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A review by sonofatreus
Alexandria by Paul Kingsnorth
2.0
I generally didn't care for this book for most of it. I almost quit it entirely somewhere around 1/4 through, but finished it out of my love for The Wake, the first of this trilogy. I came around a little more to it in the latter half, but it still wasn't my jam.
Like The Wake, this mostly isn't written in modern English. Here, it's another shadow tongue, I suppose, projecting what English might be like several hundred years in the future. Some of Kingsnorth's choices make sense (there are fewer double consonants like "ck" when a simple "k" will do; several double vowel diphthongs are also reduced), but others are real head scratchers (I'm not sure why "yesterday" would become "yester day" or "another" become "an other" (if anything, I'd guess that become "a nother")). There's also relatively little punctuation, and grammatical structure is looser. Some pronouns, like "my" are gone in favor of "me." On the whole, I found it pretty readable, if puzzling sometimes.
In terms of the story, it's set several hundred years after humanity has completely screwed up the earth with climate change. There are only a handful of humans left, and most animals seem to be gone too. At the same time, there is still this AI construct that exists at a distance. The story involves the handful of humans interacting with an emissary of that AI, who is trying to recruit them individually to join in the construct. It sounds like a stand-in for Heaven, but the remaining humans have their own religious system that makes this seem threatening to them. They even have a mythology, clearly derived from Christianity/Judaism, wherein a certain Sir Pent once deceived humans and set them on their course to ruin (
Like The Wake, this mostly isn't written in modern English. Here, it's another shadow tongue, I suppose, projecting what English might be like several hundred years in the future. Some of Kingsnorth's choices make sense (there are fewer double consonants like "ck" when a simple "k" will do; several double vowel diphthongs are also reduced), but others are real head scratchers (I'm not sure why "yesterday" would become "yester day" or "another" become "an other" (if anything, I'd guess that become "a nother")). There's also relatively little punctuation, and grammatical structure is looser. Some pronouns, like "my" are gone in favor of "me." On the whole, I found it pretty readable, if puzzling sometimes.
In terms of the story, it's set several hundred years after humanity has completely screwed up the earth with climate change. There are only a handful of humans left, and most animals seem to be gone too. At the same time, there is still this AI construct that exists at a distance. The story involves the handful of humans interacting with an emissary of that AI, who is trying to recruit them individually to join in the construct. It sounds like a stand-in for Heaven, but the remaining humans have their own religious system that makes this seem threatening to them. They even have a mythology, clearly derived from Christianity/Judaism, wherein a certain Sir Pent once deceived humans and set them on their course to ruin (