Hello everyone! I have recovered from Covid! Those of you who had early May 2023 in the death pool, sorry to disappoint. I know you’re probably sick of my format changes, but I’m still working out how best to put out good content. I’ve decided that my podcast, Reading in the Time of Monsters, will primarily be a guest podcast from now on, doing interviews like I did with Quinn Slobodian or joint book discussions like I did with my great friend Kit. I might still do a few solo podcasts, but I don’t love that middle ground between writing an essay and just riffing that you need if you’re going to do solo podcasts often.
What I’m going to try is this- every week, have either a podcast or a review essay. Review essays will be more in depth discussions of one thing (a book or maybe a series) I read recently. If there’s other books I want to talk about, I’ll talk about them more briefly in a “reading notes” section.
If this winds up being the format I stick with, I might paywall some of them, maybe with a monthly digest made available to non-paying subscribers? I’m not sure yet. I don’t want to paywall stuff before I know what I’m doing. We’ll see. Anyway! On to the show.
CONTENTS
Reading Notes
Butler, Flaubert, McMurtry
Review Essay
Kingsnorth, Buckmaster Trilogy
Reading Notes
A fair amount of the reading I’ve done lately has been to advance one or another project- birthday lecture, future podcast interviews, etc. I usually don’t review those. But I read a few novels I think are worth talking about.
The first is Octavia Butler’s Kindred. This is one of the books I didn’t review because I wanted to talk about it on the podcast, but the points I want to make about it are probably more suited to this format. Kindred about Dana, a black woman from 1970s Los Angeles, who gets zapped back to the environs of her enslaved ancestors in early 19th century Maryland. She comes and goes based on whether one of her family’s master’s kids is in trouble (he’s an impulsive asshole and gets in trouble a lot), or whether she is meeting mortal danger. On one trip out, she manages to take her (white) husband, but he isn’t around for her trip back- a few days pass in her timeline, but years of the husband being stuck in the 19th century. Needless to say, it’s a harrowing experience- not just the physical pains and fear, but also the codependence between the slaveowner’s narcissistic himbo son and Dana entails emotional damage, too. Butler is a god/saint figure in contemporary speculative fiction, practically unassailable, and there’s good reasons for it. Her writing is clear and often brutally effective at getting across pain, hope, fear, love, and above all shifts in perspective. This is high in the running for the best novel I’ve read so far this year. One thing I found myself thinking reading Kindred was how different this work is from many of the popular recent scifi fantasy works by authors who would claim her as a patron saint. No turgid worldbuilding, for one, and that’s true of other works of hers, like the Xenogenesis and Earthseed books, where she does invent more of a secondary world. There are no plaster saints for heroes, and no cardboard cutouts for villains, but people do meaningfully heroic and meaningfully awful things… they do them as people. Among other things, if no one knew who Butler was, and she tried to get along on scifi/fantasy twitter, it wouldn’t be hard to see a scenario where she’d get lambasted for not making the slave master’s boy more purely despicable. Dana does come to have affection for him, even though he betrays her at every turn, but that in and of itself would get some of our patrollers of the discourse in a fine fettle… an interesting contrast between the real promise of a diverse literature as represented by Butler’s work, and the interests of diversity’s supposed guardians.
I also read Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô, coincidentally around the time Radio War Nerd did some episodes about the book and the world of the Punic Wars it depicts. Like many a budding little history nerd, I thrilled to the doings of Hannibal, taking the elephants over the Alps, Cannae, etc. I even devised an alternative setting for the cyberpunk role-playing game Shadowrun that took place in a world where Carthage won out over Rome, it’s oligarchical merchant-clan model seeming pretty close to Shadowrun’s megacorps in my mind… my friends were indulgent enough to play in the setting once or twice, but not so indulgent as to get into the sixteen-year-old-history-fan-way-out-of-depth historical lore I invented for it… Anyway! This was pretty cool. Big “no plot just vibes” vibes, as the kids say. Carthage doesn’t want to pay the mercenaries it hired to lose in it’s first big rumble with Rome, the mercenaries revolt, but neither side can gain much of an advantage for a while- disorganized mercs from all over the Mediterranean world versus an entrenched, arrogant Carthaginian elite, most of whom think war beneath them. Meanwhile, a mercenary captain conceives a doomed love/insane lust (same thing, it’s written by a 19th century Frenchman) for a Carthaginian priestess aristocrat, so that leads to trouble. Flaubert expends his considerable talents getting across the decadence, disorganization, and savagery of this world. Rome is always off-stage, not just in terms of being the doom dangling over Carthage’s head, but also as the comparison point for everything, from the aesthetics to the political organization, that strikes us as weird about Salammbô’s world- Rome, the nice, neat, severe, crushing iron weight that sorts us all out and makes things “normal”… for better and for worse.
I also read Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo. This was his follow-up to his Western epic Lonesome Dove. Word on the street is that McMurtry wrote Streets of Laredo as a fuck you to everyone who decided that Lonesome Dove was about how the old West was cool and romantic, which was far from what McMurtry was saying. He wanted to make damn sure no one would make that mistake for Streets of Laredo. So, twenty-odd years on from the previous volume, Woodrow Call is old and haggard but still chasing criminals, in this case a sociopathic young killer. Deaths are frequent and unceremonious across the board, with a lot of emphasis on the bleakness and hostility of the trans-Pecos borderlands between Texas and Chihuahua. We get more of the perspective of women, Mexicans, and Mexican women that we did in Lonesome Dove, and the hostility of the west gets compounded by the violence of the border and that of men’s expectations of women. There’s some bravura scenes of amputation and other bodily degradations, and grim depictions of recovery. Everyone, sociopathic teen killers included, is recognizably human, and McMurtry seldom takes easy routes- the greenhorn following Call around isn’t just a whiny butt of jokes, the mother of the killer isn’t just a put-upon Mexican woman begging the world for relief, some of the jobs people need to do get done after great difficulty but not all of them. All told, a worthy sequel, though I wonder if it did what McMurtry wanted it to do. It didn’t make me want to go out west, but then, neither did Lonesome Dove- I’m an indoor boy!
REVIEW ESSAY
Paul Kingsnorth, Buckmaster trilogy (2014-2018) - I was going to do a podcast episode on this. I recorded one, actually, but even without listening to it, I know it wouldn’t be as good as just doing an essay, because that’s what it was- me, speaking at essay length, into the microphone. I get that some people have made their fortunes that way. But I don’t think it would be the best way for me to go forward. So, I’m writing this. And in future, I’m going to focus on having guests on the podcast, rather than solo episodes.
In any event! This is one of the more interesting sets of books I read recently, and one of the installments is one of the better novels I’ve read this year. Moreover, it places Paul Kingsnorth in that rarified company- a contemporary right-leaning fiction writer who can write something worth reading. The world of letters isn’t in great shape in general, and the dearth of talent on the right of the spectrum – which, historically, has contributed its fair share to the literary arts (whatever you might think of the authors or their ideas) since the concepts of “right” and “left” meant anything politically – is even worse. Writers don’t generally like being pinned down ideologically, for good reasons and also for reasons of vanity. None of the ones I see as the examples of good right-wing fiction writers today – James Ellroy, Michel Houellebecq, the fantasist John Whitbourn, and now Paul Kingsnorth – would self-describe as being right-wing in some easy way- Whitbourn even wrote me a long email about how right and left don’t mean anything anymore. I have no doubt that Kingsnorth would have ripe things to say about this classification scheme of mine, too, especially given that he’s a past master of the English polemicist’s art- calling attention everyone else’s ignorance, bad faith, and errors, while giving out as little as possible about what you positively believe, preferably in a few curt, market-tested phrases that make you sound tough and independent-minded, but not too far from the point in the Venn diagram where your editor and your publican meet, opinion-wise.
See! One of the problems with trying to do this in audio was how to tie in the disparate strands I want to talk about: the books themselves, their author, where they fit in the broader scheme of things. It’s hard enough written down- but if I’m going to do it on audio, I basically need to write it down, and at that point, it might as well be an essay. I’m not great at getting my ideas out elliptically, in outline or note form.
So, let’s talk about the books themselves. The Buckmaster trilogy is made up of three novels – The Wake (2014), Beast (2016), and Alexandria (2018) – that all take place in the Lincolnshire/East Anglia area of England. The Wake takes place in the lead up to and aftermath of the Norman invasion of England in 1066. The other two each take place roughly a thousand years after the previous volume- Beast in roughly the present day, Alexandria about a thousand years in the future. They’re all about people having a rough time, and the land having a rough time. Paul Kingsnorth was an environmental and anti-globalization activist and writer (one of his books is titled “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist”), from the end of both movements that disdains most people and the things those people make, but which has a vast well of sentimentality for more aesthetically-pleasing parts of nature, “local” cultures, etc.
Later for that! The point is, we have characters, interacting with the land. First, we have Buccmaster of Holland (Holland is the name of a part of Lincolnshire), Saxon smallholder, who witnesses the land being overrun by Norman “ingengas” (“foreigners”), in The Wake. Then in Beast we have a Mr. Buckmaster going out to live on his own in the countryside (abandoning wife and kids, along with the inanities of urban civilization, in the traditional guru way), getting randomly injured and seeing animals that shouldn’t be there. Lastly, in Alexandria we follow a small group of survivors as they eke out a living in the hot, humid wasteland that Lincolnshire becomes after a millennium of climate change disaster.
The three novels all read quite differently, as Kingsnorth made the choice to write from first person in all three, and to develop unique voices for his perspective characters. Near the release of The Wake, Kingsnorth spoke out about how dissatisfied he is by historical fiction where characters spoke in basically modern English, and he goes as far away as he can from that, in The Wake especially. He knew he couldn’t write in Old English, which is incomprehensible to modern English readers unless they go learn it. Instead, he devised an orthography to get across the speech and thought of a particular sort of 11th-century Saxon. Here’s a sample:
thu is a man of parts she saes thu has three oxgangs this is good
it is good i saes yes it is good is this why they cums for me with laws and bocs they is agan me for what i has. loc now they cums to me and they saes ingengas is cuman we need thy sons and thy geburs for we moste feoht agan the cwellers but efry daeg they is cwellan us the cyng and the crist. this ingenga god that they lufs he has nefer seen an anglisc treow this god from a land of dust where there is no night
is there no night
lysten to me i is specan lysten we feoht agan one yeoc only to cepe our selfs under another this god does not cnaw me how can he sae i is yfel can he see my heorte
This is a sample of dialogue between Buckmaster and his “wif” (root of “wifman,” their term for woman, and Buckmaster uses “wifman” often in its most insulting register). Some of you have heard my opinions of alternative orthography schemes. I find Cormac McCarthy’s refusal to use commas, quotation marks, or any punctuation other than periods and sometimes question marks, annoying and precious. But, I actually think it works in The Wake. It really does conjure up an alternative mindset, and the character of Buccmaster. It reflects his mental world- blunt, a combination of brutal and sensitive you don’t usually see in fiction, struggling to find words that work for new concepts. And I found decoding the text to be kind of fun in and of itself. In Beast, the narrator speaks in fairly standard English that gets hastier and more unhinged the farther it goes. And in Alexandria, we get multiple viewpoint characters. Most of them are part of this community of primitive survivalists, living in a shamanistic matriarchal society, and their thoughts are expressed in a sort of simplified English. But one of the viewpoint characters is the representative of technological civilization, and talks like it.
In all three books, Kingsnorth summons an atmosphere of dread and apocalypse. This comes together more naturally in some of the installments than in others. I’m not an expert, but I know enough about the historiography of England to know Kingsnorth is taking a definite Side- that the Norman invasion was the harbinger of many of the evils of the Middle Ages and beyond, in an otherwise egalitarian, sensible Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Tom Paine took a similar position! Regardless of how we the Norman situation in the long run, medieval warfare and conquest isn’t pretty, so it’s not hard to believe someone like Buccmaster would see the sky falling down, with the French-Viking “cnihts,” with their funny bowl haircuts, running around burning and killing. Alexandria, of course, takes place after the apocalypse, the survivors thinking they’re some of the few living humans left, and those being stalked by a cyborg who wants to upload their brains to a supercomputer. It’s less convincing in Beast, but then, to my mind, Beast in general is just less convincing and interesting than the other two books. It’s also the closest to standard literary fare- standard contemporary subject has things happen to them and thinks about themselves, starts to lose grip, we’re unsure of what’s going on, yadda yadda.
Well, we’re often enough left unsure of what, exactly, is going on in the other two installments as well. To my mind, The Wake is the best of the three in part because of how it plays with our expectations and depicts the breakdown of the protagonists. The Normans aren’t Buccmaster’s only, or even necessarily his biggest, problem. Buccmaster’s biggest problem is somewhere between his own ego and some kind of generational curse/blessing involving the old gods. As hinted at in the conversation above, Buccmaster cares not for “the crist” and it turns out he, like his grandfather before him, hews to the old gods, the Germanic gods. As he comes to believe more and more that these gods – specifically, Wayland the Smith, a sort of Hephaestus type that swaps out the Greek’s gentleness for homicidal rage – are acting through him to destroy the Normans and liberate England, the pettier, more egotistical, and more rage-driven he becomes. He can’t even keep a small band of “green men” together in the woods consistently, because he flies into a rage whenever anyone questions him, especially if they mention rival (and superior) leaders of the resistance to the Normans. Buccmaster’s ego and entitlement are tied together with his love of England and his old gods and his sense of himself as a master and as a man, and in the end they all crash down together. We also find he was a pretty unreliable narrator the whole time, mostly in terms of how much people in his service – fellow green men, the “wif,” his sons, his “geburs” (serfs) etc. – liked and respected him. This makes us unsure of much of the rest of the story.
We see another breakdown in Alexandria (well, another character break down, we also see the local ecosystem further degrade), the breakdown of K. K is a cyborg in the employ of the titular Alexandria. When K meets surviving humans, and tries to tempt them to join Alexandria, he tells them it’s a paradise, where you leave aside your bodily cares and get whatever you want, in the communion of all the other human minds- basically, your post-singularity “rapture of the nerds” scenario. Despite him being a freaky-looking skinless cyborg, this works pretty well. The primitivist survivors treat K as a devil figure, and he is, in the sense that he cannot force anyone to join him, but he can persuade. And, seeing as the survivors eke out a living with Stone Age conditions and under numerous rules and taboos, you can see why.
That’s another admirable facet of Kingsnorth’s work. You know what side he’s on, but he doesn’t make living green seem easy. It’s hard, and people don’t like it. And K isn’t all honeyed utopian words, either. When he argues with survivors, he shows them how badly humanity has destroyed the planet, and argues that it’s not just technology or culture or the other things the survivors left behind to join their matriarchal bird cult that does it- it’s just humanity. Kingsnorth really whales on the tragic-destruction-of-beautiful-things people-as-virus-with-shoes strings, here. The conclusion being, on K’s part anyway, that he needs to rescue the primitivists from their own condition, and also keep them from multiplying and destroying the planet further, by putting them in the magic busybox of the Alexandria system. Of course, it turns out the powers behind Alexandria were keeping things from their servants, and the Earth has a few tricks up its sleeves to preserve itself after all, but I guess I won’t spoil the ending… which is odd and oddly-described enough that I’m not sure I could do it justice, anyway.
There’s one facet of both The Wake and Alexandria I think it’s worth discussing, and that’s the presence of people lingering outside of the central drama of Buccmaster versus the Normans (and himself) or people versus the machine civilization and climate disaster. In The Wake, Buccmaster makes much of the connection he has to the land, the “anglisc treows” (English trees) “the crist” never saw, the deep dark fens where he communes with his gods and where the Normans can never follow. Here’s the thing with that- whatever the Normans were, the Saxons were also relative newcomers to England! They migrated from Germany starting in the 5th century. There were people there before, and you figure if tenure on the land makes for a unique connection with the Gods, then the Gods would most be Celts, or the people Buccmaster dismissively refers to as “wealsc.” Where do they enter into all this? Realistically, the answer is nowhere, and that makes sense, given how much of this, the relationship with the Gods etc, is arguably in Buccmaster’s head.
In Alexandria, we hear about how the little group of primitivists in semi-tropical Lincolnshire might be the last humans. But we also hear about vast groups of “sea people,” going around in canoes and catamarans on the world’s oceans, expanded as they were by global warming. We see them, they’re at first a harbinger of child-stealing terror, but then turn out to be ok, if kind of scary-looking? What happens with them? What’s their deal? Why are they in this book? If the world is having another apocalypse, as is heavily implied, do they just kind of float through it? Wouldn’t that seem to lower the stakes for the hunter-gatherers we’ve been following this whole time? Why don’t they get on some boats themselves?
I don’t raise these as “plot holes.” I don’t care much about them in that sense (though, between the lowered stakes the sea folk represent and the increasing preachiness in Kingsnorth’s writing, is a major reason why I see The Wake as by a good margin the best of the three). I do think it gets at some of the value systems and ideas involved. If the Celts or the boat people are present, but don’t matter… well, I think that’s because as Kingsnorth’s concerned, people don’t matter. I mean, some people do. You presumably need someone around to observe the sublime beauty of jaguars that are prowling around Lincolnshire for some reason like in Beast. We can have a few people who are at one with nature, as a treat, might be the reasoning. But people qua people are set dressing, incidental.
Look: I definitely don’t have answers to all of our environmental questions. A lot of the people I know who do know more are, sadly, engaged in the online back-and-forth between “degrowth” advocates and “eco-modernists,” which has to be some of the saddest, least-informative nerd slapfighting I’ve ever seen. What I will say is this: it’s pretty hard to go against species (I’ve seen “speciesist” used as an accusation/insult and I’m just going to enjoy the time before it becomes something I have to take seriously). I’m not saying people don’t, or can’t. I mean, have you seen people lately (or ever)? But… if nothing else, people usually love themselves (including, arguably especially, people who make a big deal of self-loathing), and usually like some kind of people. It’s all those others – either specific kinds of people, or people in the abstract, as opposed to the concrete people that a given person knows and likes and imagines going into the future with – that cause the problem.
I suppose I could be called a “humanist” at the end of the day, less in the sense of believing that people are so great, but more in believing that I am stuck with them, stuck with a human perspective and human desires. And I can’t help but think that humans who can’t acknowledge that they are the same way are, at least a little, posturing, along with sometimes something worse than that. None of that is to say that people should just do whatever they want with no regard for the environment- among other things, that’s something that leads to disaster, from any kind of human perspective. Tell me a given measure will improve human civilization’s survivability, and I am for it, including the likely drastic measures we will likely need to take down the road. But most “deep green”/eco-misanthropic stuff I come into contact with is clearly about someone’s aesthetic. That’s the most innocent version, too, that they don’t get that in order to get their vaguely racist version of how Native Americans lived pre-contact, or their Hobbit village world, or whatever it is, who knows how many people would have to die, and the world would have to get smaller and darker for those left alive. For an growing number of eco-fascists, everyone else dying is a feature, not a bug. You’re not gonna sell me on mega-deaths with “and after, everyone gets to shit outside and live happily ever after about it!” No, thank you.
Is Paul Kingsnorth an ecofascist? I don’t know. The last big thing he wrote was an account of his conversion to the Romanian Orthodox church. That’s not a great sign, given how many right-wingers have flocked to varying kinds of eastern orthodoxy on the idea that those denominations are more “traditional,” hardcore, not-woke. That said, his essay on his conversion has less culture war and more introspection than you’d think likely from something published in Rod Dreher’s “First Things” online magazine. That’s one of the issues of classifying writers by ideology- most of them are more interested in other things. In the essay, Kingsnorth damns the two houses, the “machine civilization” looking to flatten the world (with some verbiage about rebuking “biology,” so, uh, we see you there, limey) and the defenders of a “Christendom with little to do with Christ.” The reductive part of me wants to say Kingsnorth would do ecofascism, but he’s too nice now, thanks to old JC. Similarly, he probably could be an “ex-environmentalist,” as one of his books put it, but still write on the basis of his disdain for modern civilization’s destruction of the environment, at least in part due to a vaguely-Buddhist detachment he tried to affect for a while there.
I guess that’s what gets me about a fair amount of ecological thinking- how few people (well, I’m sure plenty of ecologists manage it, I mostly mean writers who borrow/steal their material) who do it can avoid making nature their special friend. We’re used to the hippie “nature loves me” thing, the idea that nature is all-loving and all-good, like the monotheistic God but less of a killjoy. That’s obviously silly – how does nature feel about people with MS, for instance, or for that matter just a broken leg? – and people like Kingsnorth, with a good eye for what will play, know it. You get the other version creeping in more, as the waters rise- nature as dark avenger, nature as what will check our hypocrisies and pomposities… but, you know, the ones the speaker dislikes specifically. Nature will prove their misanthropy (and I’ve never met a true misanthrope, the proverbial “asshole who hates everyone equally,” there’s always some selection at work and usually follows established pathways) right. Nature will prove Alexandria — and it’s not an accident Kingsnorth chose one of the symbols of human learning as the name of his humanity-consuming machine mind — to be so much flotsam, that people don’t really know so much… except, you know, the special people who can read the bird flight patterns to see the future. See what I mean? If someone could manage a consistent anti-human or anti-knowledge perspective that’d be one thing, but they generally never can. And no, self-abegnation or self-derision doesn’t square the circle.
But hell… what attitude has produced more quality literature than a hypocritical, knowing disdain, complete with small grudges avidly pursued, masked by supposedly high principles? That sounds facetious, and I guess it is a little, but good writing definitely comes from that place, sometimes. Certainly, it’s a more fertile ground for writing than the sickly, hateful sentimentality that the right has embraced since Reagan and Thatcher hit on playing those few key chords as the key to electoral success. That sentimentality went a long way towards killing quality right-leaning literature (and literature in general, and arguably democracy and the planet). There’s a reason that the good living right-leaning writers are all, to one degree or another, pretty heterodox: Kingsnorth and Whitbourn rejecting our civilization, right and left, tout-court, Ellroy and Houellebecq refusing to back the contemporary right in their countries, with Ellroy praising Obama and Houellebecq voting for Macron.
What’s the use in classifying writers that way, then? Especially when I don’t use left-center-right distinctions as a guide on what to read (or not read), seeing good (and a lot of shit) in writing from all over the map? Well, god help me, I happen to think the right-left spectrum has meaning beyond the electoral successes of this or that moment, or even the culture war setpieces of a given era. I think there are broader patterns that define politics since the unfolding of modernity. These have to do with the nature of the interaction between people and power- who should have power, how it should be wielded, what ways are acceptable to limit it or redistribute it, etc. These questions relate to further questions ranging from those touching individual comportment to those dealing with very basic elements of human existence. I think the particular sort of worldview Kingsnorth shows, the yearning for an apocalypse that will sweep away the human pretense of having control over our own fate, undertaken through a drama between select humans defined by their tie to a given special piece of land, and forces utterly beyond their comprehension (while the rest of humanity just sort of gawps, I guess)... to me, that belongs on the side of the spectrum that understands liberation, the empowerment of those previously powerless, as essentially futile or destructive. This is worth noting, less on the idea we might vote Kingsnorth into office someday, but more because these questions we sometimes parcel off as political, apart from the concerns of art, are hard to truly escape. Moreover, while it’s clear what side I’m on, I’m not so doctrinaire as to refuse to see the relevance in other answers, and other framings of the question, or their ability to contribute to worthwhile art.
Meanwhile, Mithra’s just lounging. She’s not bothered!
Yes! Glad you're better. Great reviews, as usual--I was particularly impressed with that summary of Salammbo'. Looking forward to seeing how the new format will play out.
Congratulations on your recovery! Hope you are having appropriate celebrations