The eeriness of lockdown: To Battersea Park, by Philip Hensher, reviewed

We never quite make it to Battersea Park. By the time the narrator and his husband reach its gates, it’s time for them, and us, to return home.

The narrator is a writer, living just that little bit too far away from the park, inspired by eeriness of the Covid lockdown regime but also horribly blocked. All kinds of approaches to fiction beckon to him in his plight, and we are treated to not a few of them here. 

Each section of this novel embodies a literary device. We begin, maddeningly, in ‘The Iterative Mood’ (‘I would have’, ‘She would normally have’ ,‘They used to’) and we end in ‘Entrelacement’, with its overlapping stories offering strange resolutions to this polyphonous, increasingly surreal account of lockdown. Every technique the narrator employs is an attempt to witness strange times using ordinary words.

Philip Hensher didn’t just pluck this idea out of the void. Fiction has a nasty habit of pratfalling again and again at the feet of a contemporary crisis. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (about the Blitz) dribbles away into an underpowered spy thriller; Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (about 9/11) only gets going in the last few dozen pages, when the protagonist quits New York for the poker tournament circuit. Mind you, indirection may prove to be a winning strategy in itself. The most enjoyable section of To Battersea Park is the ‘hero’s journey’, set in post-apocalyptic Whitstable. Hensher nails perfectly the way we distance ourselves from a crisis by romanticising it.

Milan Kundera wrote about this – about how ‘the monster comes from outside and is called History’ – impersonal, uncontrollable, incalculable, incomprehensible and above all inescapable.