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FICTION
To Battersea Park
Philip Hensher
Fourth Estate, $37.99
Many years ago Philip Hensher gave a masterclass in which he delineated a number of fictional modes. After a discussion on dialogue (“Nabokov disliked it,” he said), Hensher spoke of the relationship between “Telling Time” (that is, narrative time) and “External Time” (the time taken to narrate). These narratological preoccupations come to the fore in his wonderfully strange and beguiling latest novel.
Philip Hensher has written a kaleidoscopic and polyphonic bookCredit: Roberto Ricciuti/ Getty
His previous book, A Small Revolution in Germany (2020), was a moody and powerful work about politics and friendship with the spectre of Brexit looming. If at first glance To Battersea Park seems less of a unified piece the wary reader ends up proved wrong.
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Hensher’s 11th novel consists of four sections, overlapping in chronology, geography and preoccupation. Each builds on the other with a sly brilliance and narrative authority into a kaleidoscopic and polyphonic book about how and what we perceive and the ways in which we try to grab hold of a world that keeps eluding our grasp.
The first section, “The Iterative Mood”, is about a writer – very like Hensher himself – enduring lockdown in South London in May 2020. He walks with his husband towards Battersea Park but never quite gets there: they have to be home within the hour, according to state decree. He reads the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett; he bakes extravagant cakes and becomes obsessed with the names of things – what is the name for “the thing that the coffee machine grinds beans into”? (The answer disappoints him.)
Philip Hensher’s characters try to walk in Battersea Park during lockdown but, unlike these amblers, never get there.Credit:
There’s an exactness to this concentration on a period of arrested time that is frankly a bit exacting if not stupefying. But the imagination doesn’t take long to rebel and the writer comes alive and so does his narrative as he broods about the mechanics of novel writing.
“Telling Time” and “External Time” are here glossed as Erzählzeit and Erzählte Zeit and even if Hensher palms the German literary critical terms off to “theorists … busy with their categories” he still wants the shadow of their rigour. Mainly, though, he observes and fantasises about the habits and manners and hypothetical lives of his neighbours. His husband is a sane presence, warning the narrator when he seems to be going too far into a world of obsession and solipsism.
The next section, “Free Indirect Style” – that third-person fictional technique coloured by the consciousness of the subject – takes us in and out of the minds of a wider cast of characters, all under duress: a neighbour, worn ragged by endless Zoom meetings, her restive stepchildren, her furloughed husband; there’s a lawyer, Femi, drawn ever deeper into the recesses of his mind and its emotional darkness; and there’s a beautiful portrait of our narrator’s parents – his father with his model railway, his mother with dementia.
The third, ravishing section, “The Hero Undertakes a Journey”, is set in a blasted post-apocalyptic landscape beset by roaming gangs called “the life-to-come-boys” and tells of Quentin and his hapless and unwanted sidekick, Simon, who embark on a hazardous journey from Whitstable to Ramsgate. Hensher’s pacing here is uncanny, he expands and compresses time, and the drama and suspense he generates are the work of a master of indirection. This is narrative fiction operating at full throttle and it’s an unforgettable performance.
“Entrelacement”, the final section, is a delicate, surefooted, bringing together of the strands. The stealthy ingenuity with which each part enacts and sometimes subverts its narrative label is audacious and creates worlds of wonder and awe. Whether tracing the contours of a “period of immuration” or elaborating fantastic flights of imagination, To Battersea Park is the work of a magician of artistic freedom. Its vision is at once brutal and generous, shot through with a rich vein of suburban comedy and poignancy.
Ultimately, though, it’s an ode to “the hard, warm irreducible kernel of love”. In To Battersea Park Hensher has given us the perfect antidote to the hangover of the past few strange and strangled years.
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