Burntcoat

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Throughout the book, Edith achingly remembers the stories—stories from her unconventional childhood, stories of past abusive loves, stories of her creation of a masterwork of art—with a special emphasis on how and why we live and create in unprecedented times. I suspect I'm doing Sarah Hall an injustice, but at times it really felt like I was reading chick lit upgraded with some artistic flair and a pandemic sauce over it. It’s an intense, claustrophobic piece displaying many of the features associated with Hall’s fiction: a strong female protagonist, a northern setting and generous amounts of meticulously-detailed sex.

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. Even renovated, Burntcoat is ugly by most standards, a utilitarian warehouse, but it stands beside the river’s lambency — a hag in a bright mirror.Addressed later is a different “you,” one she realizes has been with her since she was a young girl.

It’s slenderly plotted, although it reminded me at times of Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in the way that information’s drip-fed, elliptical, requiring readers to piece together what’s happening from the narrator’s fragmented offerings. Written during the early feverish months of the first wave of COVID-19, Burntcoat is a haunting, beautifully-crafted story of love, trauma and the creation of art, all set against the backdrop of a deadly global pandemic. In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat in north Cumbria the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. To the days when she learned art techniques that would eventually lead her to win awards and more wealth than she knew how to comprehend. It is set in the 1930s, focuses on one family - the Lightburns - and is a rural tragedy about the disintegration of a community of Cumbrian hill-framers, due to the building of a reservoir.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.

Hall started writing this novel when the UK went into lockdown in March 2020, and I love the hazy atmosphere of this melancholic, lyrical novel about love and illness.And the fact that it’s not Covid but another (albeit more deadly) virus distances it from our own experiences of the recent pandemic, to a certain extent at least.

Finding the meaning in life through art — and especially as women fighting for space in male-dominated fields — is a recurring theme here. Edith’s mother was a popular novelist before her stroke (and it isn’t until the future scenes that her books will be reassessed as “works of merit”, the “Gothic label stripped off like cheap varnish”; a dismissive term that had been “used for women whose work the establishment enjoys but doesn’t respect” as only “men are the existentialists”. The most powerful sections of the novel are those featuring Halit, whom Edith starts seeing in the months leading up to lockdown. Maybe you could say it chars the surface but then polishes it to create something stronger and more resilient. Opening upon a scene a couple of decades in the future, 59-year old Edith Harkness — world famous sculptor; master of the Japanese Shou Sugi Ban technique of burning wood to seal it against decomposition — discovers that the AG3 novavirus, which had lain dormant in her since surviving a devastating pandemic as a young woman, has reactivated, giving her only days to live.Informed by and written during our time of pandemic, the November book for the Nervous Breakdown Book Club is another selection worthy of the “club’s” name. I’m pretending I never read it, instead remembering only Hall’s mastery of the written word and the stunning, evocative intimacy of Burntcoat. 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.