The name is inexplicable in the deeds — some eponymous merchant’s, an incendiary event. I admit, it was the name that made me want the building, as well as the proportions. Such things shouldn’t be meaningful, but they are. 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.
Sarah Hall apparently began writing Burntcoat on the first day of the UK’s COVID-related lockdown in March of 2020 (finding time to work in the early hours before homeschooling her daughter) and everything about this novel struck me as a perfect literary response to what Hall (and the rest of us) lived through over the last year. I have appreciated other recent novels that serve to record some of the specific details of the living-through-a-pandemic experience, but Burntcoat is the first I’ve read that puts that experience through the crucible of artistic sensibility and turns the details into art. This novel engaged me on every level, the language provoked and delighted me, and I think it’s as near a perfect response to these crazy times as we are likely to get. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages recorded may not be in their final forms.)
People say timing is everything, and it’s true. You arrived just as that brilliant, ill star was annunciating. I imagine you as a messenger. You were the last one here before I closed the door of Burntcoat, before we all shut our doors.
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. As Edith puts the finishing touches on what is to be her final commission (a memorial piece to the millions lost to AG3, her own name already inscribed there), her memory floats over the major events of her life: a childhood with a mother left brain-damaged from a stroke (an event which caused her father to abandon them); Edith’s early years as a student and an artist; the first public commissions that gave her the small fortune to buy the industrial building “Burntcoat” (which she turned into a massive studio with a small apartment above); but especially, the intense relationship that she had started with a local restaurateur just before the lockdown began. As the streets teemed with food riots and racist attacks, and the government and health care system seemed on the brink of collapse, Edith and Halit retreated to her fortress-like building to wait out the storm. There are many graphic sex scenes (between Edith and Halit and in memories of her former lovers) but they never felt gratuitous or cheap; being thrown together as a pandemic rages outside the walls of Burntcoat is a baptism by fire and this relationship burned intensely. (It seems particularly appropriate that Halit is a Muslim immigrant from Turkey [by way of his family’s expulsion from Bulgaria], and as he is isolated from his family back home, his relationship with the white Englishwoman prods at the cultural differences between them while underscoring their meaninglessness.)
Is it possible to work with a material so long and still not understand its condition? We are figures briefly drawn in space; given temporary form in exchange for consciousness, sense, a chance. We are ready-mades, disposables. How do we live every last moment as this — savant dust?
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”.) In Edith’s art school, she was the only woman interested in metal-working (and she was mocked for it), it was considered transgressive when she later wanted to learn the art of Shou Sugi Ban (women obviously have trouble controlling fire), and when her first public commission was revealed (the massive Scotch Witch rising triumphantly out of the gorse at a highway junction island, complete with provocative gashes at the mouth and crotch), male revulsion must be quelled by the female patron who funded the project who quips that it’s the perfect response to millenia of marble statues with their little white penises. The theme seems to relate to Hall herself, carving out those few hours to write every morning before domestic demands called her away from her work; and creating incisive meaning from the chaos of our times is exactly what she achieves here — the specifics don’t relate to me and my life, but every bit of it spoke to me deeply.
I’m still a halfling on the moors, finding berries, cupping from the underground river, making things out of reeds and thorns. The world exists through recreation, how it is perceived. You were a tear in all that, a gift of sudden truth. Because of you I could say, with certainty, I believe in it, all.
I love the words and the sentences and the story they add up to; I was moved emotionally and intellectually; provoked and challenged. I loved every bit of this.
