A sculptor recalls her fling with a restaurateur as the world succumbs to a deadly virus in Hall’s urgent lockdown tale
The pandemic novels are coming. While lockdown hovered just out of eyeline in Rachel Cusk’s Second Place and provided a coda to Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, its presence is far from a garnish in Sarah Hall’s new book, a tale of sex and death told by a sculptor, Edith, whose heady liaison with a Turkish restaurateur, Halit, meets a fork in the road with the advent of a deadly virus that liquefies victims from inside.
Hall’s super-heated style, distinctive in a landscape of internet-flattened minimalism, has always combined sci-fi world-building with horror twists and a nature writer’s hyper-sensitive vision. She is drawn to words such as “liminal”, “interstitial”, “chimerical”; things happen “blackly”, “pinkly”, “tannicly”. “February,” begins one passage, “with its bare, larval branches. March. Other nations were closing borders, quarantining… I think back on those last unrestricted months. The before.”
As Halit passes lockdown (“that strange aestivation”) with Edith in her warehouse on the rural edge of a northern city, there are shortages and looting, curfews and armed patrols. A vaccine doesn’t emerge for two years, although “most of the world” has it by the time Edith tells us the story, a couple of decades down the line at 59, and in the grip of a fatal resurgence of the virus as she’s putting the finishing touches to a long-delayed government memorial to the “million” dead.
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. Doomy cadences fuel drama by keeping us guessing. “I remember a saying from your country,” Edith says on the second page, but we have to wait for a hint of who the addressee might be. “When I was eight, my mother died and Naomi arrived,” she later tells us, in a wrong-footing line that sets up the history of her mother’s life-changing brain injury, central to our understanding of Edith’s upbringing.
The book’s energy lies in Hall’s knack for alighting on the sort of authentic detail that brings a scene alive. Edith remembers that the day her mother collapsed with a clot was the first time she was allowed in the front passenger seat of the family car. During the helter-skelter craziness of early fame in the wake of victory in a Turner-ish art competition, she tells us she dealt with an impatient man hassling her in an ATM queue by taking out the maximum amount on her card and thrusting it into his startled hand.
Most of all, there’s the sex between Edith and Halit, the novel’s engine; both high-literary and blunt (Edith tells us of her “rivery flavour” and “walls of meat”), these scenes aren’t exactly unembarrassing, yet their vocabulary has a pungent, even subversive clarity that demands attention – call me sheltered, but I’ve never seen “latch” used as a noun for anything but doors and breastfeeding.
For all that, Hall’s best fiction is still to be found in her short story collections (witness the superlative Evie, another tale involving neurological disorder, from 2017’s Madame Zero). While the fluid structure of Burntcoat mimics the narrator’s roving memory, isn’t it also a convenient way to meld the quick strokes favoured by Hall’s vivid scene-making? Don’t the story’s more drastic turns exist primarily to get her out of a tight spot or at least one that would require her to further develop her characters’ relationships?
Almost everyone Edith encounters has a complicated story of migration in their past, not least Halit, whose family were ethnic Turks who fled persecution in Bulgaria, but you can’t help wonder if dislocation is merely a symptom of the novel’s slash-and-burn approach to those relationships, most starkly felt in the deus ex machina impact of the virus. It’s perhaps telling, too, that the pandemic we actually have doesn’t seem sufficiently dire to sate the demands of Hall’s narrative logic, even if you suspect she fully recognises the ticklishness of that position. As Edith says: “Artists don’t civilise, or comply, no matter how serious the game they play… Part of me enjoyed the crisis, I admit.”