The Wake - Paul Kingsnorth.
Set in the years during and immediately following the Norman invasion of England, this tells the story of a man called Buccmaster, a middle class (for the time) English landowner who, like almost everybody, loses his family and home and way of life to the French invaders. So he goes about seeking revenge. He leaves his burned home and goes into the forest, teams up with other refugees and wannabe-revolutionaries, with the intention of becoming 'grene men' - forest marauders, something like a Robin Hood gang. He wants to drive out the French, which is a popular goal. But he also wants to drive out Christianity and bring back the old English gods along with a mythical English-ness he thinks was being lost even before the French arrived. So, he has his work cut out for him. But, he's an angry man, and paranoid, frankly not too smart, and far more ambitious than effective; and all this leaves him constantly foiled and frustrated, generally by his own hand. And while he's doing all that, he's slowly being overwhelmed by what he thinks is the angry spirit of the blacksmith who made the sword he inherited from his grandfather.

This is historical fiction, so all of Buccmaster's travels and troubles are set among the actual events of the time. Which means I learned more about the Norman invasion from this book than I ever did in school. And, to really set the sense of place, the book is written in what the author calls a "shadow language". It's a blend of Old English words, or pseudo-OE words, sortof- O.E. spellings, no capital letters and the barest of punctuation (only occasional periods). But it's fit into something like a modern English syntax to make it readable. So, it looks like this:

when i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all time. a great wind had cum in the night and all was blown then and broc. none had thought a wind lic this colde cum for all was blithe lifan as they always had and who will hiere the gleoman when the tales he tells is blaec who locs at the heofon if it brings him regn who locs in the mere when there seems no end to its deopness.

There are no French-based words, and very few Latin-based words, since English didn't get those until after the Norman invasion.

It felt daunting for a page or two. But the style quickly becomes familiar. The meanings of most of the words can be gleaned from context - and there's also a small glossary in the back. The only word there that might really trip you up is 'gleoman' (a traveling teller of stories and bringer of news). But all the rest can be puzzled-out. Reading it phonetically in an exaggerated Scottish accent helps.

And this language makes Buccmaster's world feel very alien - as it is. This is set in the 11th century, after all, a time when life in England bore very little resemblance to any place in the world today. It was a tough life, but much more connected to the land and the wild than anyone reading this will ever be, and the language reflects that - it's simple, direct, coarse, not a lot of abstractions. But Buccmaster feels the connection to the land slipping away as the English language changes, as languages do:

i seen that the names of the focs of angland was part of anglisc ground lic the treow and rocc the fenn and hyll and i seen that when… their place was tacan by names what has not growan from that ground is not of it… then sum thing deop and eald had been made wrong. and though folcs wolde forget cwic the eald gods and the eald places the eald trees and the eald hills these things wolde not forget what had been broc.

There's a sense throughout that the author might be longing for a more English England, too: as if the story was an allegory for today's England. But that idea gets pretty dark pretty quick (driving out the foreigners, returning to homogeneity, to the old ways and religions), so I tried not to linger there.

The language used in the book, though invented, is fascinating. The history is interesting. The settings and culture are fascinating. The story felt a bit unsatisfying, though. But I suppose that couldn't be helped unless the author was willing to completely abandon history; we know Buccmaster can't win his ultimate quest because we all know that the eald Anglo-Saxon gods didn't return and that the French controlled England for centuries after the invasion. Still, I loved the journey.