Edward
Buckmaster has been living alone on the northwestern moors of England for “five
seasons.” He keeps largely to himself, even from the reader; we don’t know much
about until; later. ‘From the east I came to this high place,” he says, “to be
broken, to be torn apart, beaten, cut into pieces. I came here to measure
myself against the great emptiness.” What we don’t know is whether that great
emptiness is what he came to or what he came from.
For five
seasons, he lives his chosen life. And then comes a storm. When he awakens, he
finds himself in the yard outside a farmhouse; he’s seriously injured with what
looks like a broken knee, severe pain in his chest, and five claw marks across
his stomach. He’s also disoriented; everything seems strange, including the
sky, which has become entirely white. He hears no birds, and no other sounds.
Beast by British novelist and writer Paul Kingsnorth is one of most unusual
novels I’ve read. It’s the second in what Kingsnorth calls the “Buckmaster
Trilogy” (the first being The
Wake) but it’s a standalone novel. The time for the narrative is likely
contemporary, but the only clues are a reference to a sleeping bag and a bottle
of pain relievers. Beast has many of
the trappings of a dystopian novel, but it’s not one in the commonly understood
sense. The dystopia seems to lie more inside Edward Buckmaster, a man who
thought he knew what he was doing but finds himself unmoored and untethered.
After a
period of recovering from his injuries, Buckmaster goes walking to find other
people and to find food. But he only finds two things: an empty church dating
back to Anglo-Saxon times and a glimpse of a large, dark animal moving quickly
across the unpaved road. The church offers no answers, so he goes looking for
the beast, as it calls it, mapping out a grid on a map that will allow him to
search one square mile every day.
 |
| Paul Kingsnorth |
Buckmaster
will indeed find the beast, but not when or where he’s looking for it.
Beast is a
one-character story often told in broken and run-on sentences and without the
use of quotation marks (since Buckmaster rarely actually speaks, the quotation
marks aren’t needed). It’s about a man’s relationship to the land and with
himself. It’s about both exterior and interior landscapes. It’s about finding
peace.
It’s a
strangely beautiful story.
Top photograph, an aerial view of the moors near Oxenhope, England, by
Richard Horne via Unsplash.
Used with permission.
On most days, it’s difficult to find a crowd at the reserve. One can walk the trails and perhaps pass one or two or perhaps as many as three people. Many times, I’ve walked the five-mile-round-trip river trail and not seen a single person or head a single man-made noise other than the sound of my feet on the gravel path. The trail ends at the Meramec River, and one can walk out on the gravel sand bars and simply watch the river flow. 
