AK Blakemore's third novel is the kind of book that announces itself in the first paragraph and doesn't let up for 500-odd pages. Doom Painting covers the 16 days of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt — poll tax, burning records, severed heads, the lot — through a cast so vast it includes a porpoise and a runaway horse alongside Richard II, Wat Tyler, and dozens of unnamed commons. The title is a medieval church image of the Last Judgment, and Blakemore means every bit of that eschatological weight. The prose is the engine and the argument. Blakemore raids every register of the English language simultaneously — archaic diction, contemporary slang, liturgical cadence, market-stall vulgarity — and the collisions are mostly joyous. Slugs that 'blurb their elementary forms from out of the undergrowth to begin a dank and toothless festa.' Mud that is 'lunar-brilliantined.' A brewer's beard 'chlorotic with hops.' The anachronism is not carelessness; it is method. By dropping 'glitchy' into a description of medieval dreamers, Blakemore refuses the comfortable distance of costume drama. These people are not quaint. Their grievances rhyme with ours. The book's best passages are the commoners' chorus sequences — Blakemore's prose shifts into something between liturgy and list-making, her anaphora building a collective weight that no individual character achieves alone. 'They rise, to fry eggs in butter and pork fat; they rise, to whet knives on scarred stone; they rise, to count arrows.' This is the novel working at its highest level: language as political argument, form as content. Where Doom Painting struggles is in the conventional novelistic work of character and plot. Wat Tyler, the rebellion's most visible leader, is drawn inconsistently — coarse bruiser in one scene, introspective psychologist in the next, coherent political thinker in a third. These are not three sides of a complex man; they read as three different drafts of him that never reconciled. Richard II is similarly out of focus. The romance between Wat and fellow rebel Jack Straw has the bones of something genuinely interesting but is handled so lightly it carries, as the reviewer notes, a faint whiff of 'shipping' — fan-fiction wish-fulfillment rather than historical imagining. And a significant portion of the dialogue lands as action-movie banter in fancy dress, wit that feels more like a Netflix writers' room than 14th-century England. None of this sinks the book. The prose glamour papers over most tonal cracks, and when it doesn't, the political energy of the material carries you forward. What Blakemore has done is write a novel that functions partly as an argument — about who bears the cost of taxation, about the bodies that records erase, about what it takes for 'the commons' to become a political subject — and that argument lands even when the fictional machinery misfires. This is reckless ambition doing what reckless ambition does: scoring in ways safe work cannot, and dropping catches that careful work wouldn't attempt.
