Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers is set in Hanmouth, a small English coastal town described so thickly that it is established from the outset as effectively a character in itself. Lovely to look at, the town is too small and insecure to be thought of as adult. In fact, it’s uncomfortably adolescent — a skittish concoction of class tension, shifting demographics and unwitting self-sabotage.
The novel is full of unexpected turns. It’s also brilliant, sustained and weirdly captivating. Thematically, it’s coherent: Hensher is concerned throughout with sex, class, surveillance, the keeping and violation of secrets. And yet it’s never quite clear what kind of novel you’re getting into.
Elements of it are inescapably — quite deliberately — sensational: an abducted child, a crazed gunman at a London train station, the grisly discovery of a murder. But for long stretches, these shattering events recede into the background, just as they would if we had read about them in the papers or seen them on television.
Instead, we are embroiled in the lives of Hanmouth’s middle-class residents, including a middle-aged gay couple, a retired colonel, an elderly conceptual artist (she makes collages from photos of penises), an outwardly straight couple with a teenage daughter (the father is carrying on a loving relationship with another man), and a well-meaning retired couple recently relocated to Hanmouth (they have a gay son who comes to visit).
Is it, then, a ‘gay novel’? Perhaps only in the same way that John Updike’s Couples is a ‘straight novel’: the acrobatics may be diverting (Hensher includes, for instance, a detailed description of a marathon gay orgy) but it’s hardly the first thing you’d say about it. (Come to think of it, you could almost see Hanmouth as a version of Updike’s fictional Tarbox transposed to conflicted, class- ridden, media-addled England. The town and its characters are described with a similar descriptive intensity and from a similarly detached, omniscient point of view.)
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