Savage Gods Read online

  PAUL KINGSNORTH

  NON-FICTION

  One No, Many Yeses

  Real England

  Uncivilisation: the Dark Mountain Manifesto

  (with Dougald Hine)

  Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist

  FICTION

  The Wake

  Beast

  POETRY

  Kidland and other poems

  Songs from the Blue River

  “Paul Kingsnorth’s books have such a profound affect on me that I always feel I must make them into a play or a film or something after reading them. In a world of such confusing news and opinion, I always find a story in Paul’s writing that leads me to an authentic place in the world.” —Mark Rylance

  SAVAGE GODS

  “Horrible and brilliant and terribly important. This book is what I’ve been looking for for years, and what I’d hoped never to see.”

  —Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast

  “Savage Gods is a compromise of a book, veering between inner and outer worlds, shape-shifting from narrative to aphorism to vision. But tidiness is indisposed to containing multitudes, and there’s a price to pay in retaining them. Kingsnorth’s troublesome words do an unexpectedly moving job of capturing the problem of being, and of writing about it.”

  —Nina Lyon, The Spectator

  “What ultimately makes Savage Gods a success is Kingsnorth’s passion. His honest probing of himself is the real strength of this book. He is a man bearing everything. And for all the confessional memoirs so popular at the moment, this is the real deal.”

  —Scott Beauchamp, The American Conservative

  “Paul Kingsnorth has always held my attention, and at times completely astounded me with his varied and vital writing talent. This spectacular little volume is a book all about that writing talent, but discussions of process and craft are secondary to a more ontological exploration of what writing really is… and what it very much isn’t.”

  —Mark Schultz, Carmichael’s Bookstore, Louisville, Kentucky

  “An enigma of a book, Savage Gods takes a long hard look at the creative process of writing as well as deep, philosophical questions of purpose, place, and belonging… honest in a way few books ever are.”

  —Caleb Masters, Bookmarks, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

  THE WAKE

  “Rhythmic, angry, darkly funny and at times poetic.”

  —Jennifer Maloney, The Wall Street Journal

  “Like Tolkien’s and Martin’s books, The Wake presents the reader with an immersive experience… What sharply distinguishes it is its disorienting use of high literary experiment and its insistence on uncertainty.”

  —Laura Marsh, Bookforum

  “Kingsnorth’s daring linguistic conceit… propels a tale that feels strangely contemporary in its concern for what is lost when a social order perishes.”

  —Hari Kunzru, The New York Times Book Review

  BEAST

  “Wild and spectacular.” —Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe

  “Beast cements Kingsnorth’s reputation as a furiously gifted writer.”

  —Benedict Cosgrove, The Washington Post

  “[Written] with unnerving smoothness and lyricism… [Beast] leads readers away from optimism and realism alike, deeper into a new scrutiny of the stories by which we try to make our way.”

  —Kenneth Baker, The San Francisco Chronicle

  “On its own, [Beast] is a taut, thrilling and mystifying narrative. Taken in tandem with The Wake, it forms a powerful meditation on violence, society and the nature of exile.”

  —Tobias Carroll, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

  “Kingsnorth is becoming an existential David Mitchell: a versatile weaver of the seemingly unconnected into a tapestry realer than reality.” —Boris Kachka, Vulture

  CONFESSIONS OF A RECOVERING ENVIRONMENTALIST AND OTHER ESSAYS

  “Kingsnorth’s is a much-needed perspective in the environmental movement, recovering or otherwise.”

  —Scott F. Parker, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

  “Although he writes about feeling despair, grief, and loss in the face of climate change, Kingsnorth says he has not given up hope—only what he perceives as false hope.” —Michael Berry, Sierra Magazine

  “A brilliant and sobering collection recommended for anyone, liberal or conservative, concerned about the runaway train of climate change.” —Booklist

  WHO WE ARE TWO DOLLAR RADIO is a family-run outfit dedicated to reaffirming the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry. We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.

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  Pretty much anywhere because books are portable and the perfect technology!

  ANYTHING ELSE? Yes. Do not copy this book—with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews—without the prior written permission from the copyright holder and publisher. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means.

  If only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

  Rilke

  There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more.

  The Smiths

  Table of Contents

  Begin Reading

  Acknowledgements

  SAVAGE GODS

  1.

  Writers are lost people.

  Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it. Writers want to belong to a place that is just beyond their reach, because if they were to reach the place they would have to do the hard work of being in it. Writers don’t belong anywhere, or to anyone, and they do not want to. They are driven by some severance and none of them understands it. Not just writers. Painters. Musicians. Artists. Art is the search for intact things in a world in which all things are broken.

  That paragraph was dishonest. I am going to rewrite it.

  Here goes.

  I am a lost person. I wouldn’t write books if I wasn’t lost. I wouldn’t write anything at all if I wasn’t in search of paradise, and I wouldn’t be in search of paradise if I didn’t need it; if I didn’t think I would be less lost if I were to find it. So I write to find it… but no, not that either, because I am nearing middle-age now and I know there is nothing to find. I know now that my paradise is not in a cave on a South Sea island or in the montane rainforests of Borneo where the gibbons call or in a finca in Patagonia or down the side streets of Mexico City, in a blue house with yellow doors and shutters that the sun comes through and wakes me, and orange trees. There is no paradise out there, so I write to create my paradise on paper or on this blank, flat screen, but something in me always sabotages it and turns it dark. So then I write to reorder the world so that paradise might look possible again even for a moment, for someone. I don’t belong anywhere, or to anyone. I am driven by some severance and I don’t understand it.

  That’s better.
/>   I am sitting in a field in the west of Ireland. It is a long, thin field, grass and dock and plantain and ground ivy, hedged in with thorn and sycamore and elder. The air is primaveral. The field is impacted with thin plastic coils, each about two feet long, pointing up to the sky, about a hundred of them. It’s as if something up there has been throwing darts at me. I sit among the coils. Each one encloses a young tree which I planted this winter with my wife and my two young children. This is our field.

  I thought that if I had a field then I would feel less lost. I thought that if I had some land I would belong somewhere. And sometimes I feel it has started to happen. Sometimes I think the place is looking out at me, curious. He’s been here for a while. What’s he up to? Other times I sit in the field, in the circle of Scots pines we have planted on the highest point and I feel I am not here at all. This is my field, but it doesn’t feel like mine. What could it ever feel like to own a piece of ground? I have never felt like I really owned anything. If you don’t believe you really exist, you can’t believe you own anything. Sometimes I can sit in the field, like I am sitting here now, and feel like I am floating on air and through it and on into empty space.

  2.

  This field: it belongs to us, to me and my wife, because we paid for it and we have a piece of paper lodged with a lawyer somewhere that proves it. But my lifetime will flicker out and this field will still be here, as it was before I came. I am passing through this field like the heron sometimes passes above it and foxes come through every night and red-tailed bumbles drone past on their way to the hedgebank petals. I am here now, and then I will be gone again.

  So the field does not belong to me, really. Do I belong to the field? Probably not that either. I would like to. But I have only been on this land for three years. I have only been in the country for three years. I am a blow-in, as we are called in these parts. You can’t just turn up in a place and claim it. A place needs to claim you. People belong across two axes: time and space. My neighbors’ names are on the tombstones ’round here, and mine is not. How much does that matter? It is not everything, I think, but neither is it nothing. Money whips us around like a tornado, money and capital, greed and ambition and hunger and power, they uproot people and scatter them about and we all keep our heads down as the Machine passes through, drizzling us across the landscapes of the world, breaking the link between people and place and time, demanding our labor and our gratitude, hypnotizing us with its white light, transforming us into eaters, consumers of experience and consumers of place, players of games, servants.

  Is displacement good? Is it good to be lost and far from home, even if you are still at home? Are we all lost and far from home? I think I could build an argument around that. I think the world is lost and far from home, and that all the people flooding across borders everywhere, from village to city, from country to country, fleeing the hardship or chasing the money, dug up by the Machine and dumped on the concrete, working to keep the wheels turning and to keep us all from being able to belong anywhere ever again—well, what do I think about that? What do I think, really?

  No. I am going to avoid building any arguments. I am going to refuse to stake a claim, to build a case and then defend it. The minute you circle the wagons you are vulnerable. What if you didn’t even want to defend that territory? What if it was not worth dying for? Everyone is picking fights out there. In the streets at night, on the feeds when they should be working, in 140 characters with borrowed opinions and impossible levels of anger. I can’t do it, not anymore. It’s all wasted energy, the flaring of a billion daytime candles. Why light them? What do they illuminate?

  I felt far from home even when I was young and at home. Now I have come to a foreign country to make a new home because I could not make a home in my own country, because in my own country a small house and a field is beyond the means of anyone who does not earn a lot of money or who refuses to get into debt to chase a dream. I think there is something wrong with this. But I like being here, and now, if I go back to my home country I miss my new home. I feel that something in this new home—the place itself, the work we have put in, the trees we have planted—is softly calling me back.

  Sometimes.

  But there are other times, and I have only recently allowed myself to really see them. These other times, I think to myself: I came here to belong somewhere. I came here, at last, to have a home. I wandered the world driven by this severance, thinking I needed a home, thinking that the work of being in a place would still my unquiet mind. Now I have a home, and I like it. I like planting trees, building walls, collecting eggs from my hens. I like scything down the grass and pitchforking the hay. I like splitting logs, I like the sunset over the field, I like the silence and the birdsong. I like building up, slowly, a wildlife haven and a family haven. I would rather be here than anywhere else. I appreciate the gift of it.

  But my mind, and the fire that was long ago set beneath, it remains unquiet. There is some small, insistent animal in me, still restless. Did I tell myself that life was a climb up steep cliffs to a green plateau, and is it not that? Did I think that being here would be enough? What if it isn’t enough? What if I want to belong precisely because I can’t? What if the things I thought were anchoring me were only stories, which blow away when the wind changes? What happens when the wind changes? What happens when the animal escapes?

  What happens when your stories don’t work anymore? Your words?

  3.

  I had a plan. I always have a plan. Without a plan, I am lost and fumbling. It’s a skill, making plans like this, containing your life and direction within them, a skill that can get you to places you always wanted to be, a skill that can get you out ahead of others who don’t have plans, who don’t have a direction. Ha ha, you think, as you sail by, look at me! Look at my plan! I am in control of my life! I know how to sail! Usually you think this right before you hit a squall and end up in the sea, clinging to a plank of splintered wood. You are not as good a sailor as you thought you were.

  That’s the trap. A plan can become, in an eye-blink, a cage arrayed around you like swords in a tarot deck. Sometimes you find that your plan is so good that you can’t escape from it. You get to where you wanted to be, and there is nothing else there. Only you, suddenly lonely and with no way back. I inherited my compulsion for plan-making from my father, whose need for control eventually killed him, so I should really have learned my lesson. But lessons don’t work like that, do they? Not for me, anyway. I don’t think I have ever learned a lesson in my life. I don’t watch somebody make a mistake and conclude, well, I’ll make sure I don’t do that, then. We pretend that we can learn lessons like this because the alternative is to face the music: to accept that most of what we do in our human lives is driven by some deep, old compulsion we can neither understand nor control, and that when it comes upon us, all we can do is hold on to the wrecked boat and pray. Or laugh, depending on our personalities.

  I had a plan. The plan was to settle, to have some land, to root myself and my family. To escape from the city, to escape from the traps. To grow our own food, educate our own kids, draw our own water, plant our own fuel. To be closer to nature and further from the Machine. To be freer, to be more in control. To escape and, at the same time, to belong. To learn things I didn’t know anything about but wanted to, because I felt they’d make me a better, rounder adult person: planting trees, keeping hens, managing woodland, carpentry, wiring, building, all the small skills required to run a few acres of land and to be part of it. On top of that, to bring up our young children at home. And on top of that, to write books: truer books than I had ever written before. To write something great, something real, something so intense that nobody could read it without dimming the lights first.

  It’s good to be ambitious. Or is it? I don’t even know anymore.

  We—my wife, myself, our two young children—moved to this small townland in Ireland when I was 41 years old. Our house is on a small rise, on good sandy loam, a
few miles from the River Shannon, which divides the east of this island from the west. We are in the west of the country, just, which means we are in the Romantic bit. The house is a little two-bedroom concrete cottage—can you have a concrete cottage?—built—poured—in the 1950s, to replace an older stone-and-thatch affair. The history of Ireland is a history of people escaping just as soon as they could from the tiny, picturesque, damp, cramped, white-wash-and-thatch cottages which people from the rest of the world still associate with Ireland.

  Our house is small and a bit damp. It is not surrounded by breathtaking mountain scenery or sweeping white beaches, because we could never afford to live anywhere like that. It is quite an ordinary little place—modest compared to many new rural homes—which suits me somehow, because I feel I am quite an ordinary person, and I could never live in a big house. The land around it is gentle: crooked fields, still owned by small farmers, home to beef cows, a few sheep, the odd goat, and occasionally a strip of wheat or barley. The fields are divided by hedges of thorn, elder, oak, ash, sycamore, lime, under which streams run and past which old lanes wind. It is a pleasant, unspectacular, nooky, modest sort of landscape. It is my home, though I am still a stranger in it.

  We moved here from a small Cumbrian market town where we had lived for five years, though I’m not from there either. Where am I from? I was born in Worcester, lived in Malvern until I was two or three—I don’t remember it—then moved to the suburbs of northwest London, near to where both my parents had grown up. When I was 11 we moved to High Wycombe, an ugly town in Buckinghamshire which had been an attractive town in Buckinghamshire before the 1960s got hold of it. Then we moved to a small village near Bath, in the west country, the kind of village with no farmers left in it. When I was 18 I went to university in Oxford. Then I moved to London. Then back to Oxford. Then to Cumbria. Now to Ireland. Meanwhile, my parents had moved to Surrey, then to Cyprus where my nan, a Greek Cypriot from Famagusta, had met my granddad in the war. When my dad died in Cyprus, my mum moved back to England: to Yorkshire, then to Cheshire. My two brothers are currently in Reading and Warrington. We’re not done yet. See how we run.