266 pages
FT bookshop price: £9.59
I’m bewildered by people who spend their weekends pretending to be Vikings, Romans or American civil war soldiers. I find their devotion to period-detail endearing but misguided. My bewilderment flourishes into animosity when “living historians” import their ancient aliases into the modern world.
This animosity came to mind when I was introduced to Burt Hecker, quirky protagonist of All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well. At the outset, Burt seems as ponderous as this debut novel’s title (taken from a text by a 14th-century hermit). He is a 63-year-old American medieval re-enactor with an unsightly nose and a predilection for mead. Founder of the Confraternity of Times Lost Regained, a medieval re-enactment society, Burt insists on always wearing handmade tunics and being addressed as Eckbert Attquiet.
“I believe that some of us were ourselves only during the act of re-enacting,” Burt explains. It is obvious, however, that there is more to his obsession than fervour for “historically accurate” beverages.
Burt has been unable to come to terms with the death of his wife, and his family’s subsequent disintegration. During a pilgrimage to Hildegard von Bingen’s abbey in Germany, he embarks on a wild road-trip across eastern Europe, in the unlikely company of a Brazilian dermatologist. He is trying to find his estranged son. As the late 20th-century landscape flies past he recollects the origins of his “historically displaced” life, and muses on its end result: “the fury, the hopelessness, the rotting present of a life lived perpetually out of period”. It is hard not to care for this wretched wreck of a man.
Family, memory, history – all are forms of re-enactment, suggests Tod Wodicka in an assured novel bursting with humour and weighted with sadness.