Philip Hensher’s latest novel, To Battersea Park, is not the first Covid novel – Ali Smith’s turbocharged Summer got there two and a half years ago. Sarah Moss’s The Fell and Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat were also propelled by the narrative potential of pandemic and lockdowns. Hensher, though, has done something rather different and more precarious: written a book that is really a collection of novellas engaging in more or less autobiographical fashion with his experience of Covid.
I say precarious because the book feels as if it comes both too soon and too late, landing at a time when the world wants more than anything to move on from a subject that brutally colonised our lives for so long. In the novel’s fourth and final section, Hensher writes of contracting the disease in the winter of 2020 and becoming disoriented. He checks his temperature, his oximeter; he is taken to hospital. We are with him in his aphasic fever dream.
