Book review: Embracing annihilation in the face of a doomed Earth
Paul Kingsnorth. Picture: Claire McNamee
AT his smallholding in West Galway Paul Kingsnorth has built a compost toilet. He and his family live in a mode that is alien to the traditional one he knew as a child in Worcester, England. After grammar school and the University of Oxford, Kingsnorth became an environmental activist and then a mainstream journalist. One of his younger twin brothers works for Friends of the Earth and the other for Citibank. This unbalancing dichotomy, still symbolised by his siblings’ choices, culminated in the feeling that either or both options forced him to commit to a world doomed to extinction. He thinks it is impossible for people to fix the planet. So he went to the western edge.
Activism and public life gave way to self isolation – writing from a hut permeated by damp Atlantic frets. Alexandria is the final part of his apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic Buckmaster Trilogy and it has a strong message. We who live now will not inherit the earth. We will not even, like Finnegas, prepare the soon-to-be hero Finn McCool, for the knowledge that comes to the eater of the salmon. Our ideas, education and received wisdom are misguided, wrong and utterly useless. The way we live is doomed and, alongside it, we will fall. In Alexandria, set a thousand years in the future, all this has happened.
What we might term civilisation has long gone and so has our race, we who invented all narratives, including the tale in which human beings control the planet and see its elements as resources. Kingsnorth foresees a time when natural forces have reasserted ownership leaving only one small group of survivors at Edg, in the re-flooded fenlands. The landscape, previously drained by eighteenth century engineers, has rewilded itself, becoming as inhospitable as ever it was.
The elders know that when swans return to the skies and the waters, Alexandria will fall. They know this through their ability to commune with birds and their sensitivity to the moon and to the holt, or forest. It is not easy to understand Alexandria since the narrative, constructed of the voices of each character, and their cantos or psalms, is written in an English unlike ours. It has no Latinate or polysyllabic words and eschews terms relating to our anthropocene epoch. Besides, Kingsnorth states that we no longer need tales and so he presents his novel in monologues which have no need to communicate with us, or to tell us a story. It is a tricky project to undertake – that of writing himself out of his trade, leaving himself with nothing to do but sit and watch.
Ellie Robins, a journalist, editor and translator, wrote in an interview, recorded with Kingsnorth last year, that she had suffered breakdowns after reading each of his books. His apparent nihilism is problematic for many active environmentalists who see him as having thrown in the towel. Conversely he thinks their efforts to save the planet are harmful, contributing to further damage. Kingsnorth seems to prefer to sit within a circle of self-planted Scots pines, in Buddha-like contemplation, awaiting the end of days and anticipating a natural recovery, free of mankind and his violent machinations.
Faber & Faber, who publish Beast and Alexandria, although The Wake was crowd-funded, think that Kingsnorth is a great writer, as good they say as Robert Graves, Ted Hughes, David Peace and William Golding. These three tales of our misbegotten race are only for the fearless, for those who can look annihilation in the face and welcome it to the world.
- Alexandria
- Paul Kingsnorth
- Faber & Faber hb €28.30
