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angus_mckeogh's review
2.0
Was torn on this one between 1 and 2 stars. So I didn't really not like it entirely. It had a few merits here and there, but ultimately it wasn't very good. I think the biggest strike against it was the brilliance by which I viewed his debut novel, The Wake. This sophomore effort was just bland, and compared to his first book it made this one even more of a disappointment. Just a smidgen away from 1 star.
rastamhadi's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.0
Was hoping to find more of The Wake’s pseudo-Old English, which I enjoyed puzzling through. Or at least a continuation of its plot.
lynbrey's review against another edition
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
bookherd's review
4.0
This is a slender, quick to read book about a man, Edward Buckmaster, who has apparently left his wife and child to live alone in an abandoned stone house on the moors in the west of England. As the book begins, he’s standing in a river for hours, letting his legs go numb. “ I climbed into the river in the early morning and I stood there until the sun was highest in the sky. I let the water take my body away from me so I could see what was beyond my body. I let the river numb me and I understood that I had always been numb. The sky opened a crack, but only a crack. There was still something beyond that I could not touch.” Buckmaster is in search of something, but he doesn’t know what it is, or how he will know if he finds it. We get some hints that the people he left behind tried to dissuade him from doing this. He compares himself to ancient hermits and saints who left civilization behind to live in the wild, closer to God.
Things take a disturbing turn when Buckmaster tries to fix a hole in his roof during a storm and is apparently blown off the roof. The narrative breaks and then picks up again in the middle of a sentence. He’s severely injured, but doesn’t know how it happened. Although his body begins to heal, he becomes disoriented. The landscape seems empty of other living beings, until he catches a glimpse of a large black beast. He becomes obsessed with finding the beast, and at the same time stops eating. Punctuation becomes more sparse in the narrative. It’s hard to know whether what’s happening in the story is real or a hallucination.
I liked this book a lot. I’m a fan of Paul Kingsnorth’s essays, and his novels ( this is his 2nd) add another dimension to his writing about living in the Anthropocene.
Things take a disturbing turn when Buckmaster tries to fix a hole in his roof during a storm and is apparently blown off the roof. The narrative breaks and then picks up again in the middle of a sentence. He’s severely injured, but doesn’t know how it happened. Although his body begins to heal, he becomes disoriented. The landscape seems empty of other living beings, until he catches a glimpse of a large black beast. He becomes obsessed with finding the beast, and at the same time stops eating. Punctuation becomes more sparse in the narrative. It’s hard to know whether what’s happening in the story is real or a hallucination.
I liked this book a lot. I’m a fan of Paul Kingsnorth’s essays, and his novels ( this is his 2nd) add another dimension to his writing about living in the Anthropocene.
cryo_guy's review against another edition
2.0
I started reading this book while reading a few others, but for a 150-some page book I found myself struggling to finish it.
First off, I really loved Kingsnorth's first book in this trilogy of books that "delve into the mythical and actual landscapes of England across two thousand years of time, linked by their related protagonists and by other coincidences and connections." You can check out my review, if you'd like; it's full of praise. I suppose I should also mention that I really like the cover art of this book, like The Wake's.
Spoilers follow.
Beast, unlike The Wake, was completely uncaptivating to me. The first 60 pages detail a man isolated on an English moor, who breaks his leg, and then improvises a routine to heal from the injury. Astoundingly boring. Then after page 60 he starts thinking about more than how much water he needs to drink, how much chocolate he wants to eat, and how many times he takes a walk. He ruminates on actually interesting topics like embodiment (perhaps the most interesting paragraph in the book), his fear of things that grow (weird because isn't he supposed to be returning to nature in some rejection of civilization thing?), and his hatred for Christianity (a continuing, although much much less powerful [and infrequent] theme from The Wake). He sees ominous elements in ordinary things and starts seeing a large black animal that might be hunting him. This may speak to a civilization-nature divide but Edward Buckmaster doesn't really seem that into nature. It seems more like he needs an escape from whatever he left. Other times he has giggle fits and relishes his newly discovered freedom of a completely isolated existence.
Then he wants to track the animal. He makes a plan. He drinks some water. He drinks some more water. Then he says eh whatever. He freaks out about seeing the animal again. HE SAW IT. IT'S REAL.
At 107 we get our first page break. Pages are missing, capitalization starts to drop out commas drop out. THIS MAN MUST BE GOING CRAZY. It turns out, HE IS.
He's had some weird dreams, but dreams are just dreams right? Now he starts having waking dreams. The narration of reality effortlessly slides into dream narration. However is the reader to untangle this web of ambiguous narration? In some ways, this even cheapens the narrative twist which relies on an unreliable narrator in The Wake.
The waking dreams are less revealing for Mr. Buckmaster's past and more revealing for his current insanity. I respect the attempts to recreate the descent into madness, but I must confess I did not find it appealing or intriguing, let alone "shocking or exhilarating." And these attempts, looking at the full-blown "shadow language" of The Wake, pale in comparison.
We get a few details about a potential family, and potential circumstances that could have led to his departure, but nothing resolute. (My theory is he started having symptoms and his family tried to persuade him to stay but he was conflicted and it caused a lot of familial strife then someone got into an argument with his daughter and he went out and murdered the guy and ran off after that--I admit a highly sensationalized reading). From my perspective, the thing most assured of from the course of his hallucinations is his insanity, wherever it came from. The Beast is a big cat which has mystifying eyes (what a clever notion. Too bad it doesn't go anywhere). It is hunting him, maybe. My one consolation from this section is that Odin shows up.
And then the book ends. He pets the cat. Could the Beast be his mental illness? Could it represent his desire to go home? Or maybe his desire to return to nature? I don't know. I'm not sure what the Beast really even means.
I can't really recommend this book to anyone except those who have read The Wake. The prose is fine, the attempt to narratively show the main character break down is not terrible, but everything else about the book is pretty boring. The descriptions of landscapes are simply not as vivid as those of the Wake. The ruminations of various existential and philosophical issues are simply not as interesting or developed as in The Wake (Even with the adjustment for historical context). I tried to give Beast the benefit of the doubt, but for being so short it spends an exorbitant amount of time on Edward's perceptions of his surroundings, and his philosophical insights are at worst naïve and trite, at best, underdeveloped. I'm not saying that a guy who goes loony enough to isolate himself in a British swamp should be a philosophical powerhouse, but I think it could have been more interesting; Or, even, more tied to The Wake (In some ways this was the most underutilized opportunity to make the book better). It would have been great to have the character evolve into a whole meditation on the Buccmaster lineage. To some extent that must be implied, but I would have liked something more explicit. Anything more explicit.
So I hate to give this book a bad review because I loved The Wake and the prose is fine, but I didn't particularly enjoy reading it, not even when it stopped being Hermit in the Fens and became Crazy Hermit in the Fens. There is the possibility that the third book of this series will shed some light on the book, but until then Beast will remain on my bookshelf looking nice with its nice cover art, unpraised by me.
First off, I really loved Kingsnorth's first book in this trilogy of books that "delve into the mythical and actual landscapes of England across two thousand years of time, linked by their related protagonists and by other coincidences and connections." You can check out my review, if you'd like; it's full of praise. I suppose I should also mention that I really like the cover art of this book, like The Wake's.
Spoilers follow.
Beast, unlike The Wake, was completely uncaptivating to me. The first 60 pages detail a man isolated on an English moor, who breaks his leg, and then improvises a routine to heal from the injury. Astoundingly boring. Then after page 60 he starts thinking about more than how much water he needs to drink, how much chocolate he wants to eat, and how many times he takes a walk. He ruminates on actually interesting topics like embodiment (perhaps the most interesting paragraph in the book), his fear of things that grow (weird because isn't he supposed to be returning to nature in some rejection of civilization thing?), and his hatred for Christianity (a continuing, although much much less powerful [and infrequent] theme from The Wake). He sees ominous elements in ordinary things and starts seeing a large black animal that might be hunting him. This may speak to a civilization-nature divide but Edward Buckmaster doesn't really seem that into nature. It seems more like he needs an escape from whatever he left. Other times he has giggle fits and relishes his newly discovered freedom of a completely isolated existence.
Then he wants to track the animal. He makes a plan. He drinks some water. He drinks some more water. Then he says eh whatever. He freaks out about seeing the animal again. HE SAW IT. IT'S REAL.
At 107 we get our first page break. Pages are missing, capitalization starts to drop out commas drop out. THIS MAN MUST BE GOING CRAZY. It turns out, HE IS.
He's had some weird dreams, but dreams are just dreams right? Now he starts having waking dreams. The narration of reality effortlessly slides into dream narration. However is the reader to untangle this web of ambiguous narration? In some ways, this even cheapens the narrative twist which relies on an unreliable narrator in The Wake.
The waking dreams are less revealing for Mr. Buckmaster's past and more revealing for his current insanity. I respect the attempts to recreate the descent into madness, but I must confess I did not find it appealing or intriguing, let alone "shocking or exhilarating." And these attempts, looking at the full-blown "shadow language" of The Wake, pale in comparison.
We get a few details about a potential family, and potential circumstances that could have led to his departure, but nothing resolute. (My theory is he started having symptoms and his family tried to persuade him to stay but he was conflicted and it caused a lot of familial strife then someone got into an argument with his daughter and he went out and murdered the guy and ran off after that--I admit a highly sensationalized reading). From my perspective, the thing most assured of from the course of his hallucinations is his insanity, wherever it came from. The Beast is a big cat which has mystifying eyes (what a clever notion. Too bad it doesn't go anywhere). It is hunting him, maybe. My one consolation from this section is that Odin shows up.
And then the book ends. He pets the cat. Could the Beast be his mental illness? Could it represent his desire to go home? Or maybe his desire to return to nature? I don't know. I'm not sure what the Beast really even means.
I can't really recommend this book to anyone except those who have read The Wake. The prose is fine, the attempt to narratively show the main character break down is not terrible, but everything else about the book is pretty boring. The descriptions of landscapes are simply not as vivid as those of the Wake. The ruminations of various existential and philosophical issues are simply not as interesting or developed as in The Wake (Even with the adjustment for historical context). I tried to give Beast the benefit of the doubt, but for being so short it spends an exorbitant amount of time on Edward's perceptions of his surroundings, and his philosophical insights are at worst naïve and trite, at best, underdeveloped. I'm not saying that a guy who goes loony enough to isolate himself in a British swamp should be a philosophical powerhouse, but I think it could have been more interesting; Or, even, more tied to The Wake (In some ways this was the most underutilized opportunity to make the book better). It would have been great to have the character evolve into a whole meditation on the Buccmaster lineage. To some extent that must be implied, but I would have liked something more explicit. Anything more explicit.
So I hate to give this book a bad review because I loved The Wake and the prose is fine, but I didn't particularly enjoy reading it, not even when it stopped being Hermit in the Fens and became Crazy Hermit in the Fens. There is the possibility that the third book of this series will shed some light on the book, but until then Beast will remain on my bookshelf looking nice with its nice cover art, unpraised by me.
batbones's review
5.0
Where the landscape and language unite, and thought and sensation are bound in the same bundle of nerves, the same unquestioning consciousness. The wildness of language is the wildness of a disorganised mind, a searching mind, and the wild-land over which this figure wanders in search of an elusive creature is both metaphor and real. Kingsnorth brings back with all clarity the force of the word - his words are mostly simple, references to stone, cloud, sky, rain, and the scream unlocked by pain, but he returns the world as it might have been without the distractions of the tv set, or other people's love and expectation. A simple, brutal, sensory world, before the Fall of language that damns language as a referent to a thing rather than being the thing itself. Fuck poststructuralism, when he says stone he means stone, it is a moment where the essence of the thing is laid before the reader's eyes. It is what it is, language becoming stream of consciousness and making capturing the rhythms of experience not just possible but poetically beautiful. Language is no longer the careful putting of one word after another, it is the pulse of life, the flow of things, not narrative but the cinema of experience, language is not a symbol needing translation, but paint. Where a solitary person meets nature, the sensory apparatus expands seemingly to infinity. The feeling one gets from this book is the same as walking through a woodland, or down a misshapen, uneven road in the country, smelling earth, seeing imperfection, roughness, the real.
sonofatreus's review against another edition
3.0
The best thing about Beast is the style of prose. I've heard some compare it to Cormac McCarthy and this isn't totally wrong. It is incomplete though. Kingsnorth's prose only progressively becomes less rigid, or, put another way, it gradually degrades over the course of the novel (first losing some punctuation, then capitalization, then mostly without either). This degradation is directly tied to the story itself, speaking to the mental state of our Buckmaster. Perhaps this is best represented with the few instances where Kingsnorth deliberately breaks off the narrative mid-thought (and mid-word). I found this aspect of the book to be effective and the main reason I kept reading. Given Kingsnorth's brilliant creativity for the first book in this trilogy (the Wake), this should come as no surprise.
As for the story, it was good by the end but could be downright tedious for much of the book. The scenes and lines I did like were drowned by the day to day grind facing the protagonist. By the time the novel ended I was finally getting into the story itself, so I wonder if more time could have been spent in the later half of the book, less on his broken leg.
As for the story, it was good by the end but could be downright tedious for much of the book. The scenes and lines I did like were drowned by the day to day grind facing the protagonist. By the time the novel ended I was finally getting into the story itself, so I wonder if more time could have been spent in the later half of the book, less on his broken leg.
lilbabyratgirl's review against another edition
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.75
If you wanna listen to someone have their very first experience outside of themselves and wax poetic about things you haven't thought were deep since the sixth grade for 200 pages, this is the book for you.
mehsa's review against another edition
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0