<em>Beast</em> Celebrates a Man's Abrupt Return to Nature

Scan today’s headlines and climate change in the Anthropocene might appear horrifyingly novel: Manmade monstrosities like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and “dead zones” seem like problems unique to the contemporary era. The human response that such devastation demands, however, may sound familiar to students of history.

The British author Paul Kingsnorth, for one, knows that humans have experienced the end of the world, or at least, of world, before. As he writes in an appendix to his 2014 novel : “The Norman invasion and occupation of England was probably the most catastrophic single event in this nation’s history. It brought slaughter, famine, scorched-earth warfare, slavery, and widespread land confiscation.” The unprecedented ferocity of the invasion, he explains, brought about an almost complete break with the pre-Norman past. In short order, an entire world vanished. which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and is the first volume of a planned trilogy, is set against