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Nancy J Runyan

KIND OF ... WEIRD

Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2020

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Well, you never do find out if the protagonist is crazy, having some kind of near-death experience, or maybe, is dead already and this is the afterlife. It’s all very mysterious, though well-written. However, the protagonist is kind of a dick, so I couldn’t talk myself into caring.

John K Russoniello

While not as strong or gripping as Kingsnorth's The Wake ...

Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2018

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While not as strong or gripping as Kingsnorth's The Wake, Beast modernizes his formless, semi-stream-of-conciousness style. Without the linguistic gymnastics of his previous work, though, Beast feels flat and without stakes, an exercise as opposed to a final work. Kingsnorth is a strong writer capable of truly eloquent prose, but this novel seems lost in a fog, hunting for a large cat.

Skh

A surprisingly unappealing main character

Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2021

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I found the protagonist so unappealing that the book became unreadable, which I was very disappointed about. Mr Kingsnorth does seem to enjoy having thoroughly unlikeable characters as the principals of his novels.

Josef Vindu ka

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2017

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I was thrilled with The Wake. This one I did not quite grasp. Too dreamy, ethereal, experimental...

Annabelle

Nope

Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2017

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Not for me.

John L. Murphy

In-depth (to a point!) review

Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2017

Disenchanted by his efforts to save the planet, Paul Kingsnorth retreats. He co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, a “global network of writers, artists, and thinkers in search of new stories for a world on the brink,” which explores what ideas, images and narratives may sustain humanity during its doom. Instead of hope, Kingsnorth counsels engagement. His new essay collection’s title sums up his stance: Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. Released in tandem, his novel Beast sustains disorienting responses of awe and woe from a recluse trapped on an Earth whose men and women poison and poke. Part of a projected trilogy, it dramatizes the plight of a refugee caught within chaos.

In 2014’s The Wake, Kingsnorth reduced his English word-hoard to its Anglo-Saxon origins, conveying the consciousness of Buccmaster of Holland in the fenlands of Lincolnshire. He and a small guerrilla band fight back in the wake of the Norman Conquest, as its troops and bureaucrats wipe out the native language and laws. Limiting his vocabulary in a manner reminiscent of Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic Riddley Walker, Kingsnorth conveys in Beast the mindset of a desperate fugitive.

The forest offers no idyll. Neither does the shack near the moor where Buccmaster of Holland’s presumed descendant, a thousand years on, has sought uneasy refuge. Instead of warriors or judges, the titular foe Edward Buckmaster fends off remains occluded. Literally, for whatever bestial threat it assumes, this beast lurks less in sight than in sense. Buckmaster finds its tracks crossing his path in a nearby village. “I brushed my hand across its dust and it was as real as the thing that made it.” He tracks it in turn. His methods resemble the schemes—half-mad, half-rational—of the characters assigned exacting tasks in the skewed satires of Magnus Mills, in experimental fables such as The Restraint of Beasts.

Edward recently left the “screen-dumb” multitudes of our “dying West.” An “animal shift” towards the elemental attracts him to what is “calling us home.” At a dwelling little more than a tumbledown shed, a storm shatters its tarpaulin—and the print on the page itself. Mid-sentence, it will halt. His story resumes after a gap of two blank sheets. This conceit repeats twice, as the plot pulls Buckmaster into his hobbled pursuit of not only the mysterious beast, but his own odd impetus.

He is drawn away from shelter. Nearly starving, wearing a single outfit, he heals himself from the damage wrought by the tempest. “Broken in the broken place I had to walk into the whiteness.” Heat and glare dominate whatever this English landscape has become. No living thing is seen in the novel except a trace of the beast. The reasons for this depopulation lurk as unstated, similar to the catalyst that destroys our civilization in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Kingsnorth echoes the decaying prose of Samuel Beckett’s later prose poems, and punctuation drifts off, followed by the loss of a capital “I” as the subject linked to Buckmaster himself dissolves into an eerie oneness. This interdependence on the chaotic “nothingness” increasingly evoked as the story totters along displays to him the “essence of everything.” This revelation may terrify or it may comfort as Buckmaster undergoes his vision quest.

A reader’s patience will be tested by the logic of this pursuit, a miasma that requires an observer determined to stare down fear. The aims Kingsnorth articulates in his project, repeated in his fiction, demand a refusal of terms or actions that can be pinned down. No facile explanation will suffice, and much is left unsaid. Perhaps the conclusion of what his publisher labels as “The Buckmaster Trilogy” will explain the perplexing and unresolved encounters, which here, as in The Wake, are vividly conjured.

A strangely beautiful story

Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2018

Edward Buckmaster has been living alone on the northwestern moors of England for “five seasons.” He keeps largely to himself, even from the reader; we don’t know much about until; later. ‘From the east I came to this high place,” he says, “to be broken, to be torn apart, beaten, cut into pieces. I came here to measure myself against the great emptiness.” What we don’t know is whether that great emptiness is what he came to or what he came from.

For five seasons, he lives his chosen life. And then comes a storm. When he awakens, he finds himself in the yard outside a farmhouse; he’s seriously injured with what looks like a broken knee, severe pain in his chest, and five claw marks across his stomach. He’s also disoriented; everything seems strange, including the sky, which has become entirely white. He hears no birds, and no other sounds.

“Beast” by British novelist and writer Paul Kingsnorth is one of most unusual novels I’ve read. It’s the second in what Kingsnorth calls the “Buckmaster Trilogy” (the first being “The Wake”) but it’s a standalone novel. The time for the narrative is likely contemporary, but the only clues are a reference to a sleeping bag and a bottle of pain relievers. Beast has many of the trappings of a dystopian novel, but it’s not one in the commonly understood sense. The dystopia seems to lie more inside Edward Buckmaster, a man who thought he knew what he was doing but finds himself unmoored and untethered.

After a period of recovering from his injuries, Buckmaster goes walking to find other people and to find food. But he only finds two things: an empty church dating back to Anglo-Saxon times and a glimpse of a large, dark animal moving quickly across the unpaved road. The church offers no answers, so he goes looking for the beast, as it calls it, mapping out a grid on a map that will allow him to search one square mile every day.

Buckmaster will indeed find the beast, but not when or where he’s looking for it.

Kingsnorth is the author of the two novels, “The Wake” (2015) and “Beast” (2017), and a collection of poems, “Kidland: And Other Poems” (2011). He’s also the author of three non-fiction works: “One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement” (2003);” Real England: The Battle Against the Bland” (2009); and “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays” (2017).

“Beast” is a one-character story often told in broken and run-on sentences and without the use of quotation marks (since Buckmaster rarely actually speaks, the quotation marks aren’t needed). It’s about a man’s relationship to the land and with himself. It’s about both exterior and interior landscapes. It’s about finding peace.

It’s a strangely beautiful story.

Mabel

Gripping, surreal, interesting.

Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2022

Kingsnorth is one of the most underrated contemporary authors. I love his language, use of surrealism and unreliable narrator, and super interesting ideas. Great book, quite short but gripping.

Top reviews from other countries

David Simpson

Kindle edition missing chunks of content

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 5, 2022

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Very much enjoying the book, but my kindle version seems to have bits missing. I don’t know whether this is a bug or a feature. See screenshot above of table of contents - p 22, 110, 162 all have missing text, hard to tell how much.

MisterHobgoblin

Psychogeography?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 25, 2016

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I was a big fan of Paul Kingsnorth's previous novel, Wake. That took us into ancient England, seeing feudal warring, fear and flight.

Beast is, dare I say it, a different beast. Whereas Wake's pseudo-mediaeval language was a barrier for some, the difficulty with Beast is that the modern English is used to tell an impenetrable story. Initially we meet a man living in a stone room, somewhere on an unspecified moor, caught between running away from something and searching for something. He seems to be unable to move beyond a church - constantly finding himself back on the same stretch of road. In subsequent sections, a strange black cat appears.

That's about as much as one can say without spoilers.

The four sections begin and end in mid word. Some sections lack capital letters and have unconventional punctuation, whilst others use more normal language. There are strange references to tropical plantlife - plantains, for example - and the weather seems to flit from cold and misty to arid and hot. The setting is both bleak moorland and the edge of a great city with shanties. In trying to make sense of this, the best I could come up with was four separate narrators, each in some kind of different temporal existence in the same space, whilst the land showed traces of all stages of its existence dating back to pre-historic mangroves. I wondered whether the narrators could be ghosts - one seemed to have been injured badly with scratches and lacerations and one was called Edward Buckmaster, the principal character in Wake.

I am sure there is something profound going on, and psychogeographers would have a field day trying to unravel it all. But for this reader, at least, the interesting ideas did not completely work on the page. It was all a bit disjointed, fragmentary, and directionless. And, frankly, a bit repetitive.

Beast is not a long book, more of a novella if anything, and that is a blessing. At this length, the ideas just about balance out the frustration. But had it been much longer, I suspect it would have outstayed its welcome.

Colin

almost unreadable

Reviewed in Canada on November 8, 2022

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I wanted to like this book as it came recommended to me. I enjoyed it at first, but then got frustrating and frankly boring. I know the author was trying to do something innovative with the style, but it went overboard to the point of absurdity and annoyance.

Also, this is better characterized as a short story than a novel.

WeAreWhatWeRead

When a novel is not a novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 2, 2017

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Forget what the blurbs are saying. This is NOT a novel, and people who are looking to be entertained or escape by reading an actual story about some characters, 'Beast' will disappoint on all levels. There is a story of sorts, but a novel this little book ain't.
What it is, it's a long, colorful, beautifully thought-out and skillfully written meditation about, I would sum up, existential angst. Highly personal and yet with universal appeal, kind of what I imagine Saint Augustine would say in the 21st century -- profound musings with some vigorous philosophical shouting and screaming included. If, and only if, this sort of thing appeals to you, sit yourself down with this book and prepare to be patient and to have to think hard. When you do, you shall be rewarded for sure.

Amazon Customer

Questionable Experiment

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 12, 2022

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The narrative style is fast-paced and original, but I found the book too rambling to be enjoyable. Lack of character made it hard to engage with.

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