Burntcoat

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The pandemic which is worse than Covid and seems more like a plague, is utterly depressing with descriptions that are graphic and unpleasant. Hall’s fictional version isn’t the virus or the lockdown we’ve had, and there’s a danger that we could fall further into our current impasses if we give in to the desire to fantasise apocalypse. em Burntcoat, um enorme armazém capaz de albergar as suas enormes peças em madeira, que Edith passou a viver e trabalhar, após a morte da sua mãe, algo que ela esperava a todo o momento desde que Naomi sofrera um derrame cerebral, há muitos anos.

The story of a fictional pandemic, it’s told by an artist looking back on her experiences as she creates a commissioned sculpture to memorialize the victims.But while the narrative has the urgency of a disaster scenario, its texture is more mazy; as we roll through Edith’s life pre-Halit, a variety of names (including a Sean and a Shun) prove only incidentally important to the action as we seek a toehold amid the fluently jumbled timeline. Burntcoat seems to me to be based in a City which draws heavily on the author’s current home of Norwich but transported to her birthplace of Cumbrian – where most of her novels are set. What’s fascinating here, though, are Hall’s revelations about illness and its relationship to creativity and to sexuality. So, ultimately, having given the book a bit of time to settle, I am giving it 5 stars because it takes what we have all lived through over the last 18 months and turns it into a work of art that generates, at least in me, a gut response unlike the response I have had to any book that I can think of. As Edith reminisces on her life, she completes the finishing touches on her magnum opus, knowing that she will never see its final installation.

This is an intense read particularly in the latter half or so of the book when the narrator, Edith meets and falls in love with Halit. I love Hall’s prose style, so the quality of the writing was a big part of the draw for me with this one.In the end though, I felt they were sufficiently connected to form a novel, albeit one with a number of different interconnected facets. Halit’s a Muslim immigrant, a local restaurant owner, cut off from his home and family, and for Edith a source of mysterious loss and lingering grief. Hall started writing this novel when the UK went into lockdown in March 2020, and I love the hazy atmosphere of this melancholic, lyrical novel about love and illness.

I would have appreciated something a bit more cohesive, but can give some positive credit for this if I take a step back and reflect. As a storyteller and an artist, Edith struggles to express her experiences and her feelings - and didn't we all during the pandemic? In places it’s lyrical, there are some original and powerful images that will stick in my mind for a long time they’re so stunningly creative.Edith comes across like a composite of artists like Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin, vulnerable but fiercely feminist, keenly aware of the challenges of being a woman creating art, of the difficulty of negotiating male-dominated spaces. It recounts memories of her mother Naomi and of her childhood, her training in the art of Shou Sugi Ban, burnt wood, a technique she learns in Japan, her love affair with Halit of Bulgarian/Turkish origin and the impact of a terrible pandemic known as AG3 - novavirus. Hall highlights instantly recognisable features through the scenes witnessed by Edith: aggressive racism; rampant individualism and hoarding; street protests and deniers; a collapsing health system presided over by a tottering, ineffectual government, marked by its indecision and cronyism. This will definitely be in my top ten books of the year and it stands a good chance of being my favourite.