posted on 17 Feb 2017

Beast by Paul Kingsnorth

For a slim book of only 160 pages this is a physically and emotionally exhausting read. Technically this is the second book of a proposed trilogy – the first of which was the 2014 publication The Wake – but the relationship between the books is loose enough for them to effectively stand as individual and self-contained. Stylistically however the visceral intensity of both books is a clear unifying factor and something that I guess will also find its way into volume three when it appears.

Where The Wake was set in the 11th century, Beast is a modern day fable. Edward Buckmaster has left his family to live in some kind of elemental hermit-like communion with nature. Living in a makeshift shelter he is caught-up in a storm that threatens to destroy his hut and Buckmaster himself. In trying to repair the damage he is badly injured and, with no help at hand, has to self-medicate.

At this point in the story the narrative begins to fracture and, it seems, so does Buckmaster’s mind. Kingsnorth signals this stylistically by the use of unfinished sentences, blank pages and a gradual disintegration of punctuation and sentence structure. Seemingly trapped in some kind of hallucinatory warping of time and space, Buckmaster finds it impossible to reach a town – every time he sets off he finds himself looped back to where he started from. In the process of trying to escape this disturbing groundhog-day experience he starts to think he has spotted some kind of beast stalking his movements – but he can never quite locate it and it remains always glimpsed from the corner of his eye.

Kingsnorth drags us into an unreliable world at once vivid and menacing and yet uncertain and suggested. The unknown beast becomes the obsession, the fixed focus of attention and its existence or non-existence a sort of existential and metaphysical debate.

Writing in The Guardian in July 2016, M John Harrison had this to say about the experience of reading Beast:

To read Beast is a joy. Prose and gaze are inseparable, and Kingsnorth’s gaze is so intense it forces a similar intensity from the reader. The smallest shift of the light puts us on edge, on our mettle. Will something terrible happen? The moor, an empty church, an empty lane with something glimpsed swiftly crossing it – all are so menacing because they are so minutely themselves. There’s a kind of aching attentiveness necessary to read Beast, but the narrative easily brings it out in you, and the reward is obvious. The more of Kingsnorth’s intensity you survive, the more you can manage: in the end, your gaze has become as minutely focused as his hermit’s. You feel alive.

I’m not sure that I feel so unreservedly admiring of the book as this. There is no question that it’s an intense experience but I also found it teetered too often on the edge of being pretentious and portentous – to me it felt way too conscious of its own sense of ‘depth’ to be an entirely immersive reading experience. The construction of nature as a ‘savage-god’ and the semi-hallucinatory blurring of reality and unreality has been done before and, in my opinion, better than what we have here.

However, having said that, this is still an impressive piece of writing and he is trying to do something profound ( which is always to be applauded) and this in itself makes it worth checking out.

 

Terry Potter

February 2017