When the apocalypse comes, popular literary imagination has it that what will remain of mankind will be a linguistically challenged tribe of outlaws eking out what existence they can amid the wreckage of ecological collapse. Such is the Riddley Walker-style scenario that begins Paul Kingsnorths new novel, the third in his loose trilogy set in East Anglia that imagines how man might respond to violent or alienating social upheaval at discrete points in English history.

The 2014 Booker-longlisted The Wake was set during the Norman Conquests, while 2016s novella Beast inhabited, Pincher Martin-style, the disintegrating consciousness of a 21st-century man living in haunted self-exile from the aggressions of modernity. Alexandria, meanwhile, takes place nine hunnerd years in the future where, its no surprise to be told, the breakin, buildin, burnin of man has left civilisation and the natural world in a bad way. The only people left alive are seven members of the Nitrian Order, who have rejected the old destructive materialism in favour of a back-to-nature way of life in the Fens in accordance with the paganish creeds of their deity, Lady.

Their fragile existence, though, is under threat. In the woods lurks the Stalker, a hooded, engineered metahuman emissary of Wayland, which, we are invited to assume, is an all-powerful AI invented long ago by man, and who controls a transhumanist utopia called Alexandria. Every other member of the human race has uploaded themselves to Alexandria, where they can keep growing, keep exploring in blissful, incorporeal perpetuity. Known as K, the Stalker is determined to persuade the last remaining Nitrians, as they pick plastic out of the clay and talk to the birds, that their faith in the truth of the body and the land, a faith that feels as old as England itself, is false and that salvation is only to be found in an eternal digital enlightenment. Yet the Nitrians, who consider Wayland the enemy machine, have received a sign. Their oldest member, yrvidian, has dreamt of swans. And when the swans return, Alexandria will fall.

Regular readers of Kingsnorth will know that the principal challenge and pleasure of his fiction is his use of invented first person narrative voices that point up the intimate relationship between language and selfhood, although his dialect is becoming more simple (and less invigorating) with each passing novel. His human characters here, who narrate alternate chapters and who consist of a married couple and their young daughter el, a lusty young chap called Lorenso, plus Mother, father and old yrvidian, speak in a minimalist, stumpy present tense that dispenses with articles and conventional capitalisation (we come to Land at dusk) and has an erratic dislike of the letter G. Their elemental language is a sort of rag-tag dream poetry littered with classical allusions, bits of Arthurian legend and echoes of early Christianity that hark back to a romanticised, fabled, ancient rural England, and some of it is mysteriously beautiful. outside Sun comin down, says mother. day is green like birth.

Some of it, though, is wincingly po-faced. Theres a lot of portentous talk of the i am woman. i am blood variety. More fundamental a problem is that Kingsnorths didactic message is in competition with his formidable imagination. Its hard not to see K who at times is oddly the most human character here, with an unexpected sense of humour as both an avatar of the encroaching hi-tech omnipotence Kingsnorth is writing against and a mouthpiece for his own beliefs, which he has detailed extensively as a member of the radical writerss eco collective Dark Mountain.

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What will England be like 900 years in the future? Paul Kingsnorth offers an answer - Telegraph.co.uk