Three years on, it remains difficult to think coherently about Covid-19 and the many ways it has changed us. A global pandemic, abstract and vast, rendered painfully real in the most intimate of ways; in freedoms curtailed, in relationships lost, in millions of bodies broken or buried. How do we tell the story of something we can’t see? Is there a legible thread that connects a set of experiences that differ so radically along lines of wealth, geography, health, politics, risk appetite and plain old dumb luck?
These interpretative challenges are at the heart of To Battersea Park, the surefooted and emotionally generous new novel by Philip Hensher. At first glance, it might seem late in the day to be adding to the already swollen ranks of lockdown novels, but Hensher’s treatment of the topic is both original and affecting. To Battersea Park is primarily concerned with how the mechanisms of storytelling might enable us to bear meaningful witness to the experience of the pandemic.
