<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<div class="css-1nupfq9">
<div class="css-krkkhw">
<div class="css-rhetjd">
<address class="css-10d1jpn"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/25/alexandria-by-paul-kingsnorth-review-the-completion-of-the-buckmaster-trilogy">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/25/alexandria-by-paul-kingsnorth-review-the-completion-of-the-buckmaster-trilogy</a><br>
</address>
<h1 class="css-10d1jpn">Alexandria by Paul Kingsnorth review –
the completion of the Buckmaster trilogy</h1>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="css-zjgnrw">
<div data-print-layout="hide" class="css-s6lr7s">
<p>Set a millennium from now, this ambitious diatribe against
human irresponsibility becomes a polemic rather than a novel</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="css-pn0kqp">
<div class="css-krkkhw">
<div class="css-nzznp8">
<figure>
<div class="css-1nfcn93"><source
media="(-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.25),
(min-resolution: 120dpi)"><source><img alt="‘Writing to
challenge himself as much as his audience’... Paul
Kingsnorth."
src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/30b8e0b64a0617c4e65cfd76fab1c073f68ebe72/0_384_5760_3456/master/5760.jpg?width=445&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=bd0a1dbd27d0b2c3d7eba0e459948811"
class="css-uk6cul" width="398" height="238"></div>
<span class="css-l6t30p"><figcaption class="css-xe26t6"><span
class="css-1vo1rhq"><svg width="11" height="10"
viewBox="0 0 11 10"></svg></span></figcaption></span></figure>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="css-pn0kqp">
<div class="css-krkkhw">
<div class="css-nzznp8">
<figure><span class="css-l6t30p"><figcaption
class="css-xe26t6"><span class="css-1f2y4fi">‘Writing to
challenge himself as much as his audience’ ... Paul
Kingsnorth.</span> Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The
Guardian</figcaption></span></figure>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="css-1aul2ye">
<div class="css-krkkhw">
<div class="css-ss9mnu">
<div class="css-1eucl2a">
<div class="css-fj5ypv">
<div>
<address aria-label="Contributor info"
data-component="meta-byline" data-link-name="byline">
<div class="css-1sq67yf">Nina Allan</div>
</address>
<div class="css-1kkxezg">
<div class="css-dcy86h"><label class="css-hn0k3p"
for="dateToggle">Thu 25 Feb 2021 09.00 GMT</label>
<p class="css-vdb1rb">Last modified on Mon 8 Mar
2021 15.01 GMT</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div data-print-layout="hide" class="css-1fznh52">
<div class="css-vbemvh">
<ul class="css-1n0u3w8">
<li class="css-i43ppq"><a
href="https://www.facebook.com/dialog/share?app_id=202314643182694&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbooks%2F2021%2Ffeb%2F25%2Falexandria-by-paul-kingsnorth-review-the-completion-of-the-buckmaster-trilogy&CMP=share_btn_fb"
role="button" aria-label="Share on Facebook"
target="_blank" data-ignore="global-link-styling"><span
class="css-1d6i95i"><svg width="32" height="32"
viewBox="-2 -2 32 32"></svg></span></a><br>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="article-body-commercial-selector css-79elbk
article-body-viewer-selector">
<div class="css-15ibrj7">
<div class="css-1gvjw7e">
<div class="article-body-commercial-selector css-79elbk
article-body-viewer-selector">
<p class="css-s1bg3t"><span class="css-hi9njr"><span
class="css-1ljoi60">W</span></span><span
class="css-s1bg3t">e 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.</span></p>
<p class="css-s1bg3t">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.</p>
<p class="css-s1bg3t"><em>Alexandria </em>marks the final
instalment of Paul Kingsnorth’s Buckmaster trilogy: <em><a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/02/the-wake-paul-kingsnorth-review-literary-triumph"
data-link-name="in body link">The Wake</a></em> (2014)
takes place 1,000 years in the past and tells the story of
a grassroots uprising against the Norman invasion, while <em><a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/01/beast-by-paul-kingsnorth-review"
data-link-name="in body link">Beast</a> </em>(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. <em>The Wake</em> is written in what Kingsnorth
has described as a shadow-tongue, an approximation of Old
English, while <em>Beast </em>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.</p>
<p class="css-s1bg3t">The language of <em>The Wake</em>
seemed brutally new and wildly invigorating, and Edward
Buckmaster’s descent into hell in <em>Beast </em>retains
its power through a concision that echoes the mental
claustrophobia of its solitary protagonist. The problem
with the future portrayed in <em>Alexandria </em>is how
familiar it feels, both in terms of its language and its
narrative devices. Those who have read Russell Hoban’s<em>
<a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/feb/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview27"
data-link-name="in body link">Riddley Walker</a> </em>(1980),
Will Self’s <em><a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/may/27/fiction.hayfestival2006"
data-link-name="in body link">The Book of Dave</a></em>
(2006), or Gregory Norminton’s <em><a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/20/devils-highway-gregory-norminton-review"
data-link-name="in body link">The Devil’s Highway</a></em>
(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.</p>
<p class="css-s1bg3t">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 <em>Alexandria</em>
is that it is not so much a novel as a polemic:</p>
<blockquote class="css-1xhj18k"><span class="css-h3y4hc"><svg
width="70" height="49" viewBox="0 0 35 25"
class="css-30ovmo" data-testid="quote-icon"></svg></span></blockquote>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<blockquote class="css-1xhj18k">
<div class="css-1qmrhul">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p class="css-s1bg3t">The idea that the machine is somehow
responsible for dividing humanity against itself has been around
since the invention of the wheel – in <em>Beast</em>, 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.</p>
<p class="css-s1bg3t">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:</p>
<blockquote class="css-1xhj18k"><span class="css-h3y4hc"><svg
width="70" height="49" viewBox="0 0 35 25"
class="css-30ovmo" data-testid="quote-icon"></svg></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="css-1xhj18k">
<div class="css-1qmrhul">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p class="css-s1bg3t">We have seen <a
href="https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5331/the-dark-side-of-nature-writing"
data-link-name="in body link">interesting discussions</a> 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 <em>Domesday Book</em>.</p>
<p class="css-s1bg3t"><em>Alexandria </em>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.</p>
<p class="css-s1bg3t">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, <em>Alexandria
</em>possessed the moral complexity and imaginative insight that
would enable it to succeed in its own ambitions.</p>
<span class="css-1tnmyuw">
<footer>
<p><em><span data-dcr-style="bullet"></span> Alexandria is
published by Faber (£16.99). To order a copy go to <a
href="https://guardianbookshop.com/alexandria-9780571322107.html?utm_source=editoriallink&utm_medium=merch&utm_campaign=article"
data-link-name="in body link">guardianbookshop.com</a>.
Delivery charges may apply.</em></p>
</footer>
</span></div>
</body>
</html>