[D66] [JD: 17] Alexandria by Paul Kingsnorth review

[R.O.]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/25/alexandria-by-paul-kingsnorth-review-the-completion-of-the-buckmaster-trilogy


  Alexandria by Paul Kingsnorth review – the completion of the
  Buckmaster trilogy

Set a millennium from now, this ambitious diatribe against human 
irresponsibility becomes a polemic rather than a novel

‘Writing to challenge himself as much as his audience’... Paul Kingsnorth.

‘Writing to challenge himself as much as his audience’ ... Paul 
Kingsnorth. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Nina Allan

Thu 25 Feb 2021 09.00 GMT

Last modified on Mon 8 Mar 2021 15.01 GMT

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We are 900 years in the future. The catastrophe that ended human 
civilisation has become its own legend. Somewhere in East Anglia, a 
tribe of hunter-gatherers take their living from what the rising waters 
have left of the land. Known simply as the Order, they exist in a state 
of thrall to the Earth-deity they call the Lady. Once a thriving 
community, their numbers are dwindling. Their matriarch blames the 
stalkers, elusive beings that haunt the woods close to the settlement. 
These stalkers, she warns them, are the servants of Wayland, the demon 
who seeks to imprison their souls in the city they call Alexandria. The 
story progresses in short chapters told from alternating points of view. 
Interspersed with these personal accounts we get a series of “cantos”, 
recounting the history of the Order and the ascent of Wayland, who is 
not in fact a demon but a pioneer in post-humanism. Wayland’s doctrines 
preach salvation through the abandonment of the physical self and 
transmigration to a digital existence within a super-collective 
hivemind, Alexandria.

The steady decline in their numbers has aroused in the remaining 
settlers a simmering disquiet. When the wife of one elder begins a 
passionate affair with the son of another, the resulting tension 
threatens to split the community apart. Meanwhile, the Order’s seer 
Yrvidian has prophesied that the world as they know it is soon to end: 
when swans return to the Earth, Alexandria will fall.

/Alexandria /marks the final instalment of Paul Kingsnorth’s Buckmaster 
trilogy: /The Wake 
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/02/the-wake-paul-kingsnorth-review-literary-triumph>/ 
(2014) takes place 1,000 years in the past and tells the story of a 
grassroots uprising against the Norman invasion, while /Beast 
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/01/beast-by-paul-kingsnorth-review> 
/(2016) is set roughly in the present day and follows a man hellbent on 
escaping the disillusion and discontent of modern urban life. Readers of 
the previous volumes will be familiar with the author’s innovative 
approach to language. /The Wake/ is written in what Kingsnorth has 
described as a shadow-tongue, an approximation of Old English, while 
/Beast /starts out in a modern idiom that becomes increasingly 
fragmented as the narrative progresses. In this new novel, members of 
the Order speak a denatured form of English that feels curtailed and 
simplified, with the abandonment of conventional grammar and 
punctuation. The account given by Wayland’s emissary K, by contrast, is 
couched in a brand of officialese familiar from our own time.

The language of /The Wake/ seemed brutally new and wildly invigorating, 
and Edward Buckmaster’s descent into hell in /Beast /retains its power 
through a concision that echoes the mental claustrophobia of its 
solitary protagonist. The problem with the future portrayed in 
/Alexandria /is how familiar it feels, both in terms of its language and 
its narrative devices. Those who have read Russell Hoban’s/Riddley 
Walker 
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/feb/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview27> 
/(1980), Will Self’s /The Book of Dave 
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/may/27/fiction.hayfestival2006>/ 
(2006), or Gregory Norminton’s /The Devil’s Highway 
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/20/devils-highway-gregory-norminton-review>/ 
(2018) will have observed how the language of the far future has 
developed its own lexicography. The question I found myself asking most 
often while reading Kingsnorth’s contribution to this subgenre was why 
the accepted mode of written English for the post-catastrophe era is so 
consistent in its demand for the random capitalisation of proper nouns.

In his summoning of our era’s most urgent themes – environmental 
collapse, the rise of artificial intelligence, the destructive conflict 
between the individual and the collective – Kingsnorth is clearly 
striving for contemporary relevance. Yet the way these themes are 
presented seems disappointingly old-fashioned. The first third of the 
novel has a quality of mystery that draws the reader under its spell; 
sadly, Kingsnorth is not content to let his mysteries speak for 
themselves. The bulk of the book is taken up with long and preachy 
infodumps of the kind familiar from the more heavy-handed variety of 
1950s science fiction novel. Kingsnorth spells out his central thesis in 
almost biblical terms, leaving us in no doubt that the central issue 
with /Alexandria/ is that it is not so much a novel as a polemic:

    most humans chose the Machine, for it completed them, in an
    important way, it was the conclusion of all they had striven for for
    so long, as soon as it began to manifest they grasped it hungrily.
    the machine allowed them to take what was in their mind and paint
    pictures with it, real pictures, everything they could imagine, they
    could create. the great majority of humanity ran full pelt away from
    the messy, dirty, dangerous reality of the physical world and into
    what the Machine offered: the chance to make their dreams manifest.

The idea that the machine is somehow responsible for dividing humanity 
against itself has been around since the invention of the wheel – in 
/Beast/, Edward Buckmaster suggests our problems actually began when we 
learned to make fire – and one of catastrophe fiction’s most dubious 
traits is its desire to decomplicate, to cull the bulk of humanity and 
dream of what might be possible if only we could return the Earth to its 
pristine state.

Yet this kind of literary genocide feels increasingly stale, removing 
the need to examine history’s moral grey areas, ignoring many of the 
systemic injustices that lie behind what Kingsnorth would have us 
interpret more simply as stupidity and greed. Similarly, while he might 
appear to promote gender equality by presenting the Order as a 
matriarchy and God as female, his far-future society seems peculiarly 
obsessed with replicating the heteronormative morality that has so 
rigidly and divisively defined our own:

    Man is made in shape of war and in shape of makin, seekin ...
    without Man no fyr, no warmth. Mans fyr creates, saves, protects ...
    but Mans fyr also destroys ... Man is fyr but Woman is Water ...
    Water is soft, still, beautiful. Water washes away cares, water
    slakes thirst, gives life. Water also drowns.

We have seen interesting discussions 
<https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5331/the-dark-side-of-nature-writing> 
over the past couple of years about the darker side of some nature 
writing: its insistence on the moral superiority of “the old ways”, the 
blanket suggestion that technology is a corrupting influence, most of 
all that there is such a thing as “real” or “deep” Britain, a land of 
lost content blissfully free of carparks and out-of-town shopping 
centres or indeed anyone unable to trace their roots back to the 
/Domesday Book/.

/Alexandria /strays perilously close to this essentialist cliff edge at 
times. The ways in which we are all to an extent complicit in the more 
unpalatable aspects of our history, those for whom English is not a 
first language, a sense of compassion for human animals who happen to 
enjoy Netflix, KFC or modern medicine – such nuances are absent from the 
narrative even by inference, and the novel’s argument is rendered 
one-dimensional as a result.

This is a passionately argued, often furious diatribe against the human 
irresponsibility that has helped to trigger the crisis of our present 
moment. Kingsnorth is clearly writing to challenge himself as much as 
his audience, and his greatest strength lies, as ever, in the power and 
vision of his landscape writing. I just wish that, as a novel, 
/Alexandria /possessed the moral complexity and imaginative insight that 
would enable it to succeed in its own ambitions.

/Alexandria is published by Faber (£16.99). To order a copy go to 
guardianbookshop.com 
<https://guardianbookshop.com/alexandria-9780571322107.html?utm_source=editoriallink&utm_medium=merch&utm_campaign=article>. 
Delivery charges may apply./

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