Beast by Paul Kingsnorth

A man alone in a barn on a moor. Outside is whiteness and emptiness and heat then rain. The man isn’t sleeping much. He’s come out here to escape to get back to living to find something real. He’s left commas behind. We are there with him among sentences that pour over one another all at once in a sort of wild poetry.

Then the roof falls in. He’s injured, his body’s broken, but he survives. Something’s hunting him. A black shadow glimpsed at the corner of his vision then nothing. His world is all heather and soil and pain and cloud and sharp little shards of philosophy among it all.

Beast is an astonishing work. It asks a lot of you. It’s frustrating, powerful, dark. Slim and intense, Kingsnorth has stripped the world bare in his exploration of madness and solitude. There’s no boundary between the man, the narrative, and the world. Only a featureless moor, and these sentences running loose into the emptiness. 

Kingsnorth’s prose works in strange ways, always in the process of unravelling: first the commas go, then the capital letters. To read Beast is to feel the overwhelming dreamlike intensity of hallucination. We have no reference points, only the scramblings of a disintegrating mind filling the silence and meaninglessness of the moor. And then somewhere high in the clouds above a skylark sings – with no regard for commas.