Alexandria

Starred review from August 1, 2020
Kingsnorth completes his quirky trilogy of novels set in the Norfolk fens with a post-apocalyptic story of the far future. As The Wake (2015) opened with events of a thousand years ago, so Kingsnorth's latest opens a millennium from now, "nine hunnerd years since Atlantis fell, since Alexandria was built." His protagonists are part tribe, part religious community who survive in the marshes after civilization's collapse and remember the distant past in chants and invocations: "Now World shall be as it should / For Machine is come" they sing of "the reign of Man." They are not alone in the fens: A "Catt"--the hidden, dangerous figure that lurks in both The Wake and Beast (2017)--has been spotted, scaring some but not all; says an awestruck character named El, "every day now i am goin to Tree and lookin for him." Kingsnorth's characters speak in patois, blending prose poem and verse, calling to mind Russell Hoban. When the young acolyte named Lorenso comes into contact with another lurker, though, a red-cloaked figure of monstrous visage called K., the language shifts into the sturdy standard English of the present. The reasons aren't quite clear for that, but Kingsnorth deserves points for the hat trick of writing the three novels in the series in distinct linguistic registers that suggest past, present, and future. K. instructs Lorenzo in the error of human ways: "Man was tempted, Man took power over all life. This is your fragmentary, mythologised version of what happened more than a millennium ago. You have now seen a little of what the exercise of that power amounted to." He promises the rewards that the celestial city of Alexandria and its divine ruler, Wayland, offer, but alas, that god appears to be dead or just not listening, and the shape-shifting, quick-thinking K. finds himself stuck with the rest of what has survived of the tribe, moored in the muck and mire, but to oddly optimistic ends. Imaginative, moody, brilliantly written--vintage Kingsnorth, that is, and a boon for readers of speculative fiction.

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October 26, 2020
Kingsnorth’s underwhelming ecofable—the last of a trilogy, after Beast—focuses on the few surviving members of a separatist religious sect in what is left of eastern England, 1,000 years in the future. Sfia, married to Nzil, has been sleeping with the community’s other young adult man, the grown child of their elder leaders. Sfia venerates the goddess Lady, whose naturalist teachings run counter to those of the godlike Wayland. Wayland reads as an all-powerful AI creation from the previous “Atlantean” age, though his true nature eventually emerges. K, Wayland’s emissary, stalks all remaining humans to convince them to upload to a heavenlike Alexandria, as part of a plot to restore Earth by convincing humans to kill their physical bodies and “ascend.” Told in alternating first-person chapters in an invented article-less dialect of English presumably evolved over time in extreme isolation, Kingsnorth’s overly romantic nature epic pummels the reader with a pessimistic view of the human condition, casting the drive to consumption, violence, and bigotry as essentially human. Awkward attempts at gender essentialism don’t help (“i am woman. i am blood. it is me blood”; “all mens bodies singin when they capture, when they kill, in blood of triumph, it is Way”). This is an easy one to take a pass on. Agent: Jessica Woollard, David Higham Assoc.