How will we write about the pandemic
I'll stop crying about this novel eventually, just not yet
Early on in the pandemic the question of whether and how covid-19 will be processed by the novel and the arts was all the rage, but as we’re entering year 3, we can’t be arsed thinking about it and I get it, completely. Whatever. It may or may not appear in novels. We know that the Spanish flu (which likely came from the US and spread by the servicemen across Europe) wasn’t a massive presence in the literature of its age. We are today much less curious as to the reasons why. That question was for the idle days of the 2020.
Or it was for me, that is, until I read Sarah Hall’s 2021 novel Burntcoat earlier this month and realized that indeed this book is a pandemic novel announcing its own kind – that it does this epochal species event that is the c19 pandemic justice – and that such a novel is very much possible, meaningful and important, and dare I say even maybe a little bit healing.
But steel comes through forging and waterproofing though burning, and this is not an easy or consoling novel. I say ‘waterproofing though burning’ because it’s one of the techniques that the narrator, a land artist and creator of imposing structures to be found around the northern British countryside, uses for her sculptures: the Japanese shou sugi ban technique: controlled application of fire so the ordinarily fragile wood becomes resistant and durable. Few women in art schools end up attending classes for the fairly dangerous and physically exhausting techniques required for making the vast and almost unmanageable structures of metal, stone and wood, but our narrator Edith Harkness did. This book is, among many other things, a Jungian analyst’s wet dream. “No new life can arise, says the alchemists, without the death of the old. They liken the art to the work of the sower, who buries the grain in the earth: it dies only to awaken to new life. Thus with their mortificatio, interfectio, putrefactio, combustio, incineratio, calcinatio, etc., they are imitating the work of nature,” Jung wrote.
Edith was already forged as a child, we learn early in the narration. When I was a child, she recalls, my mother disappeared and Naomi came in her place: that is, Edith’s mother survived brain haemorrhage and then had to relearn everything and inch back to some semblance of her old self. They have found each other as children, the daughter suddenly having to grow her own parental capacity fast. Unhappy with the requirements of the new situation, the father leaves and eventually loses his battle for sole custody. (Which boringly well ordered country he disappears into to start a very different, healthy and well-adjusted family – you have one chance to guess.) The two women live in a “cheap cottage on the upland moors, at the dead end of a narrow road flanked by rowan and gorse… A place half done, half said. It was like a dwelling from a story book, ingathered and overgrown, primed for disaster… Close by where the mountain rose, peat-black waterfalls hammered into bottomless pools.” They freeze in winter, but in the summer she’s always there, swimming and diving, mostly unsupervised. We are partly in the realm of fairytale, and there are layers and layers of other English literature about, some of it Romantic, and we are also in the myth. Angela Carter is here, present and correct. At the same time, the novel is up to speed with the latest physics and biology. Everything and everyone is elements, creatures, hosts for other creatures, permanently thrown into the buzz of life, always with others, never separate, not even after the final departure. There’s no choice but to belong.
It takes a while for the reader to get hold of the red thread, as the narration proceeds as the actual individual memory does, with jumps and interruptions and unexpected swerves. We realize slowly that Edith is looking back and intertwining the near past events with the furthest past, and we learn that she is in her final days. An illness has returned, and this time there is no hope. When this illness returns, it’s for the last time. She is addressing a recent love with the direct “you”, as if telling him this story, a man who is as strong a presence as Naomi. Where has he gone? We learn later on.
Naomi’s recovery has only been partial and she remains something of a village eccentric and many would say a distracted parent. She never quite returns to writing – she was an author as her regular self – but when Edith gets her first period and talks to her mother about it, Naomi withdraws to write. (By hand, on a roll of parchment paper taken from the kitchen.) So the last thing she ever publishes is the seemingly YA horror story of insect-like creatures invading a girl’s world. Their eyes are blood-filled and large and they swarm her and multiply wherever she tries to hide. After a horrible night, the girl wakes up to a sunny, quiet day. But now every leaf, root of grass, tree bark, patch of soil hides hundreds of eggs.
(Naomi dies many years later in a way that has nothing to do with her main bodily misfortune, when Edith is in Japan, training in new building techniques.)
The man gradually comes into focus. He is a restaurant owner and cook, Turkish origin but travelled across multiple borders before settling in UK. They have a drink, start an affair, then quickly become more serious. She takes him to Burntcoat, a warehouse-like space where she works that comes with a small flat on the upper level. “Burntcoat stands at the edge of the old industrial part of the city, where the riverbank links workers’ cottages, trade buildings and docks… The building records are incomplete so I don’t know what its primary purpose was. Storage, auction and exchange of cattle and cargo… or perhaps it was used to mend masts. It was half-ruined when I bought it.” When she moves some place, Edith tends to build the place from the ruin up, and grow roots. There are friends down the canal, a canoe ride away. Other friends come especially (there’s a scene of a party that of course ends with someone jumping from top of the Burntcoat into the river, and the post-party municipal fines). What she’s working on now is her last commission, but when she first got together with Halit, she was working on a sort of wolf vs. crane structure.
Just as their two bodies are getting to know each other – this is a very sensuous and sexual novel -- and he stays with her in Burntcoat for longer periods, there is news of a new virus coming from East Asia. How worried should anybody be? How does it fare compared to other recent viruses? Here the story hooks on recognizably to what we can remember of covid as it spread around the globe and reached the west, and the lockdowns began. But this fictional virus is different; it’s called nova and it will reveal itself as much more vicious than the covid variants have been in our world. It’s a virus that we could have easily gotten instead; that we lucked out not to have to deal with this time. In its indiscriminate felling of people of all ages, it’s closer to the Spanish flu.
Everything is familiar, but Hall turns the screw just once more, makes the story just that bit more tense. Social contract begins to fray; shortages of food, queues in front of bakeries, arguments, short fuses – so far so seen-that,-yep. Strange dreams come to the human species at night. Governments are testing approaches, flailing. But then it all turns darker (which, you think as you’re reading, could have easily happened? Couldn’t it have?). People, at first exceptionally, then regularly, get into physical fights over food and other key resources. Looting becomes less and less exceptional. On his last round to get the remaining food from the restaurant, Halit is attacked and stabbed multiple times, his supplies stolen, restaurant trashed. Worst of all, he was exposed.
Edith nurses his wounds – oh right, hospitals are overwhelmed everywhere, phone lines jammed, and when she finally gets the ER on the line, the case is triaged as non life threatening and left to her to do as she sees fit. We zoom in again to the body level: the minutiae of it, the procedures of life, the gradual recovery. The two bodies got to know each other through pleasure, and how one is getting to know the other through convalescing. But as his stabbing scars heal, Halit begins to show symptoms of nova. He insists he should leave Burntcoat, that she destroy every sheet, object, piece of clothing that he touched, but she refuses. It’s quite late for any of that even if she wanted it (and she doesn’t. There is no doubt for either of them that they love each other). They’ve already sped up their lives, had a daughter, created stories about her. “Is the little one sick too,” he asks in a rare moment of respite from the fever. “No, of course not. Why would she be?”, says Edith, as she’s changing the sheets.
So nova takes Halit, and most cruelly. Medics in hazmat suits come to collect his body. Edith is left alone to go through her own bout of virus and against all odds she survives. The waves of nova eventually run through the population, and the world starts rebuilding as if after a tsunami. Only some of her friends have survived, and some even activate their phones back and return calls. Life attempts some of its former gears. Even art commissions return, as she soon discovers. There is a public conversation about a monument to all those who died of nova, and Edith is asked to do it. Not only because of her reputation as an artist: it’s known that she lived through the virus herself and survived. But nova is unlike covid in one more way: it never goes away, it simply recedes. It stays dormant in the human body, lets it live happily for a period, then inevitably returns. That is when we find Edith, looking back. The nova commission has been completed, the remaining unfinished piece will be done as well. She refused to have the artist name separate from all the other names on the monument: hers is with all the others, at the bottom of one of the many columns of names.
So we leave her reconciled, living in relative calm at Burntcoat, noticing gradual loss of life force. Sometimes the presence of others keeps her company; Halit, Naomi, her Japanese instructor Shun. “I want to say to Shun, yes, of course, I’m the wood in the fire. I’ve experienced, altered in nature. I am burnt, damaged, more resilient. A life is a bead of water on the black surface, so frail, so strong, its world incredibly held”.
