GoKawiilOne day, Mrs. Pengelley came to London seeking the assistance of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective with the mustache, whose “little grey cells” assist him in solving mysteries. With a troubled look, she tells him that she fears she is being slowly poisoned. The doctor doesn’t see anything much the matter, she says. He attributes the stomach trouble to gastritis. She even sometimes improves, but strangely this happens during the absence of someone in her life, confirming in her a certain suspicion.
Reviewed in this article Paul Kingsnorth Thesis ~ 2025 ~ 368 pp.
$32 (hardcover)
After listening to her tale with great interest, Poirot agrees to take up the case. He sends the lady back and plans to catch a train the following day to begin his investigation. Discussing the matter with his close friend, Captain Hastings, Poirot admits the case is especially interesting, even though “it has positively no new features,” because “if I mistake not, we have here a very poignant human drama.”
When Poirot arrives the next day, he discovers that the lady has been murdered after unwittingly taking the final dose of poison. Having found the case intriguing enough to look into it, Poirot chastises himself, a “criminal imbecile,” for not having taken her story more seriously. “May the good God forgive me,” he declares, “but I never believed anything would happen at all. Her story seemed to me artificial.” Had he been convinced enough to return with her right away, he might have saved her. All that remains for him now is to catch the murderer.
“The Cornish Mystery” occurred to me while reading Paul Kingsnorth’s new collection of essays, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. In the story he weaves, a sinister force has been lurking for some time within our civilization, especially in the West. His suspicion falls upon something to do with science, technology, and how we misapprehend the world. It has been slowly sapping away at our life, creating problems that have been diagnosed as this or that malady and treated with such and such a remedy. Sometimes we feel better. And yet, we sense we are being dehumanized, unmade, that something essential is being destroyed piece by piece. Such a process is hard to pin down. This is the genius of murder by slow poisoning: it leads to doubt and misattribution. There is little ambiguity about a gunshot to the heart. Yet when killing dose by dose, one easily mistakes murderous intent with the body’s frailty, a lingering affliction, or incidental complications: murder disguised as natural causes.
And so, as Mrs. Pengelley appeals to Poirot for help, Kingsnorth appeals to us for our attention. His tale, holding traces of a crime in action, leaves us with a choice: How much do we believe it? Will we take the train today?
Kingsnorth, an Englishman who lives in rural Ireland, has been sounding some version of his warning for over two decades, as a journalist, novelist, essayist, and poet. Against the Machine gathers together some of his more recent essays, coming from both a time of heightened crisis and a spiritually dense period of his life.
We may recall how, beginning in late 2020, journalists, Twitter personalities, and authors found themselves increasingly censored for their reporting on Covid. In one of those moments of perfect alignment, a new online platform for writers had opened its doors only a few years before and now became the place for dissident, fired, and canceled authors to continue their work. Being edgy then had the effect of being listed on the index of prohibited blogs. You were unpublishable elsewhere, which meant you had a growing readership, as many readers were eager to hear and support voices outside the mainstream. It was in 2021 that Kingsnorth began his Substack, The Abbey of Misrule, which is the basis for this book.
His warning at the time was that the global response to the pandemic was “pure technique, all the way down”:
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