...[a] wild and spectacular new novel. It’s a book that strips away civilization’s fripperies in an attempt to discover the savagery beneath and beyond. Kingsnorth wants us to see the world not as we’ve been habituated to see it, through the lenses of technology and capital, but as it is in its primal form ... Beast reads like Samuel Beckett. It’s hard and lean: lean in plot, lean in character (the narrator, Edward Buckmaster, is the only human we encounter), and lean in style. All the fat has been stripped away; only the bones and sinews of language remain ... Walter Pater famously declared that all art aspires to the condition of music. This book suggests that all great art aspires to the condition of theology: It longs to speak of that which exceeds human speech. 'It is so hard to put into words into these clumsy words that say nothing,' Buckmaster laments. But words are all we have, and Kingsnorth’s Beast uses them, clumsy as they are, to get at the nothing and the everything that lurks beneath.
Though it is dense with events and sense of place, the story is as stripped-down an artefact as its prose. A man has chosen to live alone on a moor, and now something, or perhaps everything in the guise of one single thing, seems to be hunting him; while he – sometimes laughing, sometimes frightened, always determined – hunts it in turn. This is perhaps an allegory, and the book examines that possibility as minutely as it examines everything else. The plot is bare, the setting minimal. Visions roll over him, and he loses not just commas, but capital letters ... 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.
The prose in Beast is taut, bare. There is no specific mention of names of individuals or places, only general terms like 'the city' and 'people.' The vagueness is a stylistic choice, but it also serves Kingsnorth’s philosophical purposes. By keeping the specifics of our dying world at arm’s length, his prose winnows down textual reality to approximate essentials. He doesn’t just show us a man surviving, he uses language to illustrate how humans might define survival in the first place ... The novel, its unique prose raw with austere energy, demands close observation. It opens the reader’s eyes to impending destruction while simultaneously promising that survival is possible. Inevitable, even. Perhaps the specifics of that survival await a more nuanced articulation, but, for now, what Beast proffers is access to the minds and emotional lives of characters who endure.
Much of the power of Beast emerges from Kingsnorth’s juxtaposition of stylized language — sometimes rapturous, sometimes fragmented — with descriptions of a harsh landscape. This is a stark book in many senses of the word — just as Buckmaster’s narration has begun to give a sense of his inner self and his life before solitude, he enters into a primal struggle for survival. On its own, this is a taut, thrilling and mystifying narrative. Taken in tandem with The Wake, it forms a powerful meditation on violence, society and the nature of exile. Kingsnorth’s novel is relentless and philosophical, and this uneasy pairing gives it an abundance of raw power.
No synopsis can convey the strangeness of Buckmaster’s experiences, which Kingsnorth voices in tones and moods that shift from prideful, bitter reminiscence to nature ecstasy to remorse, spiraling self-doubt and delusion ... Beast is a cautionary fable for everyone who might hope to evade our current historical impasse by sheer bad faith or by extremes of primitivism, self-seeking or abstraction. It leads readers away from optimism and realism alike, deeper into a new scrutiny of the stories by which we try to make our way.
Whereas Buccmaster, along with the whole of England, is forced into the rest of the world, Edward Buckmaster, who inhabits the same lands one thousand years later in Beast, plucks himself out of it — with no less violence ...Buckmaster's narration becomes increasingly erratic. His isolation is made all the more acute by inexplicable visions and the search for an elusive, catlike beast ...Beast is still engrossing and impressive, and Kingsnorth is at his best when he forces his readers to inhabit a body, to feel the rawness of a mind on the cusp of radical change ... Buccmaster's world ends with integration and modernization, Buckmaster's through a retreat from those same things, plus the vengeful resurgence of nature.
A deceptively slender book, Beast cements Kingsnorth’s reputation as a furiously gifted writer. This is not a comforting novel. It offers questions, answers none of them and leaves the reader with a bracing, hollowed-out feeling. But like the huge creature that haunts its pages, Beast has an uncanny power ... What the creature is, or whether it exists at all, is beside the point. Edward believes. He seeks the beast. And, as with all quests, he finds that wanting is more revelatory than having. With its echoes of Kafka and of dread-filled, myth-driven tales like John Gardner’s Grendel, Kingsnorth’s Beast is as cryptic as it is thrilling. It’s not for everyone, but for those who rise to its challenge, it’s not easily forgotten, either.
It is also a place with limited punctuation, presumably part of Kingsnorth’s strategy to create language to match his narrator’s mental state. Other tactics include beginning and ending sections of the book midword, and imposing a temporary moratorium on capital letters ... He has what might be either dreams or flashbacks. This blurring of memory and invention means Buckmaster’s past remains as opaque as his present. In these moments, Kingsnorth forces readers to ask some central questions: Is Buckmaster a visionary or a sad lunatic? Is his story one of salvation, or an indictment of the false promise of heaven in the face of worldly unhappiness? And is Beast, like the 'thing that walks,' something less exotic than at first it seems?
The good news is that Kingsnorth is a fantastic novelist—lyrical, instinctive, and true. It’s the wild world, the sense of a nation, and a desire for freedom so powerful that it’s the neighbor of insanity which communicate in his fiction … Kingsnorth takes the protagonist of The Wake and brings him forward to our time. He also sends him properly round the bend … It’s a considerable achievement for a writer to pass from one highly distinctive register to another in successive novels, and Kingsnorth pulls it off, punching out a disjointed, staccato English that conveys Buckmaster’s fear and alienation as a storm closes in.
The bare-bones text is fleshed out with allusions and traces of other works. Echoing William Blake’s dictum, Buckmaster notes, 'I needed to create a system.' His predicament recalls that of Chris McCandless, the idealistic young American who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in an attempt to come mystically closer to nature. A dash of Nietszche’s abyss; a hint of Arthurian quest; even the circling camera movements in the moorland scenes of An American Werewolf in London come to mind ... Buckmaster’s frantic dash over the moor also recalls the 'mad' scenes on the heath in King Lear, with one difference: Shakespeare’s moody Dark Age monarch still had a retinue, even if a parodic one, of losers and lunatics; tellingly, modern man has nobody.
Bit by agonizing bit, Buckmaster pries from his painful bodily experiences and his even more painful flights of imagination answers to his profoundest questions about what it means to be a man, a father, a lover, a mortal in a godforsaken, god-haunted polyverse. Readers who, like the protagonist, yearn for answers to such questions will find such by joining him in a psychological maelstrom. Daunting but rewarding, this dazzling work will burnish Kingsnorth’s already luminous reputation.
A nightmare from the liminal world between sanity and insanity, between language and silence ... As Buckmaster unhinges, Kingsnorth’s language becomes an onrushing torrent of words, long passages of internal monologue without much punctuation or capitalization: 'the potato is disgusting my mouth is cracked and dry like glasspaper why did i eat a raw potato what a stupid thing to do.' The effect is one of compelling immediacy as Kingsnorth recounts what it is to live in a time and place that is crumbling at the edges. A tour de force, reminiscent of the best of John Fowles and David Mitchell.
Kingsnorth’s prose rushes on with a frenetic, almost unedited onslaught of garbled thoughts. This stream of consciousness works better if readers let it wash over them and take the slim book down in a single sitting. The blurring between reality and Edward’s distorted thinking is mostly effective, though the historical tangents don’t quite mesh with his disordered mind. Still, the novel richly rewards those who accept its demands with an impressionistic emotional wallop.
