Beast By Paul Kingsnorth

Roberto

A man leaves his wife and daughter to go fart around in a field. It has a cumulative dreamlike power, i suppose. I liked it when he threw potatoes at the window.

Hugh

What a strange, powerful novella. Unlike its brilliant predecessor
The Wake, this one is written in modern English, but it is still a very original, bleak and poetic vision of the English landscape.

The story is told in fragments, which begin and end in mid-word. It is narrated by Edward Buckmaster, who is living alone in an abandoned farmhouse on a moor. At the start of the book he is coherent, explaining that he has been there for five seasons, and is experiencing a severe overnight storm which is proving too much for the patched up roof, which he has fixed with a tarpaulin and plastic. He has memories of leaving a wife and child in East Anglia (this and his surname are the most obvious links to The Wake). He tries to talk himself into going outside to patch up the ro

[... two blank pages ...]

kes up outside, finding himself badly injured, with a damaged knee, broken ribs and scratch marks on his chest. In this long section he gradually loses both his attachment to the rest of humanity and his sense of reality, and finds both replaced by an obsession with the beast he believes is stalking him. He abandons the idea of finding food and medical help in the town he believes to be nearby, and instead opts to stay on the moor, and when his food runs out he subsists on stream water and occasionally bilberries. There is some very powerful landscape writing in this part of the book, and the coherent parts of the narrative are often interrupted by dreamlike visions in which he finds himself in earlier times. He sets out to track the beast, and eventually finds that it is a big cat.

the third part is much less coherent, perhaps because by this stage the narrator has been starving for some time. it abandons upper case letters, and the dreams and visions interrupt much more frequently

I am not sure how much of this I understood (or was meant to by the author) but the experience of reading it was a powerful one, and because it is a short book I would recommend it. Interestingly the blurb places the moor in the west country, and I didn't find anything in the book that mentioned the location, but its characteristics (wide expanses of heather and peat-bog with a few woods and old churches) could equally well be Pennine.

Antonomasia

Often breathtaking on a sentence-by-sentence level, and has a mindbending (yet personally, inwardly kind of familiar) synthesis of primitivist pagan wildness and Buddhist meditative insight that I've never seen written down half so well anywhere else - but I'm not quite so enthused by the plot/concept. One of those books in which there are bits I'd like to keep with me always, but of which I'd intensely reject others.

Over the last few years, I've read quite a few books where an individual (archetypally, a man in his thirties or forties) drops out, leaves civilisation and goes off into the wilderness.
[Off the top of my head:
Doppler,
The Year of the Hare; variations on the theme featuring female characters have included
The Detour,
All the Birds Singing, and two novels by Joanna Kavenna.]
Perennial concepts come up, such as society's view of the protagonist's sanity or otherwise, and where modern male characters are concerned, the idea that he is immature and irresponsible. I really, really ought to have read Walden which is surely the root of many of these; at any rate, I am used to the idea that Thoreau is considered admirable - but contrasting him with contemporary books, there is now the notion that a really adult man shouldn't do that any more; he and perhaps by extension, civilisation as a whole, is supposed to have tamed itself and grown out of that sort of thing. (The single female fictional protagonist is lauded for it as feminist, but I haven't seen a story like this featuring a mother. If online forums are anything to go by, the same women who slam men for wandering off would castigate other mothers for it too. They are not the ones who identify with Bergman's Monika, knowing that if they ever had a kid, they would require licence to do as she did. These have been decades of great individual freedom, but the contemporary attitude to parenting as extremely difficult and important -
independent characterisation here - means that the doors are supposed to slam shut on all that as soon as a child is born).

As a father with a strong inclination towards wild nature, perhaps it was inevitable some of this would emerge in Kingsnorth's writing, but still... yawn... at those paragraphs. I've heard too much similar before.

Then there's the tedious business of unreliable narration. In contemporary literature, this once unusual and interesting device has become commonplace. As the primary school child might end a story "and then I woke up and it was all a dream", so the modern literary novelist has their well-worn routine of gradually pulling open the curtains to reveal the story being told by ... someone who's a bit mad. I am tired of the questions that surround that (or which I think surround that; I don't see them talked about much elsewhere), as to whether the device is disrespectful in a wider sense of people with certain traits, implying they're untrustworthy, and whether it undermines other opinions held by the character. Been there, thought about that, washed the t-shirt till it was grey and faded.

I thought, sometimes, that Kingsnorth was going to fuck with the idea of the unreliable narrator, never dropping any absolute hints about what really happened as per the usual routine, contradicting what looked like those . I'd have liked it, and the necessary kick up the arse it gave to an overused literary device, if he'd maintained that lack of revelation the whole way through, but there was unfortunately one bit that seemed definitive . Although at least some aspects of the scenario remain pleasingly ambiguous. It is mythic and apparently impossible, like the stories of the hermitic church fathers the narrator alludes to at the beginning. (I have intentionally not read anything about Beast before writing this post; I've little doubt, however, that readers are mooting theories about what is "real" in the book. I prefer not knowing and not trying to find out, a balance I never quite attained with Wyl Menmuir's
The Many, a similarly short book about escape to a sinister rurality also published this year.)

However, Kingsnorth (a Zen practitioner himself) is doing something else nicely subversive here in rewilding Buddhism - or rather wilding and syncretising, for this isn't a return to the original, it's something more western and pagan and less orderly. Mindfulness and meditation have in recent years become one of the most highly recommended ways to stay civilised. Here are language and ideas that anyone who's done much meditation will recognise, but also spinning off into turbulence and dissolution of boundaries, evoking concepts like the kundalini awakening.

There are more than a few paragraphs and sentences in Beast that were midwife to my thoughts, giving form to things I'd only felt. But the
beast, the cryptid big cat itself, the narrator's white whale- this was a little transformative too. I used to have actual nightmares about these things after seeing an item on the news aged maybe seven. I can't remember at what point I stopped fearing them at all, but it was very late, probably as I spent more time in the countryside alone; 11 years ago, I remember worrying about them as an outside possibility when I spent most of a day walking around in Wiltshire. Now I wouldn't, but there iswas something still ineluctably sinister and chilling to me in the sight of a black panther. During the course of Beast I felt this shifting and softening, not altogether unlike the way my fear of spiders decreased when I kept quite a big one under a pint glass for days, waiting until I psyched myself up to carry it outside, the disgust receding as I had to keep seeing it when I walked past it several times daily. I can't say either discomfort is 100% gone, but now I can feel how it would be to be curious about seeing one of these big cats. (I feel a greater degree of probability that they are around in Britain compared with other [urban-]mythical creatures; there are too many decent self-critical people who've seen them, local police who apparently accept them as a phenomenon, whereas Nessie, aliens etc I see as probability 0.000005%-i.e.-not-worth-considering). I've often thought I'd love to happen upon some free-roaming wild boar in the British countryside; I never thought I would get anywhere near to feeling the same way about possible big cats - but in the case of the latter, I'd prefer if I were not the only human around at the time.

In making both Buccmaster of The Wake and Edward Buckmaster, his near-present-day descendant (actual? spiritual?) in Beast, into unreliable narrators, I see how Kingsnorth is making an indictment of values contemporary to these men, that to value nature this much (or in The Wake, to continue to cling to Englishness - this will make sense if you look at Kingsnorth's essays) to feel so very much part of the land as each narrator does, is considered unconventional, even mad. However, I feel that the narrative device can undermine the point as well, even if I might understand why he uses it. Beast looks like a knowing wink about/to those who
once labelled Kingsnorth "a crazy collapsitarian": the reader can't be completely sure whether a post-apocalyptic setting is "real" in the world of the novel, or exists mainly in the narrator's head. Due to this potential for undermining - and also more selfishly because the unreliable narrators are almost the only thing I don't like in his novels - I wish Kingsnorth would write reliable narratives too. However, as these books are intended as part of a loose trilogy - each book 1000 years apart, the third to be set around the year 3000, a time far more unknowable and uncertain than history or a possibly dystopian near-present - I would not be at all surprised if his next has a similar narrator.

Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer

Book whose only real character is Edward Buckmaster – who we learn left his wife and newly born daughter to move to the Moors in an attempt to find himself and escape modern conformity. The book is written in four sections – which cease and begin abruptly with narrative missing and in which the English becomes more stream of consciousness and less constrained by grammar – reflecting the increasing disassociation of Buckmaster from modern life and the increasing blurring of reality and dreams, consciousness and unconsciousness. In the first section Buckmaster is trying, during a storm, to repair the roof of a deserted shack where he is squatting – in the second we assume he was blown from the roof as he is badly injured and thereafter in his delirium he seems to be in a deserted landscape and increasingly obsessed with a beast (a large black cat) which he spots occasionally and decides to track.

Second in a trilogy after “The Wake” – the key links being a rejection of a changed world, dreams and omens, a strong sense of the importance of the soul of the natural world, perhaps controversially the self-delusion/self-centredness of the main character and (far more superficially) the character’s name. The links with the first book both give added depth to the book and encourage the reader to persevere when the second seems to lack any real meaning.

Paul Fulcher

"Come to a place like this, though, and you can still hear it sing. I can tell you that from experience. Come to a place like this, far away from the estates and the ring roads and the car parks and the black fields of beer and the screen-dumb people pacing out the slow suicide of the West around the pedestrianised precincts. Come to a place like this, shut your mouth and your mind and walk on the moor, walk in the wind and the sun, and you will understand soon enough that the world is a great animal, alive and breathing, that we walk through it, we breathe with it, we are its breath, that when we stand on a mountain overcome by the sunset and all that it brings, or fall to our knees in front of an altar in the presence of something greater than ourselves, then we are sensing the animal shift and turn beneath our feet. Then it is calling us home."

Paul Kingsnorth's previous
The Wake, set just after 1066, was a truly wonderful discovery (
my review) and Beast, set in the present day, is the second part of a planned trilogy of novels where Kingsnorth aims to “delve into the mythical and actual landscapes of England across two thousand years of time, linked by their related protagonists and by other coincidences and connections”.

The links between The Wake and Beast are loose indeed - the link between our first person protagonists is mainly their similar names ("buccmaster of holland" and now Edward Buckmaster), and that both represent elements of Kingsnorth's personal manifesto (see below) but the most distinct element of The Wake, the unique narrative style with its attempt to replicate Old English through a pseudo phonetic approximation is replaced by rather plain prose, where any difficulty of comprehension more lies in the narrator's own inability to articulate what he is experiencing.

Exactly what has happened to Buckmaster is unclear, but he appears to have left his wife and child and modern lifestyle in the East of England to flee to the wilds moors of the West, adopting a hermit lifestyle in an abandoned farmhouse, in order to find the real truth of nature, life's meaning and the deity:

“You have to leave it all, find yourself a silent place, a wild place, away from the paving stones and street lamps and away from all of the people, even the ones who love you, especially them. They are the dangerous ones. Then you must sit, empty yourself, open yourself and wait for it to find you again. This is the search, it is what they have always said, all over the world, all of the seekers. These are the rules."

In terms of literary precedents, it is difficult not to think of King Lear, and more recently
The Buried Giant by Ishiguro, not least as their is an explicit (deliberate?) nod to buried giants at one point as Buckmaster explores the moors in search of the beast of the title, a large cat like creature (similar to the
Beast of Bodmin) that he occasionally spots, only when he isn't looking for it.

Buckmaster's vision of the natural world is not at all sentimental. This is a world where modern humanity is a temporary anomaly, soon to be destroyed:

"If you sit looking at anything for long enough then everything else fades from your vision and all you have is what you are staring at. I was staring at a small knot above the biggest branch on this tree. Its trunk was black and it was bare in the white heat and suddenly I saw what terrible things trees are. They sprout up from the Earth they reach out in all directions they reach for you they will smother you they will never stop growing and dividing and colonising. They are so fecund there is no stopping them. Chop them down burn them they always come back up they stretch to the sky these thin green fingers they are indescribable. They are just waiting there waiting everywhere for us to fall and then they will come back and they will grow over everything they will suck it all in and take it up to the sky in their thin fingers. Their roots will wrap around all that we were and our lives will rot down in their litter and theirs will be a silent Earth of roots and leaves and thin grasping and there will be no place for us in their world at all.

The novel is written in four sections, each of which breaks off literally mid-word with the next starting similarly, mid a different word and sentence, adding to the fragmentary feeling of the story. At the end of the first section, Buckmaster seemingly suffers a severe fall as he tries to repair the roof of his dwelling, and as a consequence the later sections become more confused, even hallucinatory, which is reflected in the prose by his narration first losing commas, then even capital letters (e.g. I becomes i). This is a reasonably effective device but rather pales by comparison to the innovative approach in The Wake. The Wake's approach did require careful reading but actually surrender its secrets easily to those who had the patience to persist, whereas Beast remains deliberately opaque, indeed as Buckmaster himself concludes towards the novel's end:

I won't pretend that everything is clear. Nothing is really clear, but this no longer seems to matter. I once thought that my challenge was to understand everything, to build a structure in my mind that would support all that I experienced in the world. But there is no structure that will not fall in the end and crush you.

Kingsnorth is equally well known as a non-fiction writer and founder of "the Dark Mountain Project, a writers’ and artists’ movement designed to question the stories our culture is telling itself in a time of ecological and social unravelling." His manifesto, a form of ecological nihilism, and his unique take on the events of 2016 are summed up in two articles on his personal website:

"When I look at the state of the world right now, I see an arc bending towards something that dwarfs any parochial concerns about particular presidential elections or political arrangements between human nations, and which should put those events into deep perspective. I see a grand planetary shift that has not been seen for millions of years."

http://paulkingsnorth.net/2016/12/15/...

"Is it possible to be a nation without the worst of nationalism? To be comfortable with your identity and history without withdrawing into them? To welcome outsiders without forgetting what you are welcoming them to? Englishness, whatever it means, is ever-changing: England today would be largely unrecognisable to someone from 1066, or even 1866. A nation is a process not a fixed thing, but it has continuities nonetheless. It may be a story, but it is not fiction.

When I think about these questions, I always find myself coming back to the place itself: the woods, the fields, the streets, the towns, the beaches. We live in an age of climate change and mass extinction, burgeoning cities, deepening immersion in technologies of distraction, the spreading ideology of mass consumption. The antidote to this global distancing of humanity from the rest of nature is the slow, messy business of getting to know a landscape. If a nation is a relationship between people and place, then a cultural identity that comes from a careful relationship with that place might be a new story worth telling."

http://paulkingsnorth.net/2015/02/01/...

In The Wake this manifesto was present but not front and centre, but in Beast is forms the very essence of the novel and the book suffers a little as a result. Although, to Kingsnorth's credit, and as in The Wake, he doesn't make his narrators particularly sympathy-rousing mouthpieces, indeed the delusions of both buccmaster and Buckmaster are such as actually to force the reader to question their views, a brave authorial decision and one which lifts this from mere polemic to literature.

Overall, a worthwhile read, particularly when taken as part of the overall work with The Wake. I would rate the trilogy so far 4 stars overall, but as a stand-alone work I can only give Beast 2.5 stars

11811 (Eleven)

This was a random grab on my way out the door at the library. He is a prize-winning author. I hated it.

Amy | littledevonnook

This was a really strange read but I came away completely enraptured by the story.

Our main character is a man named Edward who we learn is living on a west-country moor, completely alone. We are not really told why Edward is on the moor or what has happened prior to him living there but you definitely get the sense that something bad might of occurred. Whilst out on the moors Edward spots a large animal in his peripheral and becomes completely obsessed with tracking down this beast that appears to be following him. Will he succeed?

A quirky read with many questions left un-answered, this is definitely one of those books where you fill in a lot of the blanks yourself. The main thing I loved about this novel was the poetic writing style, even if I didn't fully understand what was going on the use of language was beautiful. If you're looking for something slightly unusual this one might be for you!

Neil

Now re-read in preparation for reading the third part of the trilogy
Alexandria.

Just a few notes and some bits pulled from the internet about the trilogy. I enjoyed this second reading more than my first reading - see below - and I've added a star (but then removed it again a few days later, on reflection). It is still somewhat tricky to work out how this will become a trilogy - early indications for Alexandria suggest it links easily with The Wake, but Beast seems to be out there on its own. We'll see.

Kingsnorth says this about the trilogy, which might or might not help:

"A decade ago I started writing a novel about the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. I wanted to tell the story of the largely unknown underground resistance movement which fought against the Normans. As I wrote, a problem emerged. My narrator was an eleventh century man but he was speaking 21st century English. In reality he would have spoken what we now call ‘Old English’, a Germanic language which is virtually unrecognisable to us today. I couldn’t make his voice work. What I ended up doing was creating my own version of Old English — a shadow tongue, as I called it — which was intended to convey the feel of the speech patterns of early medieval England. It was a challenge, but it was fun.

By the time I’d finished I developed the mad idea that this would be the first book in a loose trilogy which would span two millennia of time, and would trace the path of one line of people in the same place across history. My second book, Beast, was set in the present day — that was published in 2017. Alexandria is the last book in the series. It’s set a thousand years from now, in the same place as The Wake. There are a lot of echoes, but it’s also a book that stands alone. It can be read without even knowing the other two exist; but if you have read them, there will be an added layer of richness to it. The common theme of all the books is the relationship between people and the land — and the notion that the land is a lot more sentient and aware than we might give it credit for."

(This from The American Conservative in October 2020).

Pat of this is a bit of mystery given Beast is clearly set in a very different place to The Wake, although it seems the protagonist here comes from the same place as the protagonist in The Wake.

After Alexandria, more research will be needed, partly because of the tweets/articles on line about Kingsnorth's recent conversion to Orthodox Christianity (this happened after Beast, but I am not sure when in the production of Alexandria it happened - it looks like it might be after the book was written but before it was published, but I am not sure).

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ORIGINAL REVIEW
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I fully expect there to be many rave reviews of this: it is intense, poetic and experimental. There are sections that end in the middle of a word only for the text to start up again in the middle of another word and in a different place. The narrator starts off as "I" and becomes "i" for a while, which must mean something more than a malfunctioning shift key. The language is brave. The story makes sudden jumps which could be memories or could be out of a fever and back to reality for a while. We never really know. There is a Beast (obviously), but is it real or imagined? We never really know.

In a review in The Telegraph, Sameer Raheem wrote "Whether you enjoy it will depend on whether its prose draws you into Buckmaster’s existential struggle – or puts you off.". Sadly, for me, it was the latter and I found the whole experience slightly annoying.

But, I can appreciate the effort that has gone into this. For music lovers out there, Paul Kingsnorth writes like Damien Rice sings: everything really, really matters! Actually, I have just Googled images of them both. They are by no means identical, but...

I have the feeling I should like this more than I did. I have the feeling many others will fall in love with this book, but it wasn't for me.

Angus McKeogh

Was torn on this one between 1 and 2 stars. So I didn't really not like it entirely. It had a few merits here and there, but ultimately it wasn't very good. I think the biggest strike against it was the brilliance by which I viewed his debut novel, The Wake. This sophomore effort was just bland, and compared to his first book it made this one even more of a disappointment. Just a smidgen away from 1 star.

Rebecca

I suppose a book about an existential breakdown can't exactly be easy... I really wanted to give this 5 stars, but at times it was just a little too dense - verbose without telling much - for that. I didn't need to be spoon fed answers, but at least a taste of some would have been nice! Still, it was evocative and compelling, and I felt a similar rhythm to the language as in The Wake, which I really enjoyed. There's the linked Buccmaster name between the books, and similar themes of wilderness and divinity and madness, but is there more than that connecting them? Are they meant to be related more closely or are the names just a (rather heavy handed) forcing of connections between the books? Basically, Beast left with more questions than answers.

As a side-note, why do I always end up reading books about England's chilly wild places when I'm in far warmer places - Sarah Hall's magnificent The Wolf Border in Thailand, this in Greece - the literary equivalent of a long cold drink?

Emily-Jo

Blimey, for such a short book, this was a slog. I nearly gave up on it several times. It's - not for me, shall we say. Straight white dude feels very oppressed by this cruel modern society and technology, runs away from his family to find God on the moors. I was very, very bored.

Eric Anderson

There can be no greater confrontation with yourself than to abandon all your attachments (job, house, belongings, friends/family) and walk into the wilderness to live as a hermit. That’s what the protagonist Edward Buckmaster does in Paul Kingsnorth’s new novel “Beast”. This short novel begins with him squatting in a broken-down shack in the West-country moors with its makeshift roof on the brink of collapsing under torrential rain storms. He’s already lived here by himself for shortly over a year and does not plan to turn back. Just why he’s made this radical life decision is the mystery which propels the novel as well as an enigmatic dark beast he sometimes glimpses darting through the heather-filled landscape. But this is a story more about the process of his inner spiritual/psychological quest than finding any true answers. Kingsnorth conveys this in innovative and subtle ways through his use of language and narrative format. Reading this novel feels like you’re travelling on a fascinating, absorbing and sometimes terrifying journey as Edward teeters on the brink of madness and/or enlightenment.

Read my full
review of Beast by Paul Kingsnorth on LonesomeReader

Jessie

Well that was a fever-dream if I’ve ever read one! I had a hard time getting trough it because of the writing style, but it was a very interesting read nonetheless. I’m not sure I connected to the book as much as I would have hoped, but it was definitely an experience. I really enjoyed how weird and trippy everything was and the setting of the story was very gloomy and atmospheric. If you’re into weird little novella’s with peculiar writing styles, definitely give this one a try.

Ebnarabi

رواية غريبة نوع ما، هناك روايات تعتمد على الأحداث وعمق الشخصيات لِكَي تثير بك التساؤلات اما هذه الرواية فهي لا تعتمد على ذلك، فهي أشبه بالتجربة بل تأخذ القارىء في تجربة يعيشها من خلال وضع نفسه مكان بطل الرواية والذي لانعرف عنه سوى انه ترك زوجته وابنته ورحل يعيش بعيدًا عن الحياة المدنية في مستنقع او تلال بعيدة عن البشر، لماذا؟ ما الذي حصل له لكي يبتعد ويعيش في عزلة او قل خلوة؟ لا نعلم. من خلال هذا الغموض والإبهام في شخصية البطل يسهل على الكاتب ان يقول ان هذا من الممكن ان يكون اي منكم أيها القرّاء ، هنا ومن خلال الراوي (بطل الرواية) يثير الكاتب الكثير من التساؤلات الفلسفية والدينية (بها الكثير من التأمل والأفكار البوذية) وايضاً أسئلة عن الاعتناء بالبيئة والبهائم. مع مرور الوقت والغوص في الرواية تبدأ بالشك بمكان الراوي وبقدراته العقلية هل هو فعلاً على قيد الحياة ام أنه ميت ولا يدري انه حالياً في عالم البرزخ او ما يسمى في البوذية 'باردو' وهو عالم ما بعد الموت وقبل الانفكاك من سلسلة الحياة والموت. هل هو إنسان عاقل؟ ام مجنون؟
يعيش في عزلة في مكان لوحده ويشعر بأن هناك مخلوق او وحش يتعقبه فبدل ان يهرب يذهب ليتعقب هو ذلك الوحش، ثم يتبين أن الوحش ليس سوى قط اسود كبير الحجم!!
الرواية أشبه بتجربة للكاتب، فهي تختلف عن الكثير من الروايات التي تحمل ذات الفكرة اي ترك الحياة المدنية، وقلة موثوقية الراوي (بطل الرواية)، اللغة هنا ممتازة وجميلة جدًا، الأسلوب وطريقة اثارة الاسئلة وعمق وأهمية هذه الأسئلة مما يجذب القارىء ويشده لإكمال القراءة ، رواية جميلة جدًا مليئة بالرمزية ورغم كثرة الاسئلة الغير مجابة ورغم صغر حجمها. رواية قد لاتعجب الكثير، لكن شخصيًا هذا النوع من الروايات يستهويني كثيرًا

Leonard Pierce

Paul Kingsnorth, it’s safe to say, is a man of special talent. His work with the Dark Mountain Project — one of the only cultural movements to take seriously the concept of a post-human world — and his insightful environmental journalism alone would be enough to establish his brilliance and insight, but he also wrote The Wake in 2014, one of the most astonishing and original novels of the twenty-first century. He followed it up two years later with Beast, the second in a proposed trilogy that is very different in style, tone, and format, but which nonetheless tells an unforgettable story with powerful thematic links to its predecessor.

The Wake concerned itself with a slippery character known as Buccmaster, a small landsman in the north of England, who becomes unhinged and uprooted following the loss of his family to the Norman Invasion of 1066. In Beast, he is echoed and reflected almost a thousand years later in the person of Edward Buckmaster. He once lived in the city, and had a job and friends and a wife and a young daughter. Now he is alone, helpless, hopeless, and far away, living in an abandoned cottage somewhere not far from those same fens that spawned Buccmaster. He doesn’t quite remember, or perhaps just doesn’t care to discuss, how he came to be there, why he left everything behind, or what he is hoping to find; but it’s something. He is waiting for something, on a quest for something he cannot quite name even to himself. Perhaps he is seeking enlightenment, leaving family and status behind, like the Buddha; perhaps he is trying to eradicate himself entirely; and perhaps he is trying to revert to a state of nature, to become like an animal or a blade of grass or a drop of rain. Whatever it is that he’s come here for, he is not finding it, and he is losing his mind.

Beast is a very different book that its predecessor. The Wake was a complex, ambitious, difficult book, filled with detail and deep observation, and written in an invented language that conjured a long-vanished time while creating a rhythm and meaning all its own. Beast is much shorter, more direct, simpler, and less specific; it is less like a novel and more like the collision of a dark fairy tale and an extended interior monologue. Its language degenerates and diffuses as the book goes on, but it is mostly modern, direct, and comprehensible. And it is very short, almost more a novella than a full-length work. However, it shares with its prequel a breathtaking prose style, a stunning portrait of a mind in chaos, and an incredible conjuration of place and space that never relents and perfectly illustrates the way a physical location can shape character and vice versa. At no point does its intensity and focus let up, to the point that when we encounter a handful of blank pages that represent disruptions in space and time or momentary lapses of consciousness, it is almost a physical relief.

Despite its brevity, this is not a novel that takes it easy on the reader. It is dazzlingly difficult and particularly relentless, with its pressure and savagery increasing as the book goes on. It is also not the kind of book that brings you a great reward at its conclusion; it is soaked in ambiguity as thick and impenetrable as the fog that rolls in about halfway through the book. Like Buckmaster himself, we often become lost and confused on our way to something we cannot articulate or envision. But the rewards are there; they exist in Kingsnorth’s tremendous prose, and in his unprecedented ability to portray disassociation from civilization and the creep of nature seem simultaneously inevitable, desirable, and horrendously dangerous. Kingsnorth’s vision is similar to that of filmmaker Werner Herzog, but unlike Herzog, his world is not one where humanity loses itself through too much closeness with a nature it fails to fully comprehend. In Kingsnorth’s books, man isn’t really meant to be here at all; he is an alien presence whose submersion into nature is more like the absorbing of a foreign body by a rushing and implacable bloodstream. Not only can we not attain a perfect return to nature, it doesn’t want us to try.

Very little really happens over the course of Beast. Buckmaster is injured when his roof collapses, and never really heals; he sees and senses the presence of a huge black beast that he comes to believe is following him, and sets out to find him, but never really does. (Or does he? It’s a bit of a muddle, as is almost everything that happens to the man.) He comes up with elaborate plans to track the beast and map his surroundings, but never follows through on them; he makes vows and stands on the brink of revelations, but the trigger is never pulled, the epiphany never comes. While we eventually come to learn, through the actions and statements of outsiders, exactly who Buccmaster is and the depths of his delusions at the end of The Wake, Beast allows us no such luxury, and we remain unsure whether we are watching the slow transmogrification of a man into a saint, or the final descent into madness of someone who was never quite sane to begin with. That it manages to create such an exquisite sense of movement and wildness throughout, despite its ultimate abandonment of resolution, is only a small part of what makes Kingsnorth such an amazing writer.

At a time when literature and film is oversaturated with epics, sagas, and reboots, and when sequels and franchises are assumed for even the most modest properties, Beast accomplishes something incredible: it is a sequel that owes everything and nothing to its predecessor, that remains faithful to its tone and feel despite being hugely divergent in content, and that makes readers anticipate the final chapter with an eagerness born of quality and not of obligation. Kingsnorth has created something truly special, and I can’t wait to see what he does with the next part.

Graychin

Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, I really don’t want to go among mad people, and yet here I am reading another Paul Kingsnorth book about one of them. There’s little pleasure in reading about madness, except when there is. Kingsnorth’s prior novel The Wake (
my review) was one of those exceptions. It was a difficult, remarkable, and in the end rewarding book. Beast has a sort of hallucinatory power but it lacks the ambitions of its predecessor, and its satisfactions.

In Beast we trade the eleventh-century England of Buccmaster of Holland for the twenty-first century mind of Edward Buckmaster who has, apparently, left his wife and newborn child to live raw on the moors because he’s fed up with the world and just can’t take it anymore.

Buckmaster’s diagnosis of our philosophical and social ills isn’t all wrong. At home, in the civilized world where “screen-dumb people [are] pacing out the slow suicide of the West,” he says, “I was an item, an object, a collection of gears, a library of facts compiled by others, a spark plug in a universal engine, an opinion machine… I could know anything in an instant, and I knew nothing at all.”

People, he says, have lost sight of the mystery at the core of existence. “We built a world of altars because we could never put the mystery into words. We tried to make the mystery human, we tried to lock it into shape, we made sacrifices to it, we sang its poetry and then we left the buildings empty and walked away. We don’t talk about the mystery anymore, not where I come from, but nothing has changed in the world except us.”

All well and good; I nod in agreement. But what does one do about it? For Edward Buckmaster it seems the answer is to abandon your wife and child and to glorify your own cowardice by cloaking it in second-hand mysticism. It’s appropriate that this ends in madness. The passages quoted above are about the only coherent thoughts uttered in the whole book.

Does Paul Kingsnorth have a better prescription for what ails us? Is he actually recommending madness or is he offering us a case study in dead-endism? Either way, I wish he’d drop the gimmickry of intentionally poor punctuation and grammar. Yes, I get it: the prose disintegrates along with the narrator’s mind, but that’s not enough. Which really sums up my feelings about this book as a whole: it’s simply not enough.

But perhaps we’ll get the what’s-next when Kingsnorth comes to the third installment in what is now threatening to become The Buckmaster Trilogy.

Adam

The idea of a fantasy-horror Into The Wild has been on to-write list for a while. While I'm sure there are things out there that already fit that mold (hmu with recs) I haven't found many (Laird Barron or Vandermeer's Area X comes closest). And Paul Kingsnorth is the perfect person to make good on that idea. After The Wake, I was really excited to see him apply clear contemporary English to the countrysides he's spent so much time in and imbue them with a right and proper landscape horror.

The book opens with some promising things in this vein. The hermitage setup has some good nature writing and sinks us into the landscape fairly well. It also picks up one of the best things about The Wake: undermining masculine bullshit that you'd otherwise think Kingsnorth would really go in for. The protag abandoned his wife and young daughter to go find himself on the moors, and the narration really lets him have it about how selfish this is.

It's a short book, though, and it's clear before too long that the story is not going in a good direction. Everything interesting in the first half--the landscape observations, the characterization, the potential monster--collapses into an increasingly delirious stream of consciousness. The landscape disappears behind a veil of solipsistic confusion. The monster demonstrates no agency or charisma at all, and feels like nothing more than a transparent metaphor for zen (only find it when you stop looking for it, etc). As in The Wake, there's a layer of mental illness hovering at the edges of the protagonist's arc, but where that felt potent in The Wake where it butted violently against clear external realities and, particularly, other people, there is no one else in Beast to make this meaningful. It's a limp and boring ambiguity because none of the potential interpretations have any weight--there's nothing for any of these nebulous experiences to define themselves against.

It's a shame, because it feels like Kingsnorth let pretenses to literaryness and philosophizing get in the way of the more straightforward genre story that would have, I think, been a better vehicle for his ultimate goals. Anyway, at least I still get to try to write the story I hoped this would be.

segosha

has anyone told men they dont need to publish every scrap of thought that cross their mind

jakeweinick

Leave all behind; come find what you have been searching for. Paul Kingsnorth’s Beast is an abstract story of loneliness, the wilderness, and primal callings in modern life. The narrator is a self-appointed hermit who shares his most intimate thoughts and experiences of living in isolation. Kingsnorth’s informal writing style of Beast grants the reader a straddling connection to the narrator and his journey. Although this is a fitting stylistic approach that compliments the story’s main subject of isolation, I sometimes found myself in search of a reason to continue reading this deeply personal tale. Beast lacked a binding of reason and context to support the reader—which I oddly both enjoyed and disliked, though more the latter. Those who finish Beast will not be dissatisfied, as Kingsnorth’s insight into the wild mind is tender, and his potent descriptions of the natural world provide a setting that is sensed through the pages and incessantly yearned for in the modern person’s subconscious. I’m rating Beast a three out of five stars. And finally, a quote from the book that leisurely resides in my mind, probably on a nice futon or an old recliner: “i hate potatoes anyway i don’t have time for potatoes” (120).

Mitchell

Paul Kingsnorth’s debut novel
The Wake was a masterful account of a guerilla fighter during the Norman invasion of England; a story about a bitter and broken man who’s not as important or powerful as he thinks he is, written in an invented English “shadow tongue” to mimic the speech patterns of 11th century England. Following the novel’s success, Kingsnorth said he planned to write two more as a loose ‘England’ trilogy – a second novel set a thousand years later, in the present day, and a third novel set a thousand years after that, far in the future. These would obviously be very different books, but since The Wake was one of the best novels I read all year, I was looking forward to see what Kingsnorth did next.

Unfortunately Beast is a disappointment. The second novel of the trilogy, it’s set in the present day, but it could as easily have been set whenever. The narrator is living as a hermit on a rural moor, having walked away from his partner and infant child to go on a vision quest or something – Why I Gave Up Social Media, by Edward Buckmaster. (Given that Buccmaster of Holland in The Wake was an unreliable narrator and unsympathetic character, I don’t think Kingsnorth is necessarily supportive of this kind of neo-Luddism; on the other hand, given all his non-fiction I’ve read, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was.) Following an accident when his hut collapses on him, Buckmaster seems to be knocked into some kind of dream state or new reality – it’s all very disjointed-confused-narration-style, gradually degrading as the book goes on – in which the land is devoid of birdsong, the skies are eternally white, he cannot seem to leave the moor and he is being stalked by a strange, large creature.

Normally this kind of thing would be right up my alley, but the narration lost me. I loved The Wake’s shadow English, I loved the subtle clues that Buccmaster was dishonest, a liar, a psychopath. The narration of Beast, on the other hand, is the ramblings of a man slowly losing his mind. His plight is not particularly interesting given how unclear it is that it’s even really happening. Beast only runs for 168 pages, which was more than enough for my liking.

Having said that, perhaps in retrospect it will sit more comfortably as the bridging act in a trilogy. Kingsnorth is a talented writer, and given some of his published statements about environmentalism (he’s a self-professed “climate defeatist”) I still look forward to reading his depiction of England 1,000 years hence.

Sam Worby

What virtue there is in this book is in the writing, it can be beautiful and lyrical and the images / visions can be atavistic and catching.

However, this book is also entirely self indulgent. Another book of revelation (or not) from male crisis. Another male journey rooted (either really or in fantasy) in male violence against women. The thing is, the book not even committed to being deep or meaningful. It could equally be all delusion. Some people may enjoy this but I found it boring.

Aaron Koelker

I appreciate the experimentation going on with the language and narrative flow but ultimately it just didn't do a lot for me. Started to feel gimmicky at a point. There's barely a plot to speak of -- which is fine -- but I didn't get enough out of the existential musings either to make this something I'll remember years or even months from now.

Jennifer Williams

I’m sure this is a very deep and worthy book that I just didn’t get. But I also feel like I shouldn’t have to work so hard to appreciate it. Generally some interesting sections mixed in with a lot of boredom. Big, intellectual concept; very little story. Not for me.

Andy

A confusing mess. Had potential but went off the rails. I must have missed the point.

Bobbi

Im not sure what happened, but I guess this is what happens when an over-confident straight white man decides to be an author.

Nick

The best thing about Beast is the style of prose. I've heard some compare it to Cormac McCarthy and this isn't totally wrong. It is incomplete though. Kingsnorth's prose only progressively becomes less rigid, or, put another way, it gradually degrades over the course of the novel (first losing some punctuation, then capitalization, then mostly without either). This degradation is directly tied to the story itself, speaking to the mental state of our Buckmaster. Perhaps this is best represented with the few instances where Kingsnorth deliberately breaks off the narrative mid-thought (and mid-word). I found this aspect of the book to be effective and the main reason I kept reading. Given Kingsnorth's brilliant creativity for the first book in this trilogy (the Wake), this should come as no surprise.

As for the story, it was good by the end but could be downright tedious for much of the book. The scenes and lines I did like were drowned by the day to day grind facing the protagonist. By the time the novel ended I was finally getting into the story itself, so I wonder if more time could have been spent in the later half of the book, less on his broken leg.

Rowan

A strange and compelling narrative of one man's seemingly broken mind. Unlike in his first novel, Kingsnorth employs standard contemporary English here. It is short and easy to read.

The author ties it to The Wake via the story of the central character, Edward Buckmaster. It is a dark, existential journey. Is the central figure insane? Or had the world gone mad? There are hints of an apocalyptic environmental collapse.
Alternatively, it could simply be that the reader gets to experience the shattering of a man's mind, one which is closed off utterly from reality.

I am not sure.

But I very much enjoyed the poetic prose and oddness of the story. I loved the references to ancient religions and Buddhist philosophy. And I found the questions important, even if it was only a crazy man asking them.

Eloise

A torturously captivating book, Beast exposes the mind of an unknown man who calls himself Edward. Hunted by and hunting for a large black cat on Bodmin Moor, we follow Edward's journey over a time frame that could be a day or a year. Edward appears to be a hermit, and Kingsnorth makes it evident that he is psychologically unstable; his mind and opinions flit from one topic to the other in a painful flow of free thought. Kingsnorth's lack of grammar and punctuation creates a sense of deep disturbance which will stay with readers. For me, this modernist text allowed a unique reading, as the ambiguity surrounding the cat, Edward's origin, motives and very existence are open to interpretation. It is this openness that makes this story so enjoyable, despite its unsettling structure.

Anna

I'll admit that I read 'Beast' because I'm intrigued by the forthcoming sequel
Alexandria, which apparently concludes the Buckmaster/Buccmaster trilogy. I say apparently because 'Beast' has no obvious connection to
The Wake and
Alexandria may have no association with either. Presumably the link is that each book features a male protagonist who goes through some shit and, even if unnamed in the actual text, is called a variation upon Buckmaster.
The Wake portrays a thousand years ago, 'Beast' perhaps a timeless present, and
Alexandria will depict the future. The common theme seems to be men experiencing intense wonder and fear towards the natural world; both of the first two novels centre upon emotions with limited plot. In
The Wake, Kingsnorth invented his own version of Old English, which proved both challenging and fascinating to read. In 'Beast' he confines himself to discarding commas and eventually capital letters. I did not find this as involving as his previous linguistic innovation.

'Beast' is the first person narrative of a man who appears trapped in a deserted purgatory. While he periodically slips into memories and visions, his only companion of any substance is a mysterious and elusive beast. The narrative is a stream of consciousness, which I found most interesting when it dealt with the protagonist's embodiment. His spooky isolation and lack of need for food suggest that he is a ghost in some manner of afterlife, yet he regularly experiences pain, thirst, and more subtle sensations:

I was walking over the tops now and I felt my feet through my boots I felt every bump in the ground I felt the roots of the heather through the springy peat. And as I walked as I steadily moved I suddenly realised that I was not the owner of my feet. These were not my feet. They were not an extension of me. They were me. I was this foot and I was this hand I was these fingers I was these eyes. This body was not a vehicle for carrying this mind around. Everything was me.

It is so hard to put into words into these clumsy words that mean nothing. But the shift was real and total. I knew I was not the owner of my body. I was my body. I nearly fell over in surprise. I kept walking and feeling both the feet touching the ground and feeling the knees bend as I moved. But now everything in the world was different.

This caught my attention because it sounds like such an extraordinary experience, albeit not described with particularly great intensity here. While intellectually I know that whatever consciousness I have exists because of the activity of my brain and rest of my body, my sense of self is based on residing as a mind in a body that I am reluctantly responsible for the care of.

Quite possibly I approached 'Beast' with too many preconceptions. I anticipated that it would be a fictionalised examination of the existential crisis that Kingsnorth also chronicled in
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays. That's certainly how 'Beast' then read to me, although readers approaching from a different perspective might interpret it otherwise. The narrative presents a breakdown and withdrawal into a liminal and dreamlike space of solitude in nature. The figure of the beast could represent climate change, human hubris, mental illness, fossil fuels, nothing in particular, or many things. The ending is also suitably ambiguous. On balance, I much prefer the non-fiction essay format for Kingsnorth's examination of his existential terror upon confronting the environmental apocalypse that fossil fuel capitalism has unleashed. 'Beast' appeared to me insubstantial, despite the odd arresting and vivid moment. As
Alexandria will be more than double the length and set in the future, providing the opportunity for more linguistic world-building, I have much higher hopes for it.

Title	:	Beast
Author	:	Paul Kingsnorth
Rating	:
ISBN	:	0571322077
ISBN-10	:	9780571322077
Language	:	English
Format Type	:	Hardcover
Number of Pages	:	168
Publication	:	First published July 5, 2016
Awards	:	RSL Encore Award Shortlist (2017)

Beast Reviews

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