Mark Rylance film option is latest coup for crowd-funded novel, The Wake

Actor Mark Rylance has optioned the film rights to Paul Kingsnorth’s Booker-longlisted The Wake, in the latest coup for a crowd-funded novel which was once thought to be unpublishable.

Rylance was one of the original 400 subscribers whose pledges enabled the novel to be published by Unbound after it was rejected by traditional publishers. He will play the central character, Buccmaster Of Holland, in the film to be made by Shakespeare Road, the company he founded with his wife Claire van Campen.

Set in the Lincolnshire fens, The Wake portrays the end of an era as Saxon England is invaded by the Normans. It is written in a version of old English, which Kingsnorth has described as ‘”a shadow tongue”.

Comparing the novel to Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic Riddley Walker, Guardian reviewer Adam Thorpe wrote that it had “ a fierceness about it that gives it real heft.”

Rylance said: “Paul Kingsnorth has recreated the Norman invasion of England so vividly, I immediately wanted to see and hear a filmed version. His visceral language and thrilling story telling should translate into something as original as the book. Of course he is writing about now not then and I would hope a film will share with a wide audience his acute observations about the way human beings behave when everything we know changes and the old gods fall.”

The news will be especially welcome to fans of Rylance’s award-winning performance in Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem, which played to rave reviews and sell-out houses in London, New York and San Francisco. Like Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, Buckmaster is an unlikely hero, powered by language.

Thorpe wrote: “Like a redneck recluse stocking up his arsenal against apocalypse, [he] is both utterly believable and quietly tragic – a man of limited intelligence faced with a monstrous change against which sheer bravado, driven by the earth gods though it is, can only shatter.”

Kingsnorth said: “Whilst I was writing The Wake, I would sometimes idly amuse myself by imagining who would play Buccmaster in a film version of the book. There was only ever one person I could imagine in the role: Mark Rylance. So this is literally a dream come true for me.”

The Wake was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and went on to win the second Gordon Burn Prize. It is one of six works in contention for the Goldsmiths Medal for innovative writing, which will be awarded on 12 November.