Anna McCormick, as many people did, is discovering that the first pandemic lockdown is playing havoc with time. Becalmed in her deliberately fortress-like London home with her young adult son Paul, she is simultaneously under pressure – teaching primary school children on Zoom, maintaining her stockpile of tinned goods, attempting to communicate with her mother’s care home – and forced into unnatural, unwanted inaction. As a survivor of domestic abuse, and several other threats to her safety and sanity, she is aware of the immense prize – a sanctuary, a job, meaningful relationships – she has secured, but also of its precariousness. Amid these conditions of unbidden contemplation, she begins to write a sort of memoir.
So too does Buster, the shape-shifting, monstrous undercover cop who once infiltrated the OrKestrA, the “merry little band of very harmless kazoo players” who 20 years previously travelled the country juggling, breathing fire and singing songs to bring hope to the hopeless; Anna herself, as Annanka Ladystrong, was one of their number. But whether Buster’s disjointed, weird document – which he hand-delivers to Anna’s house – is confession or manifesto is unclear. For the reader, these two wildly different accounts of personal and political events begin to resolve into an exploration of identity and purpose – or, in their less convincing passages, as very different civics lessons, at their most successful as a meditation on either adopting or escaping from nihilism.
