The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth’s Booker-longlisted debut novel, was set just after the Norman Conquest, and was told in an odd hybrid of pseudo-Anglo-Saxon and modern English. Its narrator, Buccmaster of Holland, being displaced by the incoming Frenchies, gathered a group of fighters to resist, holding them together by the strength of his personality. But something more complicated is also going on: Buccmaster, prone to visions, was an unreliable narrator; reading the book was a shocking, difficult but rewarding experience, capturing a moment in time when a whole way of life was almost entirely destroyed.
Zoom forwards 1,000 years or so (the date is not specified) and we come to Beast, billed as the second part in a trilogy. Again our narrator, Edward Buckmaster, is a strong-willed man, bedevilled by things, internal and external, beyond his control. At first it seems he is a simple Luddite, seeking a saint-like experience: ‘I talked but never listened, I sold but never gave away.
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