'To Battersea Park'
Philip Hensher
4th Estate
2023
294pp
The blurb states this is the first book about the pandemic and the lockdown. It's wrong. There are other books that take us back to the days of the lockdown, such as Summer by Ali Smith, The Fell by Sarah Moss and Burntcoat by Sarah Hall.
But this book is something else - a collection of novellas engaging in more or less autobiographical fashion with the author's experience of Covid.
In the novel's fourth and final section, the author writes of contracting the disease in the winter of 2020 and becoming disoriented. He checks his temperature, his oximeter; he is taken to hospital. We are with him in his fever dream.
Written in four parts, this book explores the strata and sediment of a single place and time.
The State issues an order. A population may not meet, or touch or speak to each other. They stay inside and the reality of a few streets in the capital city emerges. An underground river is discovered; an urban growth of pomelos appears. By the sea, two men walk into a future of uncertain violence.
Set in a large, crowded city where the inhabitants are forbidden to approach strangers, there is time to see the human dramas across the street (an abduction, a quiet breakdown, an outbreak of violence, a young mind beginning to stretch itself).
This is about what we share - humanity, imagination and the love that emerges from unsuspected sources.
We have all experienced Covid and the lockdown, though today we may prefer to forget. Towards the end of the book there is a poignant scene where people are taken to hospital with the reassurance they will be back on the morrow, which they don't.
Obviously there are other issues that do not make it to the book, such as the validity or otherwise, of the injection and the relationship, if any, with sudden death.
The author has written 12 novels, including The Mulberry Empire and the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency.