‘Beast’ by Paul Kingsnorth  (2017) – 164 pages

‘Beast’ is what I call an isolation novel.  Like Robinson Crusoe, Paul Buckmaster is a man alone. Buckmaster is a contemporary man who willingly left his village and wife and baby daughter to live by himself in a dilapidated shack out in the West Country English moors.

‘Are you looking for God or looking for your self? she said. Can you even tell the difference any more? … Six years, she said, it’s been six years, and you leave now, at the worst time there could be, and for nothing … You are a child, she said, you always have been, and now I have two children.’

Buckmaster sees his former village life as empty:

“Everywhere there were voices and I added my voice to them and we spoke out together and said nothing at all.”

“I walked the streets, I sat on the couches, I passed through the sliding doors, I talked but never listened, I sold but I never gave away.”  

He went to the wilderness seeking solace:

“I came here to measure myself against the great emptiness.”

‘Back there,’ Buckmaster says of his abandoned life, ‘I was an item, an object, a collection of gears, a library of facts compiled by others, a spark plug in a universal engine, an opinion machine, I was made of plastic and bamboo canes and black bin bags. I walked like I was human and alive but I was neither. I could know anything in an instant and I knew nothing … I need to be in the places where the light comes through, where people are thin on the ground, where the old spirits still mutter in the hedges and the stone rows.’

However by now Buckmaster has gone nearly insane after a year of solitude. ‘Perhaps I am losing my mind,’ he says: ‘I do hope so.’  On one of his long rambling walks through the woods, Buckmaster encounters a beast with penetrating yellow eyes: ‘a long low dark animal with a thin curling tail that it held above the ground as it walks’.  He has no idea what the creature is but is determined to see it again.

Although of course Kingsnorth never comes out and tells us what the Beast means, my own theory is that it represents this man’s guilt over leaving his wife and baby at a critical time.  Perhaps I’m being a little too straightforward and prosaic.

Whenever I read one of these heavy-duty isolation novels, I find myself longing for Jane Austen and her amusing congenial banter across the kitchen table.

Grade:   B+