Paul Kingsnorth is fascinating and consternating to me. He represents the closest British answer to Derrick Jensen, insofar as he’s an intractably anti-modern environmentalist. He doesn’t harp on the word civilization, rely on radical feminist analogies to understand human history, or advocate violent monkeywrenching (afaik) but the rest of it is pretty much the same.
Kingsnorth has remained relevant to me where Jensen has not, however, because he’s more interested in expressing himself through fiction than manifestos (though he does have a manifesto). His first novel, The Wake, is a bold experiment in historical fiction, creating a readable mock-up of Old English to really sell the culture shock. I found that experiment largely successful, and the work’s political themes were surprisingly palatable and relevant, given Kingsnorth’s predilections and beliefs (discussed in my review, though beware of spoilers).
What The Wake didn’t deliver on, really, was the ecological visions central to Kingsnorth’s nonfiction work. It largely takes place in the forest, but the language and the protagonist’s familiarity keep the landscape from providing much flavor. That’s why I was delighted to read that Kingsnorth’s second novel is out now, and it matches a lot of the things I hoped to see in his next novel. It’s set in the present, with no linguistic barriers getting in the way of Kingsnorth’s practiced eye for environmental writing. It also sounds like it has an amorphous spooky antagonist, which sounds great--foreboding music over sublime landscape imagery is my favorite.
I heard about the new book at the end of this Guardian piece, which is largely a fluff piece retreading familiar ideological ground to promote the book. But its main question is something I'm very interested in: developing landscapes and their non-human inhabitants as perspective characters in fiction. As Kingsnorth puts it:
A powerful landscape is one thing, though; a sentient landscape is another. A question that has been jabbing at me for some time is: how could a novel be written in which a living landscape was not just a backdrop, but a character: an actor in the drama, rather than its scenery? Are there novels in which non-human places are sensate? In which the mind of the world is made manifest in the places its human characters walk through?
He mentions a couple of older and a couple of contemporary authors he thinks approach the task, alongside his own. But the rest of the article treats the endeavor with a kind of mysticism I find rather unproductive. His reference point for personified landscapes is, of course, a hunter-gatherer culture of West Papua. There are some vague hand-wavings about a historical harmony the West has lost, and then the ritual screed against modern industrial capitalist culture:
We have ended what Thomas Berry called “the great conversation” between humans and other forms of life. We are becoming human narcissists, entombed in our cities, staring into our screens, seeing our faces and our minds reflected back and believing this is all there is. Outside the forests fall, the ice melts, the corals die back and the extinctions roll on; but we keep writing our love letters to ourselves, oblivious.
This is a familiar argument of the old and curmudgeonly, and while there may be plenty of truth in it, it's more ideologically satisfying than it is accurate or helpful. Kingsnorth admits that science itself has undermined its own "reductive," mechanistic understanding of nature, though he cites some relatively marginal and exaggerated science popularizers, like Paul Stamets, to make his case. But this is firmly a few conscientious rebels defecting from what remains a destructive and reductive system. Kingsnorth sees as his true allies only hermit poets and indigenous people--those least sullied by industrial capitalism.
But Kingsnorth is the one who's really being reductive here. We may have lost a lot of traditional language, skills, and exposure to landscape as a consequence of development, and that's worth evaluating. It has not been an empty trade, however. Our language for discussing landscapes, and our ways of seeing them, have become exponentially richer through technology and academic work. This should seem too obvious to be worth stating to anyone who's not wrapped up in apocalyptic narratives about modern culture, but it bears repeating in relation to Kingsnorth's project.
Writing the perspective of the landscape is difficult, and it's not helpful to overlook the best tools and precursors we have. My impulse here is to list all of the great and wonderful authors who have done this work, to point to Barry Lopez and Richard Manning and Bill Cronon. To invoke some of the compelling research on ecological complexity and resilience Kingsnorth nods, not just as a validation of his not-quite neo-paganism, but as a genuine approach to getting inside a landscape's headspace. Ditto visualization tools like satellite imagery, timelapse footage, or migration tracking data. Such a list would be self-indulgent more than anything; the point is that such resources are profuse and versatile today.
These are the tools and stories of conservation scientists, of environmental historians, and they could be the tools and stories of landscape-POV novelists, too. One author can't recreate an oral tradition of living landscapes. Fortunately, they don't need to--it's just a matter of accepting the culture we are a part of, and adapting it to the purpose. The problem, of course, is that Kingsnorth doesn't and will not accept our culture. And bridging that question is well, well beyond the scope of this post. Fortunately, that shouldn't be a problem for most of you.
Despite his primitivist tendencies, I am skeptical that Kingsnorth isn't familiar with or doesn't have any use for these tools and works. It's quite possible he didn't see fit to mention it because he sees a larger leap than I do from nonfiction, descriptive material and the novelist's airy 'character.' But while I may be straw-manning him a bit, it does seem fair to read an implication that science, despite many disciplines and working lives spent in the service of conservation, is still a toolset that abets environmental destruction. Adopting those tools puts you in a reductive mindset inimical to the poetic and personal. I think all doubts as to whether such things can be put to productive, rather than reductive, use, can be quelled by spending some time on this awesome decolonial map blog.
Kingsnorth also seems to have excluded speculative fiction from his survey. Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation trilogy fits his specifications to a T, but isn't mentioned. Weird Horror in general is a natural partner for the incomprehensible span and uncanny otherness of landscapes and their processes. Junji Ito's horror manga Uzumaki is in a sense nothing more than the tale of a landscape's idee fixe. My favorite is Mushishi, which features an unparalleled ecology of creatures, woven into folklore as curses and guardian spirits. It provides a great bridge between the indigenous traditions Kingsnorth fetishizes and contemporary environmental ideas and genre fiction. Weird horror and fantasy building on these angles describes most of my goals as a fiction author, so it seems a shame they didn't make it onto Kingsnorth's radar.
Anyway, I'm still rather excited for Beast. Though if it's like The Wake, it will be a while before it's available in libraries around here.