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.

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There was a door. I remember that. A large door—big, dark, and, as I recall it now, new I think, the smell of fresh-cut oak creating a sort of refuge, a place into which I just fit. I was crying. The men were gone. The dark men in their dark clothes had marched off somewhere else, but I was still afraid. My father had left. It was almost nighttime and my father had left, and the dark men in their dark clothes said he wasn't coming back.

But this man came back. He looked behind the door and there I was. He smiled at me. As if this were part of a game, as if his finding me behind the door had been part of some grand elaborate game, he smiled at me. He held a finger up before his lips which made me like him and made me want to laugh but I did not laugh. I wondered what he was going to do. He didn't tell me a secret. He took me by the hand and, gently, he led me outside.

It was snowing. The air was soft with snow. It whispered in my ears and was cold and then wet on my face. I laughed. Again the man brought a finger to his lips. The smile made me shy. Why did he like me? He knelt down. Like a mother checking her little boy's shoes, the man knelt down. Only he wasn't a mother, he was a man, and he should have checked my shoes earlier, before, while we were still inside.

I held my foot up for the man but, instead of checking the shoe as he should have, he began to scrape at the snow on the ground before him. With big red hands the man scraped at the snow, raking it into a pile. A part of me wanted to kneel down beside the man, play in the snow with him, but I didn't. I was shy. I didn't know the rules. When the pile of snow was big, the man gathered it up into his hands and, working quickly, crushed it into a ball. The man placed the ball on the ground between us.

A second time the man raked snow into a pile and a second time he crushed the snow together into a ball, set it on the ground between us. Then he stopped. Instead of making a third ball, the man stopped; he looked at me. I smiled. The two balls resting side by side were pretty. You could see where the man's fingers had pressed into them. But he wanted something, I could tell. He pointed at the balls and then he looked at me, eyebrows raised. Why didn't he just say what he wanted? Why was everyone so afraid to speak here? Had something happened? Had something really bad happened?

The man's eyes grew large. He smiled at me, shook his head. Like a mother he shook his head, forbade me to cry. Then he reached out as if to comfort me; but instead of patting me or pulling me toward him, he pulled my hand out as if checking to see if it were clean. With his other hand the man now picked up some snow and placed it in the hand he held. He looked at me, looked back at the snow in my hand. I looked at the snow. It was pretty, one or two loose flakes just catching the light. The man looked at me again. He brought his now empty hands together and pretended to make another ball.

I knew what he wanted!

I brought my hands together as the man had and crushed the little pile of snow into a ball like his. I was surprised by how cold it was. Something about packing the snow tight seemed to squeeze the cold from it.

The man took the ball I had made and laid it on the ground between us. My ball looked small next to the ones he had made. Then the man did something that surprised me. He pulled two sticks from his sleeve. Like an uncle pulling eggs from his ear, the man pulled two sticks from his sleeve. Sticks and not sticks: long and pointed like sticks but also shiny, polished, like overlarge needles. The man placed the two needle-stick things on the ground beside the balls. Again he looked at me. His eyelashes and beard were now white with snow but beneath the flakes I could see that he was smiling. I smiled too. He looked funny.

Gently, like someone stacking pots, the man placed one of his balls on top of the other. On either side of the uppermost ball the man inserted one of the stick-like things so that now they really did look like sticks, sticks sticking out of a tree whose trunk was made of two big balls of snow.

The man looked at what he had made, and then he looked at me. There was a question in his eyes but I didn't say anything. I had no idea what he was doing. The man smiled. He raised a finger and I understood that he wanted me to be patient. Then carefully, very carefully, as though it were the most important thing in the world, he lifted my ball from the ground and held it in his hands. He looked at the ball and his face became serious. He looked at the two balls he had made, the one stacked on top of the other. He cocked his head. I was afraid he didn't like my ball, that it was too small. Then the man leaned forward and, with infinite care, placed my ball on top of his.

It was a man. A little man. We had made a snow man.

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I have no more memories of that night. Did we go into church afterwards? Was that where the other monks had gone? Did Father leave the little snowman standing as he had created it, out in the middle of the garth? Or did he knock it down? I don't know. I don't remember. All I remember is Father Dagan standing in the middle of the cloister, tall and silent, a gray figure with his hood up, snow falling all around him. At his side stands a tiny form, equally still and mute, white and simple—my first snowman. view abbreviated excerpt only...

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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