Burntcoat

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In short, this is a multi-layered novel with so much to offer – a moving elegy to love, life, loss and creativity that acts as a testament to humanity’s resilience in the face of deep uncertainty. Our ' currently reading' micro-collections are limited edition shades inspired by the book currently on my bedside table. Sarah Hall's 6th novel, Burntcoat, is a beautifully written story of artistic creation, love (and lust), and the aftermath of medical trama both personal (a severe stroke) and societal (a Covid-like epidemic). The parts that resonated most with me were about Edith's art - and the process of her sculpting with burnt wood.

As life outside changes irreparably, inside Burntcoat Edith and Halit find themselves undergoing the same profound changes: by the histories and responsibilities each carries and bears, by the fears and dangers of the world outside and by the progressions of their new and burgeoning relationship. Just like her narrator Edith, in Burntcoat Sarah Hall has given us a poetic tribute to the all those who have suffered losses during Covid. Well, if it’s any comfort, I had no intention of reading a pandemic novel either, but the scope of this one really appealed to me. Plus, the premise sounded intriguing and felt suitably distanced from our own pandemic to enable me to separate the two in my mind (if that makes sense).

There’s a tendency too for Edith to express herself via pseudo-philosophical, gnomic observations, which I found slightly overblown and irritating at times. The book is about a lot of things: the uneasy alliance between life and mortality, the ways we morph and adjust to accommodate our definition of life, and how everything becomes altered in nature, damaged and resilient—whether it’s a work of art or the human heart.

In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. 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. Leaving aside for the moment the problematic implication that the Gothic is cheap (alas, a centuries-old prejudice), this sounds much like an apology for Hall’s own novel. 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.Just as with other dystopian novels I’ve read, this one got under my skin and the realism left a huge mark on me. And a plane full of equipment sitting on the runway at Heathrow, its cargo door closing, caught in some snare of bureaucracy.

She’s also just made an excellent Radio 4 programme marking the 25th Anniversary of Radiohead’s OK Computer, a fantastic listen if you’re a Radiohead fan! Indeed, although not primarily fascinated with “the ghostly, the ghastly and the supernatural”, to borrow Dale Townshend’s succinct definition of the Gothic, the novel does visit the tropes of the genre, exploiting them to great effect. With Burntcoat she has solidified her status as the literary shining light we lesser souls aspire to. It is obviously at least partly a response to Covid and the experience of life in lockdown, but it is only really the second half of the book that explores this - the first half, which I liked much more, sets up the character of the narrator, an artist who makes grand sculptures out of wood sealed by controlled burning.The government responds with more authoritarianism: the military patrol the streets, curfews are introduced for all.