A sculptor considers the meaning of art, sex and disaster, in this masterfully achieved miniature epic set against a deadly virus
What if the virus had been more deadly, more infectious? What if the deaths in the UK had been in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands? These are questions most of us have asked ourselves, imagining scenarios in which, as philosopher Srećko Horvat puts it in his book After the Apocalypse, Covid is a revelation of the new deadly viruses to come, fuelled by scientific experiment and ecological collapse. Now Sarah Hall has turned those imaginings into a novel, at once epic and miniature, the story of two lovers cut off from a disintegrating world.
Edith is a sculptor, raised by a single mother who was disabled by a stroke. She has overcome the fragility of her upbringing by making vast, often violent works of public art. She became famous with Hecky, a 40ft witch squatting by the side of the motorway. As always with Hall, the setting combines a sense of displacement with intense specificity; Edith lives in a “middleplace” in Scotland where she has turned a vast warehouse called Burntcoat into a combination of home and studio. It’s here that she begins her love affair with Halit, an immigrant chef. Lockdown comes and Halit moves in with her. They have the confidence of new lovers: “It did not seem possible joy would be disrupted, or that our bodies could break.”