Introduction

In Peak's understated but entirely spellbinding debut novel, Winwaed's warrior father, Ceolwulf, gives him...to the monastery at Redestone, near the border between two warring kingdoms in 7th century Northumbria.... With a sure hand and a formidable amount of research, Peak brings to life the day-to-day realities of the monastery, its food and drink, its dress, and its duties tied to the seasons.... A vividly realized story of one boy's attempt to live a life of faith in a time of war. ? Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

The seventh century, England: a warrior gives his son to a monastery that rides the border between two rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Growing up in a land wracked by war and plague, the child learns of the oath that binds him to the Church and forces a cruel choice upon him. To love one father, he must betray another. The decision he makes shatters his world and haunts him forever. This quietly exotic novel places us compellingly in another time, another place, where chieftains fear holy men, holy men fear the world, and prayer has the primal force of fire.

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Excerpt

I


The snow makes a sound as it falls. It is a slight sound, as if the air the snow is falling through were muttering to itself, but it is a sound. And there is something else too, another sound, muffled, distant. Practice? Are they practicing? But it is gone now. Whatever it was, the sound is gone now, the cloister silent. Except for the snow. The snow falls and falls. Like sleep it settles around the figure of a man and holds him there, as in a dream, silent, still. It is Father Dagan. Father Dagan. Father Dagan is standing in the middle of the cloister, hood up, arms at his sides, a gray and silent figure surrounded by falling snow. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

The Oblate’s Confession is set around 650 A.D., the so-called “Dark Ages.” As portrayed in the novel, what was England like in the seventh century? In what ways did the world of Winwæd’s time differ from our own? In what ways was it similar?

While entirely a work of fiction, the novel’s background is historically accurate: all the kings and queens named really lived, all the political divisions and rivalries described actually existed, and each of the plagues that visit the author’s imagined monastery did in fact ravage that long-ago world. Reading this book, what did you learn about the “Dark Ages” that you didn’t know before? What new questions do you now have about this time period that you didn’t have before? How might you go about answering them? Do you like learning a little history as you read a novel like this, or do you find it to be a distraction?

An important turning point in the novel occurs when the man sent by Bishop Wilfrid to collect Victricius’s iron is killed and an entire year’s production of the metal is stolen. This killing is called a “murder”—the only time this word is used in the novel. If it was a murder, who do you think might have committed the crime and why? Who might have benefited from denying Bishop Wilfrid the iron that gives him leverage over Northumbria’s king? Do you remember anyone in the novel—in advance of the man’s death—expressing an interest in the particulars of the route he would follow when he came to collect the iron?

Winwæd is still only a child when plague strikes and he must watch many of the people he knows at Redestone (including his fellow oblate, Oftfor) die. What do you think the effect of witnessing so many deaths would be on a child as young as Winwæd? How old were you when you first had to come to grips with the fact that people you knew and loved would die? What effect did it have on you?

When he is donated by his father to the monastery at Redestone, the little boy Winwæd suddenly finds himself surrounded by a number of other men he is also supposed to call “Father”—i.e. priests. What role, if any, does Winwæd’s idea of fatherhood play in the novel? Which characters act as fathers to Winwæd? How does Winwæd’s experience of fatherhood compare with your own?

Do you think there is any connection between Winwæd’s relationship with the different fathers he turns to in the book and his relationship with God the Father? Did your relationship with your own father have any effect on your ideas about God?

Knowing that many people like to read something in bed at night that will lull them to sleep, the author of this book has said he tried to keep each chapter in the book (or each segment within the longer chapters) to a length comparable to the amount of time most people like to spend reading before sleep … in the hopes that they could then drift off dreaming of the seventh century. Do you think he succeeded in this? The pace of this story is consistently unhurried; it is not the pace of a thriller or detective novel. Did this slower pace bother you? Did it seem to fit the tale?

Prayer—the idea of prayer—does not normally play even a minor role in most modern fiction, yet it is of supreme importance in this novel. Does this focus on prayer make The Oblate’s Confession seem old-fashioned, out-of-date? Did you know about the ancient Christian practice of meditation known as “contemplative prayer” (and, sometimes, “centering prayer”) before you read this novel? What do you think of the practice?

Winwæd never actually names the sin he hopes to atone for by writing out his confession (perhaps because he believes that his written account makes that sin eminently clear to the only people in his world capable of reading it—i.e. monks). What do you think was the sin he atones for? The idea of a public, written confession in many ways strikes us today as archaic. Do you think Winwæd would have benefited from writing out and sharing his confession like this with the monks of Redestone? Has there ever been a time in your life when you felt called upon to admit to some wrong you committed many years earlier? What was that like for you?

The Oblate’s Confession is set in a monastery in Anglo-Saxon England in about the year 650 A.D., a time and place so distant and different from our own as to seem like another world altogether. Do you think a book whose setting is as alien as this can have anything to teach the world today?

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