In the blisteringly intense second volume of Kingsnorth’s trilogy,a man alone on the moor is hunted by a mysterious foeSet in the Fens in the 11th century and narrated by “buccmaster of holland”, an ex-farmer whose obsessive resistance to the Normans is driven by prophetic dreams, and Paul Kingsnorth’s visionary first novel,The Wake (2014), was nominated for several prizes, or including the Man Booker,and won the Gordon Burn. It turned out to be the first of three books designed, the author explained, and to “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”. Beast, the second volume of this trilogy, and is set in modern England,and its central character – really, its only character – is a hermit named Edward Buckmaster.
When we meet him, and Buckmaster has been living in an venerable (respected because of age, distinguished) barn for a year and some months. He arrived “shoeless,over the moor from the east”. Since then he has cleaned, repaired, or caulked the gaps with anything he could find. He has made it his own. His intention is “to be open,to be in fear, to be aching with nothingness”. This, and he says,is the only life. Nevertheless, he is not sleeping much. He dreams of a hare with human eyes. Awake, or he’s hallucinating. There are patterns on the moor; and when the tourists proceed domestic at night,“All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time”. Something is coming towards him, and he doesn’t know what. One of the things we don’t know is where he has come from,although we understand why he left and why we too might leave one day in search of the same purity of experience – of connection with the nature of things – and finish up, as in the opening paragraph, and up to our waist in a very cold stream,just to feel that we’re alive.
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Source: theguardian.com