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To Battersea Park
‘A brilliantly conceived and audacious novel from one of our most consistently intelligent and beguiling writers’ William Boyd‘Surefooted and emotionally generous … A serious achievement’ Guardian‘Masterful’ Telegraph‘A revelation’ SpectatorThe new novel from the Booker shortlisted author of The Northern ClemencyAn order is issued. A population may not meet, or touch or speak to each other. They stay inside, and the reality of a few streets in a capital city emerges. An underground river is discovered; an urban grove of pomeloes emerges. The imagination reaches out, and makes sense of the world. By the sea, two men walk into a future of uncertain violence.There is time now to see the human dramas within a hundred yards (an abduction, a quiet breakdown, an outbreak of violence, a young mind beginning to stretch itself); to wait for the weather to change; to understand that what lies underneath this part of the city are seasonally wet pastures and woodlands.Written in four parts, To Battersea Park explores the strata and sediment of a single place and time. It shows what brings us together, through love, through the clashes of what we want to do and what the world wants to do with us. Set in a large crowded city where we are forbidden to approach strangers, this is about what we humanity, imagination, and the love that emerges from many acts of telling.‘Electrifying … works like this… allow the imagination to roam free and wild’ Observer‘Wise, ingenious and passionate’ TLS‘Magnificently succeeds in excavating the sedimentary layers of a neighbourhood in lockdown to reveal – hilariously, tenderly, shockingly – how we exist both in intimacy and ignorance of those we live among’ Financial Times‘An engrossing human drama’ The Times‘An imaginative tour de force’ Mick Herron, author of Bad Actors‘An utterly engrossing skein of narratives, beautifully written and often disturbing’ Lissa Evans, author of V for Victory
304 pages, Hardcover
Published March 30, 2023
30 people are currently reading
658 people want to read
About the author
Philip Hensher
41 books112 followersHensher was born in South London, although he spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Sheffield, attending Tapton School.[2] He did his undergraduate degree at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford before attending Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD for work on 18th century painting and satire. Early in his career he worked as a clerk in the House of Commons, from which he was fired over the content of an interview he gave to a gay magazine.[1] He has published a number of novels, is a regular contributor, columnist and book reviewer for newspapers and weeklies such as The Guardian, The Spectator , The Mail on Sunday and The Independent.
The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999) brings together 14 of his stories, including ‘Dead Languages’, which A. S. Byatt selected for her Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), making Hensher the youngest author included in the anthology.http://literature.britishcouncil.org/...
Since 2005 he has taught creative writing at the University of Exeter. He has edited new editions of numerous classic works of English Literature, such as those by Charles Dickens and Nancy Mitford, and Hensher served as a judge for the Booker Prize. From 2013 he will hold the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.[3]
Since 2000, Philip Hensher has been listed as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in Britain,[4] and in 2003 as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.[1]
In 2008, Hensher's semi-autobiographical novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2012, Hensher won first prize -German Travel Writers Award, and is shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. He also won the Stonewall Prize for the Journalist of the Year in 2007 and The Somerset Maugham Award for his novel Kitchen Venom in 1996. He wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès' 1995 opera Powder Her Face. This has been his only musical collaboration to date.
His early writings have been characterized as having an "ironic, knowing distance from their characters" and "icily precise skewerings of pretension and hypocrisy"[1] His historical novel The Mulberry Empire "echos with the rhythm and language of folk tales" while "play[ing] games" with narrative forms.[1]
He is married to Zaved Mahmood, a human rights lawyer at the United Nations.
You can find out more about Philip on his author page at 4th Estate Books: http://www.4thestate.co.uk/author/phi...
The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999) brings together 14 of his stories, including ‘Dead Languages’, which A. S. Byatt selected for her Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), making Hensher the youngest author included in the anthology.http://literature.britishcouncil.org/...
Since 2005 he has taught creative writing at the University of Exeter. He has edited new editions of numerous classic works of English Literature, such as those by Charles Dickens and Nancy Mitford, and Hensher served as a judge for the Booker Prize. From 2013 he will hold the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.[3]
Since 2000, Philip Hensher has been listed as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in Britain,[4] and in 2003 as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.[1]
In 2008, Hensher's semi-autobiographical novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2012, Hensher won first prize -German Travel Writers Award, and is shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. He also won the Stonewall Prize for the Journalist of the Year in 2007 and The Somerset Maugham Award for his novel Kitchen Venom in 1996. He wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès' 1995 opera Powder Her Face. This has been his only musical collaboration to date.
His early writings have been characterized as having an "ironic, knowing distance from their characters" and "icily precise skewerings of pretension and hypocrisy"[1] His historical novel The Mulberry Empire "echos with the rhythm and language of folk tales" while "play[ing] games" with narrative forms.[1]
He is married to Zaved Mahmood, a human rights lawyer at the United Nations.
You can find out more about Philip on his author page at 4th Estate Books: http://www.4thestate.co.uk/author/phi...
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June 26, 2023
A four-part novel by the Booker longlisted and shortlisted author, journalist, Creative Writing Professor and reviewer; this is a deeply personal examination of lockdown and COVID and very much an attempt to explore how novels can respond to and are altered by such events.
The four parts of the novel all contain roughly the same characters and back story but are each written in a very different style, which is largely set out by their titles: The Iterative Mood, Free Indirect Style, The Hero Undertakes a Journey, and Entrelacement.
The Iterative Mood begins “The State gave an order. We obeyed the order. Everyone obeyed the order. And the world changed.’ which at least to me lead me to expect some form of dystopian rendition of lockdowns/infectious diseases – but that is postponed for a later section and instead we get a near autobiographical story of a novelist and his husband, living in a leafy South London suburb around 30 minutes’ walk from the eponymous park. This of course means that they can only just about reach the gates of it, before having to run around, in their permitted one hour of exercise – a rule they follow: the tension between rules observance/compliance (to given a decent, orderly and safe society) and authoritarian/bureaucratic overreach is at the heart of the novel as it was of course during lockdown (and remains so in the post-pandemic debates about its implementation).
They quickly settle into a daily routine – their walk accompanied by breadmaking and cooking, but not by writing as the first-person narrator (who is binge reading the works of Ivy Compton Burnett) struggles with how to capture the current time in a novel in a passage which is key to this part
Hensher’s response is of course what we are reading and includes a curiosity (which shades into imagination) about the life of neighbours (a gay couple next door part of an extended family of rulebreakers, a “Stalinist” Harold-Wilson obsessed oddball living opposite, a family with a young son in which the professional and proprietorial – and jogging loving - father we are told later commits suicide). Hensher has in interviews (and in his teaching) decried the disappearance of class-filtered observations in the recent English novel and his narrator’s observations here are from a distinctly liberal, metropolitan, New Labour arts-snob middle class background. The narrator also develops an interest in both: the streets around him – for example realising that cherry blossom trees (which he associates with Japan), a Grenadian pomelo tree and Gingko trees (whose leaves he knows from Goethe) are nearby; and what lies underneath them – conjuring up the brooks, wetlands and wooded slopes obscured by South London Suburbia …. what is going on beneath the superficial – and to what an extent it is a valid pursuit of the novelist to record that - is another recurring theme of the book. Another key part of this section is a naming – of plants, smells etc.
Free Indirect Style – this section appropriately roams between the free indirect (defined elsewhere as “when a third-person narrator takes on the style and ‘voice’ of one of the characters within the story or novel. It is, if you will, as if a detached third-person narrator has begun to turn into a first-person narrator, i.e. one of the characters within the story (or novel). The objectivity and detachment we associate with third-person narrators dissolves into the subjective and personal style of a character.”) voice of a number of third party narrators to build up a story.
We have: a writer (who lives with his husband) and parents - with the writer’s elderly father (who looks after his dementia effected wife) taking a fall on a non-repaired stair carpet, necessitating a theoretically (given the current state of thinking around COVID) and actually (given what occurs) journey on public transport to supply some relief care; a woman who, orphaned and inheriting a house in her twenties, married the recently divorced, father-of-two builder who did some renovations for her but now in lockdown is realising that she resents them all and that her marriage is coming to an end; some other more incidental characters.
The key of this section is a brief list of events establishing a chain of causality between the wife’s frustration and the COVID infection of the writer (as well as the minor role played by an interview between a reviewer/journalist and an author – both this time clearly not Hensher).
The Hero Undertakes a Journey is the dystopian story that seemed promised in the opening paragraph of the first section. A virulent fifth wave of COVID has led to the sudden (and it has to say rather unexplained) complete collapse of government and utilities in England. The narrator Quentin, accompanied by the eccentric period drama inspired son of his neighbour sets out from Whitstable to Ramsgate (interestingly the question of this choice of locations is featured in the author interview at the end of the third part) through a near deserted suburban landscape roamed by occasional cultish gangs – less “The Road” and more “The Avenue”. This was probably the weakest section for me.
Entrelacement is appositely defined in one source I found as “a literary technique in which several simultaneous stories are interlaced in one larger narrative. This technique allows digression and presents opportunities for moral and ironic commentary while not disturbing the unity of the whole.”
Here we have two main stories: a first party account of a writer (here the identification with Hensher is stronger than ever) who realises that he and his husband have both caught and are badly impacted by COVID – the writer ending up taken to hospital with a shortage of Oxygen in his blood – something he is only too aware others have never returned from; a third party account by the wife of the jogging professional in the period leading up to his suicide.
A key character in this last section is the son of this couple: William – who in the first section we see tree identifying with a nature book and here are loving the imaginative world of books and fairy tales who ends the book in a rather fantastical section in which he sets out in a dinghy in a suddenly flooded South London saying in I think a metaphor for the writing of this impressively exploratory novel in which Hensher explores his own experiences in 2020-2021 and brings them back for us to share with him: ‘He did not know where he would go after Battersea Park, but the dinghy would take him there. And then when he was done … he could bring it back.’
The four parts of the novel all contain roughly the same characters and back story but are each written in a very different style, which is largely set out by their titles: The Iterative Mood, Free Indirect Style, The Hero Undertakes a Journey, and Entrelacement.
The Iterative Mood begins “The State gave an order. We obeyed the order. Everyone obeyed the order. And the world changed.’ which at least to me lead me to expect some form of dystopian rendition of lockdowns/infectious diseases – but that is postponed for a later section and instead we get a near autobiographical story of a novelist and his husband, living in a leafy South London suburb around 30 minutes’ walk from the eponymous park. This of course means that they can only just about reach the gates of it, before having to run around, in their permitted one hour of exercise – a rule they follow: the tension between rules observance/compliance (to given a decent, orderly and safe society) and authoritarian/bureaucratic overreach is at the heart of the novel as it was of course during lockdown (and remains so in the post-pandemic debates about its implementation).
They quickly settle into a daily routine – their walk accompanied by breadmaking and cooking, but not by writing as the first-person narrator (who is binge reading the works of Ivy Compton Burnett) struggles with how to capture the current time in a novel in a passage which is key to this part
I could not write, for the first time in my life. But the names of things emerged cleanly from the world around me, inside the house and out. I felt, too, that only the written word could tell the experience we were living through. Time passed as it always passed, but what was filling it was not enough. What filled it, too, was mostly behaviour that we repeated every day.
No film could account for it. Film could only represent a single passing moment, unique and occupying the same time span as the act of telling. What these months or years needed was the act of writing. You could write For fourteen months we stayed in our houses, mostly reading novels, and the time spent telling would leap over the time that was told. Erzählzeit, the theorists had said, busy with their categories, and Erzählte Zeit. I would not leap over the time that was told, if ever the possibility of writing returned to me. I would dig deep and say what it was like to move through this arrested time, like an eel through mud.
And you could write, Every day they would get up and make a cup of coffee; they would go and stand in the back garden before starting the day. There was a term for that among writers: it was called the iterative mood, the mood of narrating things that happened all the time in exactly the same way. I had sometimes said, in writing or talking to aspiring younger writers, that the iterative mood was like a landscape from which an object of individual and specific interest might emerge. How long might you spin out a paragraph before somebody cracked; how long might you go on adding to I would go to the West End every Friday afternoon. I liked to go to Soho. I would go to the Algerian coffee shop, and afterwards I would visit a bookshop to see what new novels were out, and doing well. I would usually have arranged to meet a friend in a bar at five. We would sit and gossip, and eye up the dissolute late-afternoon Soho crowd. We would often decide to go and see a film, and we would phone our husbands, and we would have dinner afterwards in a restaurant, perhaps a Sichuan ... You sit in a circle of game players, each of you adding to things done every day, or every week. But in time somebody would crack. The burden of the mood would build like storm clouds. Finally somebody would break away and say, But on the Friday I'm talking about ... breaking from the repeated to the singular, something that had never happened before or since. We lived in that mood now, where the repetitions of behaviour were building up. Something unique had to happen to crack the mood open. But it did not happen. The novel built and built, living within its iterative mood, and we were living within the novel that was living within it. Every morning I would wake and make buckwheat rolls; every day I would carry out small tasks in the garden; every night the fox would patrol its little urban acre. Nothing new happened. Nobody ever said, But today ... And the mood never broke.
Hensher’s response is of course what we are reading and includes a curiosity (which shades into imagination) about the life of neighbours (a gay couple next door part of an extended family of rulebreakers, a “Stalinist” Harold-Wilson obsessed oddball living opposite, a family with a young son in which the professional and proprietorial – and jogging loving - father we are told later commits suicide). Hensher has in interviews (and in his teaching) decried the disappearance of class-filtered observations in the recent English novel and his narrator’s observations here are from a distinctly liberal, metropolitan, New Labour arts-snob middle class background. The narrator also develops an interest in both: the streets around him – for example realising that cherry blossom trees (which he associates with Japan), a Grenadian pomelo tree and Gingko trees (whose leaves he knows from Goethe) are nearby; and what lies underneath them – conjuring up the brooks, wetlands and wooded slopes obscured by South London Suburbia …. what is going on beneath the superficial – and to what an extent it is a valid pursuit of the novelist to record that - is another recurring theme of the book. Another key part of this section is a naming – of plants, smells etc.
Free Indirect Style – this section appropriately roams between the free indirect (defined elsewhere as “when a third-person narrator takes on the style and ‘voice’ of one of the characters within the story or novel. It is, if you will, as if a detached third-person narrator has begun to turn into a first-person narrator, i.e. one of the characters within the story (or novel). The objectivity and detachment we associate with third-person narrators dissolves into the subjective and personal style of a character.”) voice of a number of third party narrators to build up a story.
We have: a writer (who lives with his husband) and parents - with the writer’s elderly father (who looks after his dementia effected wife) taking a fall on a non-repaired stair carpet, necessitating a theoretically (given the current state of thinking around COVID) and actually (given what occurs) journey on public transport to supply some relief care; a woman who, orphaned and inheriting a house in her twenties, married the recently divorced, father-of-two builder who did some renovations for her but now in lockdown is realising that she resents them all and that her marriage is coming to an end; some other more incidental characters.
The key of this section is a brief list of events establishing a chain of causality between the wife’s frustration and the COVID infection of the writer (as well as the minor role played by an interview between a reviewer/journalist and an author – both this time clearly not Hensher).
The Hero Undertakes a Journey is the dystopian story that seemed promised in the opening paragraph of the first section. A virulent fifth wave of COVID has led to the sudden (and it has to say rather unexplained) complete collapse of government and utilities in England. The narrator Quentin, accompanied by the eccentric period drama inspired son of his neighbour sets out from Whitstable to Ramsgate (interestingly the question of this choice of locations is featured in the author interview at the end of the third part) through a near deserted suburban landscape roamed by occasional cultish gangs – less “The Road” and more “The Avenue”. This was probably the weakest section for me.
Entrelacement is appositely defined in one source I found as “a literary technique in which several simultaneous stories are interlaced in one larger narrative. This technique allows digression and presents opportunities for moral and ironic commentary while not disturbing the unity of the whole.”
Here we have two main stories: a first party account of a writer (here the identification with Hensher is stronger than ever) who realises that he and his husband have both caught and are badly impacted by COVID – the writer ending up taken to hospital with a shortage of Oxygen in his blood – something he is only too aware others have never returned from; a third party account by the wife of the jogging professional in the period leading up to his suicide.
A key character in this last section is the son of this couple: William – who in the first section we see tree identifying with a nature book and here are loving the imaginative world of books and fairy tales who ends the book in a rather fantastical section in which he sets out in a dinghy in a suddenly flooded South London saying in I think a metaphor for the writing of this impressively exploratory novel in which Hensher explores his own experiences in 2020-2021 and brings them back for us to share with him: ‘He did not know where he would go after Battersea Park, but the dinghy would take him there. And then when he was done … he could bring it back.’
The novel and the art it embodied, both in those who wrote them and those who read them, was an interlacing of the truth and the invented. What happened passed before the eyes, and it was drab, monosyllabic, solipsistic, inadequate once transcribed; what might have happened stretched out limitlessly, rooted in and always returning to what had been seen.
March 28, 2023
Thank you to HarperCollins via Netgalley for the eARC of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review.
I don't really know what I thought I was getting myself into when I requested this book. I think it was the title first - I have spent a non-zero amount of time at Battersea Park over the last few years - and then the blurb, which promised a story about the lives of people who lived in SW London during the pandemic - same! The fact that this immediately made a jab at people who went for runs around Battersea Park during the lockdown (also me), meant we didn't exactly get off on the right foot. I dusted myself off, however, and gave it my best shot.
This is an odd one. It tells the stories of a plethora of different characters living in in the Queenstown Road area (as well as, for some reason, coastal Kent) during the various Covid-19 lockdowns. The book is split into sections that take on different storytelling forms- The Iterative Mood, Free Indirect Style, The Hero Undertakes a Journey, and Entrelacement. Our protagonist, if there can be said to be one, is a middle class author in his early fifties, living with his husband and observing the neighbourhood goings-on - the various tensions that are thrown up by the government rules, the rule breaking, the curtain twitching, the strange Grenadian woman who grows pomelos. Most of our characters are living an extremely bland life of Waitrose deliveries and Zoom meetings, and whilst the book seems to be going for a satire of sorts, this often veers into the plainly uninteresting. Why would I want to revisit the plain, unadorned dreariness that was lockdown? Though this did manage to extract a few amused snorts from me, it wasn't quite funny enough to stand on that leg alone.
The first section is the most grounded, with the subsequent sections taking on a more surreal feeling. The third section departs entirely from London, following a young man who has fled to Kent, which seems to have fallen into complete anarchy. There's no power, no food, and a gang of young men terrorise anyone who decides to stay. I really did not like this section in particular - I felt I couldn't get a handhold in the narrative. It was such a departure from the previous two sections that it felt like that song in a musical that nobody likes, but you need to have so that they can do big costume changes.
The final section is, I think the real strength of the book. (I will try to avoid spoilers here!) Veering between the two 'entrelaced' stories of two of our households from the first section, Hensher juxtaposes the physical health crisis of the coronavirus with the mental health issues caused by lockdown. I think it gets to the meat of what made lockdowns so traumatic, so effectively that revisiting it in this book is perhaps too fresh for the present moment. Despite this book's sardonic and skilful prose, I found myself wondering why anyone might want to read it in this present moment. Why re-experience the domestic 'iterative mood' of lockdown that brings up my heart rate and squeezes the stomach? In terms of my bodily response, this book is something like going over a hill too fast in a car. I wasn't prepared, and now I feel unsettled.
It is a book that makes you work hard to extract meaning - this isn't always a negative thing, but I can't help but feel like this isn't a subject matter I'm ready to work hard on. Maybe that's a me problem. It probably would read best as a one-sitting book, allowing you to keep all its moving parts in view from start to end. Every time I picked this up it took me a decent while to find my bearings in the narrative, to remember who 'the son' and 'the mother' were in any particular context.
If you're a big fan of Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet, you might quite enjoy the way this combines recent history with the slightly surreal. I don't think it's quite as successful though. Overall, I'd say this is well-written, and will almost certainly split opinion!
I don't really know what I thought I was getting myself into when I requested this book. I think it was the title first - I have spent a non-zero amount of time at Battersea Park over the last few years - and then the blurb, which promised a story about the lives of people who lived in SW London during the pandemic - same! The fact that this immediately made a jab at people who went for runs around Battersea Park during the lockdown (also me), meant we didn't exactly get off on the right foot. I dusted myself off, however, and gave it my best shot.
This is an odd one. It tells the stories of a plethora of different characters living in in the Queenstown Road area (as well as, for some reason, coastal Kent) during the various Covid-19 lockdowns. The book is split into sections that take on different storytelling forms- The Iterative Mood, Free Indirect Style, The Hero Undertakes a Journey, and Entrelacement. Our protagonist, if there can be said to be one, is a middle class author in his early fifties, living with his husband and observing the neighbourhood goings-on - the various tensions that are thrown up by the government rules, the rule breaking, the curtain twitching, the strange Grenadian woman who grows pomelos. Most of our characters are living an extremely bland life of Waitrose deliveries and Zoom meetings, and whilst the book seems to be going for a satire of sorts, this often veers into the plainly uninteresting. Why would I want to revisit the plain, unadorned dreariness that was lockdown? Though this did manage to extract a few amused snorts from me, it wasn't quite funny enough to stand on that leg alone.
The first section is the most grounded, with the subsequent sections taking on a more surreal feeling. The third section departs entirely from London, following a young man who has fled to Kent, which seems to have fallen into complete anarchy. There's no power, no food, and a gang of young men terrorise anyone who decides to stay. I really did not like this section in particular - I felt I couldn't get a handhold in the narrative. It was such a departure from the previous two sections that it felt like that song in a musical that nobody likes, but you need to have so that they can do big costume changes.
The final section is, I think the real strength of the book. (I will try to avoid spoilers here!) Veering between the two 'entrelaced' stories of two of our households from the first section, Hensher juxtaposes the physical health crisis of the coronavirus with the mental health issues caused by lockdown. I think it gets to the meat of what made lockdowns so traumatic, so effectively that revisiting it in this book is perhaps too fresh for the present moment. Despite this book's sardonic and skilful prose, I found myself wondering why anyone might want to read it in this present moment. Why re-experience the domestic 'iterative mood' of lockdown that brings up my heart rate and squeezes the stomach? In terms of my bodily response, this book is something like going over a hill too fast in a car. I wasn't prepared, and now I feel unsettled.
It is a book that makes you work hard to extract meaning - this isn't always a negative thing, but I can't help but feel like this isn't a subject matter I'm ready to work hard on. Maybe that's a me problem. It probably would read best as a one-sitting book, allowing you to keep all its moving parts in view from start to end. Every time I picked this up it took me a decent while to find my bearings in the narrative, to remember who 'the son' and 'the mother' were in any particular context.
If you're a big fan of Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet, you might quite enjoy the way this combines recent history with the slightly surreal. I don't think it's quite as successful though. Overall, I'd say this is well-written, and will almost certainly split opinion!
April 17, 2023
DNF. A book about lockdown. Wow I’ve never been so bored
December 23, 2024
A COVID novel, it is September 2024 and I can't think of anything more, what is the word? irrelevant? opportunistic? pointless? stupid? The 1918 flu epidemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide and affected one fifth of the world's population, how many novels did it inspire? zero. Why? because writers in 1919 had imaginations and didn't have to pull metaphors out of headlines for their novels. Want some examples? Here they are:
Sherwood Anderson 'Winesburg Ohio'
Hermann Hesse 'Demian'
Virginia Wolf 'Night and Day'
P.G. Wodehouse 'My Man Jeeves' (the first Jeeves book)
John Reed 'Ten Days That Shook the World'
William Somerset Maugham 'The Moon and Sixpence'
George Bernard Shaw 'Heartbreak House'
Ronald Firbank 'Valmouth'
I don't pretend this list is anything but idiosyncratic, I don't pretend that they are the best books these authors wrote, but in 1919 some of the greatest writers of the day didn't think that the 1918 flu was worth mentioning. So why does Hensher imagine that COVID is worth building a whole novel on? Does it not appear to be a desperate attempt at relevance? headlines?
Maybe it is just me but even HIV/AIDS which lasted for decades and has certainly killed more people than COVID probably failed to produce a literature that anyone wants to read today, so why should a epidemic which revealed only the bankruptcy of the UK and US political leadership be considered a topic of literature?
If anyone wants I can send you lists of great novels that should be read before this and if none of them appeal I can send lists of not-so-great novels and down through lists of ever less worthy novels until we reach the superficial and tawdry and those novels are probably more worthwhile reading than To Battersea Park by Hensher.
Sherwood Anderson 'Winesburg Ohio'
Hermann Hesse 'Demian'
Virginia Wolf 'Night and Day'
P.G. Wodehouse 'My Man Jeeves' (the first Jeeves book)
John Reed 'Ten Days That Shook the World'
William Somerset Maugham 'The Moon and Sixpence'
George Bernard Shaw 'Heartbreak House'
Ronald Firbank 'Valmouth'
I don't pretend this list is anything but idiosyncratic, I don't pretend that they are the best books these authors wrote, but in 1919 some of the greatest writers of the day didn't think that the 1918 flu was worth mentioning. So why does Hensher imagine that COVID is worth building a whole novel on? Does it not appear to be a desperate attempt at relevance? headlines?
Maybe it is just me but even HIV/AIDS which lasted for decades and has certainly killed more people than COVID probably failed to produce a literature that anyone wants to read today, so why should a epidemic which revealed only the bankruptcy of the UK and US political leadership be considered a topic of literature?
If anyone wants I can send you lists of great novels that should be read before this and if none of them appeal I can send lists of not-so-great novels and down through lists of ever less worthy novels until we reach the superficial and tawdry and those novels are probably more worthwhile reading than To Battersea Park by Hensher.
December 6, 2023
Sat in Auckland airport waiting for my ears to pop, thinkin about the sheer gall of my man Philip Hensher.
For a long time I felt like we shouldn't be writing about covid, mostly for emotionally driven reasons, but I feel like this novel is a really great way to dip the toe into that whole trauma bath, a novel which, in itself, is an exploration of how the fuck we can write about this period in a way that's remotely meaningful.
It's four parts, four different lockdown stories written in four different styles, essentially being like 'how about this', 'no actually how about this', 'or this', 'actually forget it'. It's really interesting to see Philip fucking with the ideas in real time. Like, he does a really good job of making everything as boring and banal as possible, then seems to just go 'actually fuck this someone's gotta get stabbed'. Defo a bit wanky in places when he starts writing about the craft of the story during the story - felt like he could have left all that to speak for itself - but I respect the ambition to fuck with the form, and ultimately each story is really rewarding in the way they slowly unfurl and pull threads together. On the whole our Phil uses covid really effectively as a means of exploring how little we know about people's private lives.
LOVE the ending as well what an absolutely wild left turn into like a whole other genre so out of character lmao king shit
Kinda unrelated but feels like this is for fans of videos that explain old London tube maps
For a long time I felt like we shouldn't be writing about covid, mostly for emotionally driven reasons, but I feel like this novel is a really great way to dip the toe into that whole trauma bath, a novel which, in itself, is an exploration of how the fuck we can write about this period in a way that's remotely meaningful.
It's four parts, four different lockdown stories written in four different styles, essentially being like 'how about this', 'no actually how about this', 'or this', 'actually forget it'. It's really interesting to see Philip fucking with the ideas in real time. Like, he does a really good job of making everything as boring and banal as possible, then seems to just go 'actually fuck this someone's gotta get stabbed'. Defo a bit wanky in places when he starts writing about the craft of the story during the story - felt like he could have left all that to speak for itself - but I respect the ambition to fuck with the form, and ultimately each story is really rewarding in the way they slowly unfurl and pull threads together. On the whole our Phil uses covid really effectively as a means of exploring how little we know about people's private lives.
LOVE the ending as well what an absolutely wild left turn into like a whole other genre so out of character lmao king shit
Kinda unrelated but feels like this is for fans of videos that explain old London tube maps
May 23, 2023
My first 'lockdown' novel...& perhaps my last!
I enjoyed...up to a critical point...the idea of telling private, personal stories set in an area of south London & a coastal retreat in north-eastern Kent...about a cast of strange characters from different 'communities' & 'minorities'...but in the four sections making up the 294 pages...Philip Hensher begins to suffer from an appropriate infection of literary fantasy...very popular with Gen-Z readers no doubt!
'Hen-shy' writes very well (cock-sure?)...on first brief acquaintance...but I wonder if I want to seek-out his other work NOT set in the Covid-19 bubbles...when a lot of common-sense was lost to state-organised chaos...reminiscent of a one-party state of recent memory?
Like so many published writers these days, he ticks a lot of the right, 'lefty' boxes, & never escapes the attention of the sympathetic book reviewers...but surely there are better treatments of such an episode in our global disasters than this accretion of fossilised perceptions of humanity? There's even a senseless - to me anyway - murder, by stabbing, of a young man, lost & helpless...& left, callously, to rot on a deserted beach by a chap called Quentin! I've never met a Quentin with so little humanity...darling!
I enjoyed...up to a critical point...the idea of telling private, personal stories set in an area of south London & a coastal retreat in north-eastern Kent...about a cast of strange characters from different 'communities' & 'minorities'...but in the four sections making up the 294 pages...Philip Hensher begins to suffer from an appropriate infection of literary fantasy...very popular with Gen-Z readers no doubt!
'Hen-shy' writes very well (cock-sure?)...on first brief acquaintance...but I wonder if I want to seek-out his other work NOT set in the Covid-19 bubbles...when a lot of common-sense was lost to state-organised chaos...reminiscent of a one-party state of recent memory?
Like so many published writers these days, he ticks a lot of the right, 'lefty' boxes, & never escapes the attention of the sympathetic book reviewers...but surely there are better treatments of such an episode in our global disasters than this accretion of fossilised perceptions of humanity? There's even a senseless - to me anyway - murder, by stabbing, of a young man, lost & helpless...& left, callously, to rot on a deserted beach by a chap called Quentin! I've never met a Quentin with so little humanity...darling!
December 22, 2023
Philip Hensher's latest novel, To Battersea Park, is a collection of four novellas reflecting on the Covid-19 lockdown in London and on the south coast, and also a reflection on certain aspects of the novelist's craft. It recalls Hanya Yanagihara's To Paradise, but falls far short of Yanagihara's ambition. Nevertheless, the first, most straightforwardly realist novella, 'The Iterative Mood' is the best depiction of the early days of a certain kind of middle-class lockdown experience that I've read, and the final section of the novel, 'Entrelacement' inhabits the mind of a peculiar child perfectly, intercut with a brilliant evocation of the fragmented thoughts of a character with a high fever and reduced oxygen levels due to a coronavirus infection. Hensher picks apart novelists' techniques for us then tries them out on the page: 'It feels too easy to leap into a character's head to explain things, and too remote from the real process of thinking'. As his imagined South London neighbourhood dissolves into water at the end of the novel, it feels like Hensher is both playing with dystopian tropes and deliberately revealing the artifice of fiction: 'The row of houses opposite his front door had been done away with, and some structures beyond that'. The weakest of the four novellas, however, 'The Hero Undertakes a Journey Away From His Environment', is straightforwardly apocalyptic, imagining a 'fifth wave' of an unknown virus that has caused society to collapse, and disappointingly familiar in its tale of two men trekking through an abandoned landscape. Overall, a bit too cerebral for me - I preferred Hensher's The Emperor Waltz - but you have to admire Hensher at his observational best. 3.5 stars.
April 3, 2023
To Battersea Park is best understood as a collection of short stories of differing genres with some common characters. Though there are a dozen storylines, the novel can be split into three main sections. The first, the effects of lockdown isolation on different families. The second, how society is faring several years into the pandemic in the near future. And the third, a focus on a family from the first section, their marriage issues, and their son’s dreams.
The beginning of the novel is strikingly familiar in its depictions of the early days of lockdown. With a shared sense of growing insanity from being housebound and a lack of normalcy, relationships change and neighbours fight. Social gathering regulations are respected and ignored, and exercise restrictions are carefully avoided. Even, for some people, the monotony of lockdown offered a life they hadn’t known they were missing.
Some parts of the novel are very much grounded, then there are other sections that veer far from reality. Alongside this, characters are introduced haphazardly and disappear just as quickly. As such, reading the novel feels a little like being thrown around on a rollercoaster and mostly enjoying the experience but with an underlying feeling that you no longer know which way you were facing.
However, overall the novel dealt well with the themes of grief and uncertainty, with some achingly beautifully written phrases.
Thank you to 4th Estate for an ARC via NetGalley
The beginning of the novel is strikingly familiar in its depictions of the early days of lockdown. With a shared sense of growing insanity from being housebound and a lack of normalcy, relationships change and neighbours fight. Social gathering regulations are respected and ignored, and exercise restrictions are carefully avoided. Even, for some people, the monotony of lockdown offered a life they hadn’t known they were missing.
The life we lived was of the utmost habit, circling the day like a satellite, and in that habit resided a happiness I felt I had only glimpsed before
Some parts of the novel are very much grounded, then there are other sections that veer far from reality. Alongside this, characters are introduced haphazardly and disappear just as quickly. As such, reading the novel feels a little like being thrown around on a rollercoaster and mostly enjoying the experience but with an underlying feeling that you no longer know which way you were facing.
However, overall the novel dealt well with the themes of grief and uncertainty, with some achingly beautifully written phrases.
I was in a world of monosyllables and I said what a million people said as the last thing they would ever say to the man they loved, I’ll see you soon, don’t fret.
Thank you to 4th Estate for an ARC via NetGalley
June 13, 2023
A real intertextual and metafictional delight (and my first pandemic novel, I believe). I mean, how could one not like a novel that opens as a counterpoint to the beginning of Proust's "Remembrance Of Things Past". Proust: "For a long time I used to go to bed early." Hensher: "For a long time I would get up early." "Enterlacement" section is perhaps the most meta of them all weaving at least three levels of discourse. I found Hensher's claim in the second section about how free indirect discourse is an ethical form because it puts the reader in relation to other individuals interesting in relation to what Deleuze and Guattari write about the same form in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. There's plenty to be said about each section depending on what one is interested in, and that's what makes this novel real good in my book.
April 18, 2023
Well I loved this from start to finish. Begins as gentle yarn about pandemic life, quickly becomes a consideration of the novel itself and then darker and darker into a dystopian future that, thank God, didn't happen. Just in time - and we nearly don't make it - the narrator realises that all that's left of us is love, and that matters whether you're a novelist wondering where to go next or a serious little boy in search of meaning in a confusing and unpredictable world. A small book with a huge heart.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 7, 2025
The fact that I picked this up thinking it was a dystopian novel says A LOT about what we've lived through (spoiler - it's all about Covid 19).
This is a really gently and thoughtfully written tribute to what daily life became during the pandemic - passing through the experiences of lots and lots of different characters with no lack of representation or diversity.
I can't say I absolutely fell in love with this as it did feel (for me) a little sedate/passive at times which doesn't mesh well with my love for a gritty narrative! But it's a really skilful reminder of the fact we've truly lived through significant history in the past 5 years and gives some really interesting insights into human dynamics and relationships.
This is a really gently and thoughtfully written tribute to what daily life became during the pandemic - passing through the experiences of lots and lots of different characters with no lack of representation or diversity.
I can't say I absolutely fell in love with this as it did feel (for me) a little sedate/passive at times which doesn't mesh well with my love for a gritty narrative! But it's a really skilful reminder of the fact we've truly lived through significant history in the past 5 years and gives some really interesting insights into human dynamics and relationships.
October 18, 2023
Philip Hensher has written four creative, linked stories (with subplots), that he has woven into a book called To Battersea Park. What I enjoyed about the book was the excellent prose – the enchanting sentences. Since this was, to me, a highlight of the book, let me illustrate with a couple of examples:
“But in fact what drew our attention and kept it was not, as in most human beings, a private and submerged existence, the larger part of life, which glimpses of a face in public only suggested, but rather a life lived in self-conscious openness, an existence spent noisily advertising itself on the street without ever reaching out, or knowing how to.” (p. 45)
“He found himself in that new medium, a new life. If he succeeded in staying down here in this different element, transformed, growing gills, like a hero under a spell, the sounds of other beings would come to him in ways he could not predict. The crowds of whales calling across untroubled oceans with their fat melisma would call to him, too, and nearer, the castanetting crabs, dancing to seduce each other, beating on their armour, the gulps and yodels of plunging seals, the crackle of shoals of herring turning in their hundreds in terror, plunging for the cold depth between landmasses.” (pp. 216-7).
So, what is the book about? It’s about how to survive an existential crisis, by calling on our inventiveness. We can use our resources to achieve harmony in life, but we must act. Man is always frustrated and holds back from taking the step needed to reach contentment.
Battersea Park then becomes a metaphor. Unless you are a jogger – and Philip Hensher hates joggers (and drivers of SUVs) – you could not venture into Battersea Park during the COVID-19 lockdowns, starting in March 2020 because the state decreed only an hour of exercise each day, and strict social distancing. Battersea Park, then, becomes a symbol of the unattainable, which can be neared, but not entered.
The narrator and his husband walk as far as the gates of Battersea Park before they run out of time and must turn back. Their daily outing to the never-entered promised land of the park is marred by numerous joggers, “perspiring and flailing, their faces irresolute and assured… the mist of their wet breath, the miasma of their sweat… I hated them with an energy that afterwards was hard to account for.”
“To Battersea Park” portrays the weirdness of the new normality in which we found ourselves in lockdown: the silence left by the absence of cars and planes which “you could almost reach out and squeeze… like a saturated sponge;” the sudden inexplicable shortages of eggs and flour; the lavish abundance of blossom and birdsong; the endless hours stripped of their usual activities, lying down in the middle of what would – in normal times – be a busy road jammed with traffic.
Nothing happens. Or does it? Probe, analyze. Philip Hensher helps the reader. He cleverly weaves together multiple storylines to reveal the complex textures of human relationships in a few deft phrases. He notices and analyses with sensuous vigilance minutiae, or smaller events that inevitably have a larger meaning. Small details of behaviors, words spoken, actions taken or not taken… can reveal a lot about the dilemmas facing people in everyday life – “nothing was too small to look at, to name or rename, to contemplate.”
In a lockdown, boundaries between individual worlds become increasingly indistinct as the weeks progress. If you go out to work, you create a distancing between work and home. Perversely, the need for human connection stubbornly resists the imposition of isolation at every turn. Lockdown could hardly be more densely and vibrantly populated.
Philip Hensher explores the consequences of this relentless proximity and enforced solitude. The marriage of another neighbour, the wife of a builder, quietly withers under the pressures of homeworking, Zoom meetings, and the constant presence of her fractious stepchildren and slobby, furloughed husband. With no distractions from the persecutory voices inside his head, Femi, the upstanding lawyer who lives opposite with his wife and son, is driven to suicide.
In another story, locked down in a large Victorian house outside London, the narrator’s elderly father lovingly tends his model trains upstairs while his mother spends her days in the sitting-room, trapped in the timeless confinement of dementia. When she periodically calls up to her husband for help, he “lets the calls go on for a few minutes, in general, before going down.” Between those commas resides a whole marriage.
When the narrator succumbs to COVID-19, from his feverish imagination emerges a new character, Quentin, who spends lockdown in his seaside retreat of a new-build in Whitstable. Set on the south coast of England in a dystopian, lawless, near future, feral gangs roam the streets, with water, food and petrol running short. Accompanied by a hapless young man named Simon whose mother has taken off, Quentin embarks on a perilous 20-mile walk to Ramsgate, where he hopes to locate his father and his errant lover. As the story develops, the “batter” and “sea” of the London park take on a far darker meaning.
In the next chapter, a befuddled account of the narrator’s experience of the virus is entwined with the story of the lawyer, Femi, and his descent into the abyss of his own mind. Hensher draws the reader into Femi’s world, but interrupts the flow of this storyline with authorial digressions on the story he is writing, reminding readers that Femi and his family are as much fictional constructions as the sinister Quentin.
“How we understand the world is the same as how the novel understands and reproduces the world,” one of these digressions begins. “The novel tells us about the past, but it knows how to bring the past into the room,” opines another. The novel creates reality, our knowledge of others is always an act of imaginative invention.
To Battersea Park looks below the surface of the iceberg to reveal how we exist both in intimacy and ignorance of those we live among. It is not fences that make good neighbours, this novel suggests, but “the hard, warm irreducible kernel of love.”
Some brilliant writing. A serious topic. Humor to warm the reader. A creative narrative structure. A consistent overall message. It is leading edge. I give it five stars for these reasons.
“But in fact what drew our attention and kept it was not, as in most human beings, a private and submerged existence, the larger part of life, which glimpses of a face in public only suggested, but rather a life lived in self-conscious openness, an existence spent noisily advertising itself on the street without ever reaching out, or knowing how to.” (p. 45)
“He found himself in that new medium, a new life. If he succeeded in staying down here in this different element, transformed, growing gills, like a hero under a spell, the sounds of other beings would come to him in ways he could not predict. The crowds of whales calling across untroubled oceans with their fat melisma would call to him, too, and nearer, the castanetting crabs, dancing to seduce each other, beating on their armour, the gulps and yodels of plunging seals, the crackle of shoals of herring turning in their hundreds in terror, plunging for the cold depth between landmasses.” (pp. 216-7).
So, what is the book about? It’s about how to survive an existential crisis, by calling on our inventiveness. We can use our resources to achieve harmony in life, but we must act. Man is always frustrated and holds back from taking the step needed to reach contentment.
Battersea Park then becomes a metaphor. Unless you are a jogger – and Philip Hensher hates joggers (and drivers of SUVs) – you could not venture into Battersea Park during the COVID-19 lockdowns, starting in March 2020 because the state decreed only an hour of exercise each day, and strict social distancing. Battersea Park, then, becomes a symbol of the unattainable, which can be neared, but not entered.
The narrator and his husband walk as far as the gates of Battersea Park before they run out of time and must turn back. Their daily outing to the never-entered promised land of the park is marred by numerous joggers, “perspiring and flailing, their faces irresolute and assured… the mist of their wet breath, the miasma of their sweat… I hated them with an energy that afterwards was hard to account for.”
“To Battersea Park” portrays the weirdness of the new normality in which we found ourselves in lockdown: the silence left by the absence of cars and planes which “you could almost reach out and squeeze… like a saturated sponge;” the sudden inexplicable shortages of eggs and flour; the lavish abundance of blossom and birdsong; the endless hours stripped of their usual activities, lying down in the middle of what would – in normal times – be a busy road jammed with traffic.
Nothing happens. Or does it? Probe, analyze. Philip Hensher helps the reader. He cleverly weaves together multiple storylines to reveal the complex textures of human relationships in a few deft phrases. He notices and analyses with sensuous vigilance minutiae, or smaller events that inevitably have a larger meaning. Small details of behaviors, words spoken, actions taken or not taken… can reveal a lot about the dilemmas facing people in everyday life – “nothing was too small to look at, to name or rename, to contemplate.”
In a lockdown, boundaries between individual worlds become increasingly indistinct as the weeks progress. If you go out to work, you create a distancing between work and home. Perversely, the need for human connection stubbornly resists the imposition of isolation at every turn. Lockdown could hardly be more densely and vibrantly populated.
Philip Hensher explores the consequences of this relentless proximity and enforced solitude. The marriage of another neighbour, the wife of a builder, quietly withers under the pressures of homeworking, Zoom meetings, and the constant presence of her fractious stepchildren and slobby, furloughed husband. With no distractions from the persecutory voices inside his head, Femi, the upstanding lawyer who lives opposite with his wife and son, is driven to suicide.
In another story, locked down in a large Victorian house outside London, the narrator’s elderly father lovingly tends his model trains upstairs while his mother spends her days in the sitting-room, trapped in the timeless confinement of dementia. When she periodically calls up to her husband for help, he “lets the calls go on for a few minutes, in general, before going down.” Between those commas resides a whole marriage.
When the narrator succumbs to COVID-19, from his feverish imagination emerges a new character, Quentin, who spends lockdown in his seaside retreat of a new-build in Whitstable. Set on the south coast of England in a dystopian, lawless, near future, feral gangs roam the streets, with water, food and petrol running short. Accompanied by a hapless young man named Simon whose mother has taken off, Quentin embarks on a perilous 20-mile walk to Ramsgate, where he hopes to locate his father and his errant lover. As the story develops, the “batter” and “sea” of the London park take on a far darker meaning.
In the next chapter, a befuddled account of the narrator’s experience of the virus is entwined with the story of the lawyer, Femi, and his descent into the abyss of his own mind. Hensher draws the reader into Femi’s world, but interrupts the flow of this storyline with authorial digressions on the story he is writing, reminding readers that Femi and his family are as much fictional constructions as the sinister Quentin.
“How we understand the world is the same as how the novel understands and reproduces the world,” one of these digressions begins. “The novel tells us about the past, but it knows how to bring the past into the room,” opines another. The novel creates reality, our knowledge of others is always an act of imaginative invention.
To Battersea Park looks below the surface of the iceberg to reveal how we exist both in intimacy and ignorance of those we live among. It is not fences that make good neighbours, this novel suggests, but “the hard, warm irreducible kernel of love.”
Some brilliant writing. A serious topic. Humor to warm the reader. A creative narrative structure. A consistent overall message. It is leading edge. I give it five stars for these reasons.
January 9, 2025
Bought on a whim as I live near the park, unusual and lucid dreams of a book about the lockdown but also about everything but - I'd love to know more about what other people think about it!
June 18, 2024
It's been four years since the world stopped thanks to Covid. It's not a long time when all is said and done. However, it feels both too soon and too late to publish a book about it. We've not moved on enough that the pandemic is a quaint part of our history, but enough time has passed that we all want to forget about the months we spent inside. By this point, a few novels have been set during the pandemic, so Philip Hensher needed to do something amazing to stand out. What he offers is a literary experiment that comes in four parts. On the one hand, it is a collection of novellas that tell us about life during lockdown. At the same time, it is a book that questions the writing process. How can you write stories about the pandemic when everyone was behind locked doors? Who knows how life was for everyone else when your scope was so limited?
The first part of the book is titled 'The Iterative Mood'. It's where Hensher describes the repetitive and endless feeling of the early days of the pandemic. It describes the mundanity that occurred and what we all did to entertain ourselves. Going out for our designated exercise and finding a way to drag it out. Looking through your curtains to see what your neighbours were up to. In this section, the narrator, a writer, describes scenarios that he imagines taking place across the road. It's a fun idea. What does a writer do when he can only see glimpses of everyone? He writes stories about them. The point of this section is to keep the repetition going until you can't bear to carry on. Honestly, I would have been quite happy for this to continue.
Section two is called 'Free Indirect Style", which splits the perspective between the writer, his mother, his father and a builder and his family. It shows the invisible connections that can cause problems in our lives. It's enjoyable getting all of the snippets of people's lives and working out how the pieces come together. It also gives a great insight into the human experience. We see the writer's mother who is struggling with dementia, his father who is doing his best to care for her and an unhappily married couple making the best of their lockdown. It picks apart family dynamics as it shows the positives and negatives of your relatives. The relationships that were already teetering on the edge before the pandemic threw them into freefall.
The third section is called 'The Hero Takes a Journey Away from His Environment' and takes us into an imagined dystopian future. This piece of speculative fiction shows a world torn apart after Covid. Society has broken down, the government lost control and it's every man for themselves. Quentin embarks on a journey from Whitstable to Ramsgate accompanied by his young neighbour at the behest of his mother. The 20-mile journey is full of drama and the relationship between Quentin and his travel partner is interesting. I enjoyed how this section evoked the genre and connected it to the virus. It was an original and fun way to write about the pandemic.
The final section takes us back to the writer and his husband. It describes the time they both caught COVID-19, which led to the writer's hospitalisation. It's interwoven with snapshots of the family across the road. The family are at risk from another illness that is harder to detect and treat. For me, this was the least enjoyable section of the book. After the previous section, it just felt a bit slow and repetitive. It might have felt different had this been released closer to the lockdown. The way he works to emulate the disorientation of fever and low oxygen levels is clever but it just felt like a literary experiment rather than engaging prose. This book is a literary experiment that asks "How can you write about the pandemic?" It's a difficult balancing act and I liked Hensher's approach. Each section has a different style that tries something new.
The only problem is that not all of it is as engaging as it should be. It didn't help that the audiobook narrator was dreadfully dull. Whatever the reason, I didn't connect to the book. The standout section is the third because it's so original. It's almost a shame that it doesn't exist as a novella in its own right. The other sections are interesting and well-written, but they lack something. I wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. Not because it's bad but just because it didn't really offer any new insight into the pandemic.
The first part of the book is titled 'The Iterative Mood'. It's where Hensher describes the repetitive and endless feeling of the early days of the pandemic. It describes the mundanity that occurred and what we all did to entertain ourselves. Going out for our designated exercise and finding a way to drag it out. Looking through your curtains to see what your neighbours were up to. In this section, the narrator, a writer, describes scenarios that he imagines taking place across the road. It's a fun idea. What does a writer do when he can only see glimpses of everyone? He writes stories about them. The point of this section is to keep the repetition going until you can't bear to carry on. Honestly, I would have been quite happy for this to continue.
Section two is called 'Free Indirect Style", which splits the perspective between the writer, his mother, his father and a builder and his family. It shows the invisible connections that can cause problems in our lives. It's enjoyable getting all of the snippets of people's lives and working out how the pieces come together. It also gives a great insight into the human experience. We see the writer's mother who is struggling with dementia, his father who is doing his best to care for her and an unhappily married couple making the best of their lockdown. It picks apart family dynamics as it shows the positives and negatives of your relatives. The relationships that were already teetering on the edge before the pandemic threw them into freefall.
The third section is called 'The Hero Takes a Journey Away from His Environment' and takes us into an imagined dystopian future. This piece of speculative fiction shows a world torn apart after Covid. Society has broken down, the government lost control and it's every man for themselves. Quentin embarks on a journey from Whitstable to Ramsgate accompanied by his young neighbour at the behest of his mother. The 20-mile journey is full of drama and the relationship between Quentin and his travel partner is interesting. I enjoyed how this section evoked the genre and connected it to the virus. It was an original and fun way to write about the pandemic.
The final section takes us back to the writer and his husband. It describes the time they both caught COVID-19, which led to the writer's hospitalisation. It's interwoven with snapshots of the family across the road. The family are at risk from another illness that is harder to detect and treat. For me, this was the least enjoyable section of the book. After the previous section, it just felt a bit slow and repetitive. It might have felt different had this been released closer to the lockdown. The way he works to emulate the disorientation of fever and low oxygen levels is clever but it just felt like a literary experiment rather than engaging prose. This book is a literary experiment that asks "How can you write about the pandemic?" It's a difficult balancing act and I liked Hensher's approach. Each section has a different style that tries something new.
The only problem is that not all of it is as engaging as it should be. It didn't help that the audiobook narrator was dreadfully dull. Whatever the reason, I didn't connect to the book. The standout section is the third because it's so original. It's almost a shame that it doesn't exist as a novella in its own right. The other sections are interesting and well-written, but they lack something. I wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. Not because it's bad but just because it didn't really offer any new insight into the pandemic.
May 14, 2024
This is a novel divided into four sections that read like short stories but all heading in the same direction: freedom. The first is set in the pandemic era and is Hensher and his husband (or that is how I read it) during lockdown describing what happens on their street. There are the joggers, the walkers, the little boy naming trees with his Observer book of Trees and then there are the neighbours Stuart and Gio. Their house had always been party house for family and friends and so it continued throughout the lockdowns despite the rules. There was alcohol, shouting, abduction and police on one memorable occasion, all with Hensher and partner imagining what was happening in between the bits they could see. This is of course writers we are talking about and so being free to make up tales about your neighbours was one of the grand entertainments.
The description of the time as an 'iterative mood' was for me very apposite. When I look back now to try and date something, I can't. Every day was the same, pleasant but the same. If asked to say when something happened, I am reduced to saying if it was before or after lockdown and sometimes even failing that. There was something reassuring about this section; comfortable and middle class.
In 'Free Indirect Style' we look at the lives of people in London under the microscope, opening outwards from the street but looking in in more detail. There's the writer being interviewed, a woman slipping into dementia and siblings falling out over what to do with her along with a builder and his second wife and his children. The consequences of actions are often what books are all about and this story relates the consequences of the builder not going round to a local house to mend the broken stair rod. These consequences spread and affect a lot of people that they come into contact with, not unlike a virus.
The 'hero' takes a journey away from his environement - a very greek title and now the story broadens out in both time and space to the dystopian future of the fifth lockdown where society has broken down. Here, Quentin, a gay muscle man, sets off on a journey to visit his boyfriend in Ramsgate but the breakdown in society loosens inhibitions and in a short space of time he refuses to pay for a plant and takes it, slaps a woman across the face and then stabs and kills Simon who he is walking with. The journey away from his environment is not just literal but also metaphorical. After reading this story, I wondered how we had got to this point but in fact it was not with one giant leap but several smaller steps. Does it start with the prime minister not following his own rules?
We then come full circle back to the boy who identified the trees in the street. William. His father's suicide releases him from an oppressive, abusive parent who is never satisfied with his son. Here I found the book a bit hard to understand as we move into a dream of sorts with a flood and William finding a boat tied to a tree - a tree that was important in the first story. Was this William finding his own freedom?
The book as a whole explores what freedom means - is it being able to roam anywhere at any time or is it free to think any thoughts? Running throughout the book was a theme of writers and writers' block and perhaps how the lack of feeling free affects the freedom of ideas and therefore writing. Were some of these stories a rewilding of the imagination? I'm not sure, but I think the first story was autofiction and that the structure replicated the spread of the virus until it was totally free and out there in society. A very interesting idea.
The description of the time as an 'iterative mood' was for me very apposite. When I look back now to try and date something, I can't. Every day was the same, pleasant but the same. If asked to say when something happened, I am reduced to saying if it was before or after lockdown and sometimes even failing that. There was something reassuring about this section; comfortable and middle class.
In 'Free Indirect Style' we look at the lives of people in London under the microscope, opening outwards from the street but looking in in more detail. There's the writer being interviewed, a woman slipping into dementia and siblings falling out over what to do with her along with a builder and his second wife and his children. The consequences of actions are often what books are all about and this story relates the consequences of the builder not going round to a local house to mend the broken stair rod. These consequences spread and affect a lot of people that they come into contact with, not unlike a virus.
The 'hero' takes a journey away from his environement - a very greek title and now the story broadens out in both time and space to the dystopian future of the fifth lockdown where society has broken down. Here, Quentin, a gay muscle man, sets off on a journey to visit his boyfriend in Ramsgate but the breakdown in society loosens inhibitions and in a short space of time he refuses to pay for a plant and takes it, slaps a woman across the face and then stabs and kills Simon who he is walking with. The journey away from his environment is not just literal but also metaphorical. After reading this story, I wondered how we had got to this point but in fact it was not with one giant leap but several smaller steps. Does it start with the prime minister not following his own rules?
We then come full circle back to the boy who identified the trees in the street. William. His father's suicide releases him from an oppressive, abusive parent who is never satisfied with his son. Here I found the book a bit hard to understand as we move into a dream of sorts with a flood and William finding a boat tied to a tree - a tree that was important in the first story. Was this William finding his own freedom?
The book as a whole explores what freedom means - is it being able to roam anywhere at any time or is it free to think any thoughts? Running throughout the book was a theme of writers and writers' block and perhaps how the lack of feeling free affects the freedom of ideas and therefore writing. Were some of these stories a rewilding of the imagination? I'm not sure, but I think the first story was autofiction and that the structure replicated the spread of the virus until it was totally free and out there in society. A very interesting idea.
May 25, 2023
This is an ouroboros of a read - a lockdown novel in which the author speculates about how an author might go about writing a lockdown novel. In fact three of the four sections are named after different grammatical aspects, 'The Iterative Mood', 'Free Indirect Style' and 'Entrelacement'. If this sounds pretentious, don't be put off - To Battersea Park is actually a blisteringly honest narrative, at least as regards the author's own account of his lockdown experience.
In the first section, Hensher and his husband, confined to the home by lockdown in 2020, discover or re-discover a host of simple pleasures - the 'collision of rain and dry earth' that is petrichor, the 'lemon glisten of song from a blackbird', the 'football rattle of an angry magpie'; and, on their permitted hour's walk which takes them to the gates of Battersea Park and back again, two Pomelo trees growing in a neighbour's front garden,brought from Grenada as cuttings; the Victorian stink-pipes strategically placed at street corners and never noticed until now; the existence of an underground river emptying itself into the nearby Thames. This was actually the section I enjoyed most - Hensher's lucid powers of description are second to none, and being a South Londoner by birth I found it an immersive and nostalgic read.
The author's observation of the lockdown routines, legal or otherwise, of his neighbours leads to speculation about the hidden parts of their lives, histories and family dynamics - and parts 2 and 4 indulge and expand upon this, in parallel with Hensher's own continuing lockdown story (which includes his experience of finally succumbing to Covid).
Part 3, the only section not named for a grammatical aspect, is entirely different from the others - it's set in an apocalyptic 'Fifth Wave' of the pandemic which mercifully hasn't happened in real life (yet). The infrastructure has broken down, technology has ground to a halt, supermarket shelves are bare, water has become a scarce and valuable commodity, and two men attempt a walk from Whitstable to Ramsgate, dodging feral gangs and driven to desperate measures themselves. This is a complete flight of fancy, not anchored by any authorial comment or reference to actual lock down experiences, and while it does at first seem out of place it actually provides an interesting interlude to the rest of the narrative.
Of course there are no neat endings or tidy explanations to give the sense of a satisfactory ending, either to any of the sections or to the novel as a whole - but this encapsulates the uncertainty that we're all left with right now, with the Covid virus still mutating and the fallout of lockdown still being picked over, analysed and judged retrospectively.
A challenging but very rewarding read.
In the first section, Hensher and his husband, confined to the home by lockdown in 2020, discover or re-discover a host of simple pleasures - the 'collision of rain and dry earth' that is petrichor, the 'lemon glisten of song from a blackbird', the 'football rattle of an angry magpie'; and, on their permitted hour's walk which takes them to the gates of Battersea Park and back again, two Pomelo trees growing in a neighbour's front garden,brought from Grenada as cuttings; the Victorian stink-pipes strategically placed at street corners and never noticed until now; the existence of an underground river emptying itself into the nearby Thames. This was actually the section I enjoyed most - Hensher's lucid powers of description are second to none, and being a South Londoner by birth I found it an immersive and nostalgic read.
The author's observation of the lockdown routines, legal or otherwise, of his neighbours leads to speculation about the hidden parts of their lives, histories and family dynamics - and parts 2 and 4 indulge and expand upon this, in parallel with Hensher's own continuing lockdown story (which includes his experience of finally succumbing to Covid).
Part 3, the only section not named for a grammatical aspect, is entirely different from the others - it's set in an apocalyptic 'Fifth Wave' of the pandemic which mercifully hasn't happened in real life (yet). The infrastructure has broken down, technology has ground to a halt, supermarket shelves are bare, water has become a scarce and valuable commodity, and two men attempt a walk from Whitstable to Ramsgate, dodging feral gangs and driven to desperate measures themselves. This is a complete flight of fancy, not anchored by any authorial comment or reference to actual lock down experiences, and while it does at first seem out of place it actually provides an interesting interlude to the rest of the narrative.
Of course there are no neat endings or tidy explanations to give the sense of a satisfactory ending, either to any of the sections or to the novel as a whole - but this encapsulates the uncertainty that we're all left with right now, with the Covid virus still mutating and the fallout of lockdown still being picked over, analysed and judged retrospectively.
A challenging but very rewarding read.
March 14, 2024
I've given To Battersea Park five stars because it really is a fantastic achievement but I'm annoyed with myself because I totally missed the clever way the novel was structured (had it explained in a review I read afterwards)! This is a story about lockdown and how it changed people's lives and is set in Battersea, an area of south London I know fairly well, so I was interested in that. The main characters are a novelist and his husband, and all the characters and locations are loosely connected throughout four distinct sections. These are called: The Iterative Mood, Free Indirect Style, The Hero Undertakes a Journey, and Entrelacement and they are four different narrative styles! I liked the first section the best as it described all the little ways in which lockdown affected our everyday lives. The third section was very scary, describing a dystopian breakdown that I think some of us may have feared might follow the pandemic. I really think I'm going to have to read this again noting the different ways in which the sections are written! And I hardly ever re-read a book...By the way, Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize is pretty good too - the only other one of his I've read. I will read some of his others now.
May 10, 2023
A challenging read, with a fresh and refreshing reminder of the dreaded lockdown. Divided into four distinct narrative styles, Hensher presents to us, the alienation and anxiety that went on in every house in every street. But since no contact was allowed, anxieties grew and grew.
Unknown and undocumented personal dramas are revealed to us and we remember; kindness, fear, deteriorating mental health, a new appreciation of nature, hidden violence and something of the experience of children.
Worrying about the banalities of everyday life….the hourly walk wasn’t long enough to take us where we wanted to go. No one actually gets to Battersea Park. The ambulances which suddenly appeared in our streets, the weekly applauding. All combined to transform our lives into something strange and scary.
Henshaw recreates this for us and we are disoriented all over again.
Unknown and undocumented personal dramas are revealed to us and we remember; kindness, fear, deteriorating mental health, a new appreciation of nature, hidden violence and something of the experience of children.
Worrying about the banalities of everyday life….the hourly walk wasn’t long enough to take us where we wanted to go. No one actually gets to Battersea Park. The ambulances which suddenly appeared in our streets, the weekly applauding. All combined to transform our lives into something strange and scary.
Henshaw recreates this for us and we are disoriented all over again.
March 11, 2025
I’ve read a few novels by Philip Hensher now, and generally I’ve enjoyed them, although he can lapse into pretension (as illustrated by the section headings of this novel).
This is very much a Covid 19 novel - particularly focusing on the early days of lockdown as it impacted the residents of a small patch of South London. - if he’d focussed on documenting that I think it would have made for a better novel but there are a couple of sections where he takes flights of fancy which didn’t work for me (eg imagining a dystopian future for England where society falls apart as a result of continued Covid spikes).
So three quarters I liked - which just about works.
This is very much a Covid 19 novel - particularly focusing on the early days of lockdown as it impacted the residents of a small patch of South London. - if he’d focussed on documenting that I think it would have made for a better novel but there are a couple of sections where he takes flights of fancy which didn’t work for me (eg imagining a dystopian future for England where society falls apart as a result of continued Covid spikes).
So three quarters I liked - which just about works.
June 25, 2023
I hadn't read Hensher before, now I will read more. A novel born from the COVID lockdown and world. It charts what we don't know about each other and what we could become. How when we can do little or cannot live our busy lives how we come to discover andunderstand more.
Eah person reacts differently to changed circumstance, not always, how we envisage ourselves to be.
Exquistly written, raw, and challenging.
Eah person reacts differently to changed circumstance, not always, how we envisage ourselves to be.
Exquistly written, raw, and challenging.
August 12, 2023
This is a book about the pandemic experience. It captures the random enthrallments and horror shows as well as the dreary strangeness of the time. It does so with wonderful literary tropes and shifts of mode and tone, which, at the same time, capture the feeling of falling ill and being feverish. The book is a difficult read but a rewarding one, and it is, currently, the pandemic novel for the age.
August 8, 2024
A collection of stories loosely themed around the effects of pandemic enforced isolation. It's at its most moving when one of the protagonists must leave his partner behind as an ambulance drives him away to hospital. Less convincing to me was the dystopian alternative reality where the pandemic has spread unchecked. It's definitely worth exploring given the libertarian criticisms of government responses to the pandemic, but I found it difficult to empathise with any of the characters.
December 17, 2024
Frustrating lit fic Covid novel which takes a Wandsworth Street, seemingly stuff it with writers who then have vignettes of frustration, boredom, lifestyle wrenching issues and arguments over pomellos. Announce formal stylistic changes did nothing to mix up the monotony. There are flashes of brilliance, the two page dementia bit hits the right kind of pathos, but I could never settle into it and it seemed pretty bereft of insight
March 19, 2023
I really tried as hard as I could and restarted the book several times particularly as this is an author who I have enjoyed many times before.
The premise was clever and the writing lush and skilful but the post pandemic allegorical plot simply did not grab me and for all Mr Hensher’s undoubted skill and ability as a wordsmith this just wasn’t for me.
The premise was clever and the writing lush and skilful but the post pandemic allegorical plot simply did not grab me and for all Mr Hensher’s undoubted skill and ability as a wordsmith this just wasn’t for me.
May 24, 2023
Have enjoyed Hensher’s novels ever since stumbling upon King of the Badgers and pretty much read everything of his ever since. Wasn’t certain about To Battersea Park at first but then it hooked me and I absolutely loved it. The characters, structure, themes get under your skin and through the lens of the pandemic forces you to consider the world in new ways.
January 19, 2025
An interesting and at times thought provoking novel
In parts. The Hero Takes a Journey stands out as a work of excellent fiction and I would happily have read an entire novel based on this narrative. However the other parts are varied.
Writing style is good, I found the start and end points less interesting to read- perhaps due to the familiarity and lack of time since the pandemic.
In parts. The Hero Takes a Journey stands out as a work of excellent fiction and I would happily have read an entire novel based on this narrative. However the other parts are varied.
Writing style is good, I found the start and end points less interesting to read- perhaps due to the familiarity and lack of time since the pandemic.
April 13, 2023
I really enjoyed this but I don’t think everyone will. Stories rooted in the recent Covid pandemic that then take darker twists. It might be too soon for many people. Others won’t like that the stories don’t appear to be related.
July 10, 2023
A horrible reminder of how tedious lock-down was. There was a strange section set in a post-apocalypse world featuring Quentin, a most unappealing character, not sure what he was doing in the book at all!
October 24, 2023
I'm not totally sure what I've read, except to say that it's a literary novel, mostly about the Covid lockdown and it's strange effects on people. Dystopian in places. Strangely gloomy but well written.
November 10, 2023
Huge fan of this author, The Northern Clemency still stands as a great book however struggled a bit with this one especially the third part, also perhaps lockdown is still a bit raw to be reading about it
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