Beast

Paul Kingsnorth

Faber & Faber, £12.99

Review by Malcolm Forbes

PAUL Kingsnorth’s extraordinary debut novel The Wake (2014) was set in the fenlands of 11th century Lincolnshire and narrated by “buccmaster of holland”, an angry, unhinged landowner hell-bent on revenge against marauding Norman invaders. Kingsnorth’s new novel, Beast, comprises the second – though also standalone – instalment in a trilogy, this time following the trials and agonies of one Edward Buckmaster, a hermit holed up in an abandoned farm in contemporary England. “From the east I came, to this high place,” he announces at the outset – before adding: “to be broken, to be torn apart, beaten, cut into pieces.” By what or by whom is the question at the heart of this disturbing yet vital novel.

Buckmaster explains that he has been living in self-exile for “five seasons”. In his refuge atop a desolate, wind-lashed moor, he is far from the madding crowd, from “the screen-dumb people pacing out the slow suicide of the West around the pedestrianised precincts.” He survives on meagre rations and spends his days engaged in lean pursuits – walking, sitting, dreaming. “Perhaps I am losing my mind,” he says. “I do hope so.”

One day he catches sight of a long, black animal. From this point on it consumes him. Determined to see it again and identify it, he braves the elements and roams the moors, noting its prints, its smell and its howls. As he combs the countryside he also explores his troubled mind. Commentaries on his natural surroundings clash with dredged-up memories. Beckettian meditations on mortality – life and possible afterlife – and the existence of God soon trigger delusional and hallucinatory rants. After a while we wonder just how reliable a narrator he is, and whether his quarry is elusive or illusory.

The stand-out feature of The Wake was not its plot, protagonist or setting but its language. Written in a modified Old English – what Kingsnorth termed “a shadow tongue” – the novel taxed the reader for the first twenty pages but then paid huge dividends. The language of Kingsnorth’s second offering is nowhere near as demanding. However, unlike The Wake, which becomes more comprehensible the longer we immerse ourselves in it, akin to cracking a code, Beast gets gradually more linguistically complex, with words, syntax and punctuation deteriorating in tandem with Buckmaster’s clotted and disjointed thoughts. We slide from general coherence and corresponding grammatical soundness to gushing exuberance or garbled tirades in which commas are expunged (“This was my mission this was my pride I would not scream”). A further emotional blow leads to an erosion of capital letters, diminishing our first-person narrator (“i have got everything the wrong way round i am being hunted here there is no time for games”).

Language is not the only instance where Kingsnorth plays by his own rules. Beast is devoid of pertinent detail concerning time, place and people. Kingsnorth gives us the bare coordinates (including his protagonist’s name as late as page 37) and then leaves us to find our way. Sometimes this means stumbling in the dark. Where exactly has Buckmaster come from? Has he suffered a breakdown and walked out on his wife and child? And in the book’s final section, after a particularly delirious outburst fizzles out and gives way to cathartic lucidity in which terror has abated and commas and capitals have been restored, can we say with certainty he is “healed”?

And then of course there is the ambiguity of the eponymous beast. Kingsnorth uses variations on the same description to refer to all things which threaten, overwhelm or disorientate his hero. A brutal storm “roars up the fields like a beast chasing the smell of blood.” The world is “a great animal, alive and breathing”. When Buckmaster tells us “I shuffled like a broken creature, dragging my damaged leg behind me”, we are given the first of many hints that the real beast, and Buckmaster’s true enemy, is himself.

In the end, the book is all the better for not providing easy answers. “Nothing is really clear,” Buckmaster concedes, “but this no longer seems to matter.” Beast reads like a potent, chilling but intoxicating fable, one that builds in unbearable intensity and beguiles with unflinching prose while charting the hopes and traumas of an unknowable man.