What does it say about England that her greatest living writer lives in exile on the west coast of Ireland? For some years now, Paul Kingsnorth has lived in rural Galway, tending a small farm with his young family, cutting hay with a scythe, and alternating visionary works of fiction with doom-laden essays on environmental collapse and the totalitarian seductions of late modernity. He is, perhaps, the English equivalent of Michel Houellebecq (another former exile to Ireland’s bleak and rural western lands). But instead of submission, Kingsnorth urges retreat and then resistance. Whereas Houellebecq is fixated on the supermarkets and holiday villages of modern France, Kingsnorth’s imagination, like his life, takes him to the last wild places of the British isles, to the moors and fens, to the rain-lashed Atlantic coast, and to the mythical Dark Mountain after which he named his deep ecological writing collective.
A lifetime environmental activist and journalist, Kingsnorth’s alienation from the modern green movement, which he dismisses as captured by corporate interests, has led him into deeper and more turbulent waters. Where a perennial melancholy streak in the British imagination ponders decline, Kingsnorth’s mind leaps forward to collapse. Fusing his unfashionable support for Brexit with his dreamlike evocations of Britain’s landscapes, Kingsnorth can be seen as a green nationalist of a uniquely English type, still railing against the Norman yoke and seeking a path back to the eternal Greenwood. In his essays, which sympathetically quote Theodore Kaczynski and insist on the looming inevitability of our civilization’s destruction, Kingsnorth has marked out his terrain as the black-pilled laureate of modern Britain. His recent revelation, in an interview with Rod Dreher, that he has reverted to his “own ancestral faith, Christianity,” signifies an intriguing and not unexpected new direction for a writer of such powerful, pagan sensibility.
All these strands of Kingsnorth’s life and work join together in his latest novel, Alexandria, the conclusion of his Buckmaster Trilogy. In The Wake, the first of the series, Kingsnorth offered us, in a vigorously Germanic reinterpretation of Old English, the tragedy of Buccmaster of the Lincolnshire fens, a Saxon man against time, fighting and failing to keep his world together in the aftermath of the Norman invasion. In Beast, a short masterpiece of spare and visionary prose, his descendant Edward Buckmaster abandons his family and suburban modernity to live alone on the high moors, hunted by an oppressive and hallucinatory natural world. In Alexandria, set 1,000 years in the future, we find ourselves in a small, primitive community, scratching a living from yams and sugar cane in the hot and sweltering fens of what was once East Anglia, where “bambu is high, air full of Skito and Mij.” In the simplified English that has become the accepted register of post-apocalyptic fiction, we learn that “this heat was not always here, air was not always wet, beneath Waters are forests and cities from Atlantean times.” It is “nine hundred years since Atlantis fell, since Alexandria was built, since Waters rose, since great heat, great dyin come over Erth.”
The few survivors of this great conflagration are part tribal community, part monastic order. Protected from the outside world by their great “hedge of Yoo and Horn and Bow,” they live around a “Cloyster” and “Lady Chappel,” sculpting totem poles to the birds they worship as bringers of wisdom and harbingers of a great salvation. A struggling matriarchy, their worship of the Gravesian “great Lady” seems designed to inoculate themselves from the oppressive presence of “the Machine” and its malign and superhuman intelligence Wayland, which, they dimly perceive, has wrought this great catastrophe.
Through the Order’s fearful mantra that “in mind, in word, in Machine is deth,” the central, anti-technological drift of Kingsnorth’s essays is finally made explicit. “Wayland will tempt you, offer you riches,” we are warned, “he knows all minds, he will give you what you most seek, and then you will be trapped.” The appeal of technology and of progress is explicitly likened to that of “Sir Pent,” who holds out progress “like Appels just fallen from Tree” to seduce us weak and selfish humans: In fiction as in life, Kingsnorth’s pagan mysticism now adopts a Christian framing.
But the Order’s simple and restricted life of primitive rites and coming of age rituals is imperiled by adultery within the narrow confines of the clan. The baser human passions are already threatening to destroy the last surviving world of man when the threat from without materializes, that of the Machine in semi-human form.
The red “stalker” K, the “meta-human” emissary of the mysterious and feared Alexandria, the techno-optimist online paradise at the novel’s heart, can be read as Kingsnorth’s first, sustained assault against liberalism as well as tech utopianism. Speaking in the prissy and bloodless standard English of a malign C-3PO, he declares in his sales pitch to his fearful human prey, “I have no sex, no race, no tribe, no attachments, no tastes, no opinions, no prejudices, no mother, no father, no family, no home, no history. Thus, I am liberated.” Indeed, he emphasizes, “Many humans were like me at the last. It was a project for a while amongst some of the elites.”
When K mocks the tribal simplicity of the Edg folk, we think of Kingsnorth, the self-critical essayist of home-crafted compost toilets and the manual labor of the scythe, voicing his own doubts through the dismissive tones of the enlightened meta-human. It is “a kind of regressive paradisiacal primitivism,” K remarks, a false and backward hope that “if you can drop the literacy and the conceptual thought, ease yourself back down into the mud, live simply, renounce complex technologies, speak to the birds, you can live as one of them again.” There is no going back, K insists, only the liberation of plugging yourself into Alexandria and leaving behind the regressive human attachments of kin and kind and land.
So familiar is K’s increasingly hysteric vision of “eternal progress” — its preaching of “total equality” and “a world with no war, no hatred, no starvation, no superstition,” its angry shrieks that “biology is a crime! Biology means ignorance, stasis, division, injustice” — that the deep-rooted but hidden conservatism of Kingsnorth’s writing is finally brought to the surface. No wonder, then, that K accuses the last of Erth’s humans of being “ludicrous, childish, reactionary” for refusing to follow its path into the future: In the character of K, the bitterly clearsighted voice of Kingsnorth’s essay-writing threatens, at times, to break the novel’s spell.
It would not be a Kingsnorth novel if salvation was not to be searched for and found in the hallowed landscapes of “old Albion.” Summoning the power of “those who stand in long line behind, walking bak through time,” of “those who have made me,” and of his sacred attachment to the ground beneath his feet, the novel’s visionary seer and paterfamilias, desperate to save his tribe, fuses with the author himself.
On the desperate quest across the flooded wastes of what was once England, to the sacred height of Glastonbury Tor, “old holy hart of this holy isle,” Kingsnorth’s tragic, mystic engagement with the land of England reaches its climax. “Land speaks here to those who listen,” we are told, “to those who know words,” and we are left certain the author has been listening. Concluding his dark and powerful Buckmaster Trilogy on “Avlon,” the sacred hill that, “ridged like great old wight, like Sir Pent curled around old World Tree,” Kingsnorth has finally traveled beyond literature into myth, cementing his title as a profoundly religious writer of uniquely English stamp. His pagan sensibility, rooted in the land, now reflects his own Christian awakening, and his tragic, epic vision now concludes on a final, fragile note of hope.
Aris Roussinos is a writer and a journalist and a contributing editor at UnHerd. He lives in southeast England.
