We are 900 years in the future. The catastrophe that ended human civilisation has become its own legend. Somewhere in East Anglia, a tribe of hunter-gatherers take their living from what the rising waters have left of the land. Known simply as the Order, they exist in a state of thrall to the Earth-deity they call the Lady. Once a thriving community, their numbers are dwindling. Their matriarch blames the stalkers, elusive beings that haunt the woods close to the settlement. These stalkers, she warns them, are the servants of Wayland, the demon who seeks to imprison their souls in the city they call Alexandria. The story progresses in short chapters told from alternating points of view. Interspersed with these personal accounts we get a series of “cantos”, recounting the history of the Order and the ascent of Wayland, who is not in fact a demon but a pioneer in post-humanism. Wayland’s doctrines preach salvation through the abandonment of the physical self and transmigration to a digital existence within a super-collective hivemind, Alexandria.
The steady decline in their numbers has aroused in the remaining settlers a simmering disquiet. When the wife of one elder begins a passionate affair with the son of another, the resulting tension threatens to split the community apart. Meanwhile, the Order’s seer Yrvidian has prophesied that the world as they know it is soon to end: when swans return to the Earth, Alexandria will fall.
Alexandria marks the final instalment of Paul Kingsnorth’s Buckmaster trilogy: The Wake (2014) takes place 1,000 years in the past and tells the story of a grassroots uprising against the Norman invasion, while Beast (2016) is set roughly in the present day and follows a man hellbent on escaping the disillusion and discontent of modern urban life. Readers of the previous volumes will be familiar with the author’s innovative approach to language. The Wake is written in what Kingsnorth has described as a shadow-tongue, an approximation of Old English, while Beast starts out in a modern idiom that becomes increasingly fragmented as the narrative progresses. In this new novel, members of the Order speak a denatured form of English that feels curtailed and simplified, with the abandonment of conventional grammar and punctuation. The account given by Wayland’s emissary K, by contrast, is couched in a brand of officialese familiar from our own time.
The language of The Wake seemed brutally new and wildly invigorating, and Edward Buckmaster’s descent into hell in Beast retains its power through a concision that echoes the mental claustrophobia of its solitary protagonist. The problem with the future portrayed in Alexandria is how familiar it feels, both in terms of its language and its narrative devices. Those who have read Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), or Gregory Norminton’s The Devil’s Highway (2018) will have observed how the language of the far future has developed its own lexicography. The question I found myself asking most often while reading Kingsnorth’s contribution to this subgenre was why the accepted mode of written English for the post-catastrophe era is so consistent in its demand for the random capitalisation of proper nouns.
In his summoning of our era’s most urgent themes – environmental collapse, the rise of artificial intelligence, the destructive conflict between the individual and the collective – Kingsnorth is clearly striving for contemporary relevance. Yet the way these themes are presented seems disappointingly old-fashioned. The first third of the novel has a quality of mystery that draws the reader under its spell; sadly, Kingsnorth is not content to let his mysteries speak for themselves. The bulk of the book is taken up with long and preachy infodumps of the kind familiar from the more heavy-handed variety of 1950s science fiction novel. Kingsnorth spells out his central thesis in almost biblical terms, leaving us in no doubt that the central issue with Alexandria is that it is not so much a novel as a polemic:
most humans chose the Machine, for it completed them, in an important way, it was the conclusion of all they had striven for for so long, as soon as it began to manifest they grasped it hungrily. the machine allowed them to take what was in their mind and paint pictures with it, real pictures, everything they could imagine, they could create. the great majority of humanity ran full pelt away from the messy, dirty, dangerous reality of the physical world and into what the Machine offered: the chance to make their dreams manifest.
The idea that the machine is somehow responsible for dividing humanity against itself has been around since the invention of the wheel – in Beast, Edward Buckmaster suggests our problems actually began when we learned to make fire – and one of catastrophe fiction’s most dubious traits is its desire to decomplicate, to cull the bulk of humanity and dream of what might be possible if only we could return the Earth to its pristine state.
Yet this kind of literary genocide feels increasingly stale, removing the need to examine history’s moral grey areas, ignoring many of the systemic injustices that lie behind what Kingsnorth would have us interpret more simply as stupidity and greed. Similarly, while he might appear to promote gender equality by presenting the Order as a matriarchy and God as female, his far-future society seems peculiarly obsessed with replicating the heteronormative morality that has so rigidly and divisively defined our own:
Man is made in shape of war and in shape of makin, seekin ... without Man no fyr, no warmth. Mans fyr creates, saves, protects ... but Mans fyr also destroys ... Man is fyr but Woman is Water ... Water is soft, still, beautiful. Water washes away cares, water slakes thirst, gives life. Water also drowns.
We have seen interesting discussions over the past couple of years about the darker side of some nature writing: its insistence on the moral superiority of “the old ways”, the blanket suggestion that technology is a corrupting influence, most of all that there is such a thing as “real” or “deep” Britain, a land of lost content blissfully free of carparks and out-of-town shopping centres or indeed anyone unable to trace their roots back to the Domesday Book.
Alexandria strays perilously close to this essentialist cliff edge at times. The ways in which we are all to an extent complicit in the more unpalatable aspects of our history, those for whom English is not a first language, a sense of compassion for human animals who happen to enjoy Netflix, KFC or modern medicine – such nuances are absent from the narrative even by inference, and the novel’s argument is rendered one-dimensional as a result.
This is a passionately argued, often furious diatribe against the human irresponsibility that has helped to trigger the crisis of our present moment. Kingsnorth is clearly writing to challenge himself as much as his audience, and his greatest strength lies, as ever, in the power and vision of his landscape writing. I just wish that, as a novel, Alexandria possessed the moral complexity and imaginative insight that would enable it to succeed in its own ambitions.
• Alexandria is published by Faber (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
