Burntcoat

Product Information

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. The whole narration is presented in retrospect, with a now 59-year-old and dying Edith addressing the long-dead Halit as "you" and using the story as a means to make sense of her own destiny, the contingency of life.

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. Nothing had prepared me for the emotion I felt there, the acceptance, finding myself in tears and becoming part of the flood. I'm quite fascinated by this book, which deals on interesting questions of art, memory, and loss, and strangest of all, has a pandemic subplot that might turn off some readers for whom 2020 is fresh. There are vivid descriptions of hot summer days, and water is a recurring theme; the river, water for washing, for drinking, sustaining.

The book’s energy lies in Hall’s knack for alighting on the sort of authentic detail that brings a scene alive. Burntcoat is a sensual and exhilarating novel of mortality, passion and human connection, set against the backdrop of a deadly global pandemic in which we are starkly reminded about the vastly underestimated power of art and love to light the way during times of crisis; and it is Hall’s first novel in several years. Maybe that is why we need to make and have art in our lives because it exposes the hidden, the other perspectives which we so need to survive with our sanity intact. The book that we read is, then, the reflections of a dying woman, and memories of her mother are movingly evoked as part of its elliptical structure.

The timeline is not linear, and confusion was magnified as we bounced back and forth and all over the place…from past to present to future. I’m pretending I never read it, instead remembering only Hall’s mastery of the written word and the stunning, evocative intimacy of Burntcoat.That explicitness also appears in the detailed description of the process of deterioration Halit and Edith go through, due to the disease ('pain porn'! As you say, it was a way of channelling all the emotions many of us were feeling — fear, anxiety, uncertainty, feverish catastrophising — into something productive. And she remembers when she met and fell in love with Halit, a Bulgarian Turk who ran a small restaurant in the town where Edith lives. With Burntcoat she has solidified her status as the literary shining light we lesser souls aspire to.