Burntcoat

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With those she has loved the most now dead, Edith turns to the virus or to death itself as a lover once illness has overtaken her; the “you” of the dead Halit and the “you” of death become hard to disentangle. Intertwined with these big questions is the role of creativity in a time of crisis – the importance of art in the wake of trauma, both individual and collective.

Written during the early feverish months of the first wave of COVID-19, Burntcoat is a haunting, beautifully-crafted story of love, trauma and the creation of art, all set against the backdrop of a deadly global pandemic. We now live in a contemporary, modern world where pandemics happen, and our lives are impacted in multiple ways, including our innermost thoughts and feelings. I recently read Sarah Moss’s “The Fell” and while it does not have anything the artistic ambition or imagination of this novel it was brave enough to actually deal with the real situation we have been living through – and to try to capture the experience of COVID (or more accurately lockdown) at a very specific time and place (England, November 2020 and the unexpected national lockdown). Ou é cedo de mais para ler sobre o tema ou terei de procurar uma abordagem diferente, talvez mais sublimada.Photograph: Richard Thwaites View image in fullscreen Sarah Hall: ‘alights on the sort of authentic detail that brings a scene alive’. I don’t think Burntcoat is intended primarily as a pandemic novel – it may feature one and was written during one, but it is a novel not a documentary. Storage, auction, an exchange for cattle and cargo brought upstream from the estuary, or perhaps it was used to mend masts.

When I entered Teshima, a domed installation Shun had insisted I visit, I understood some form of perfection had been achieved. While it might sound counterintuitive at first, burning the wood in this way actually strengthens its structure, ‘preserving its integrity while enhancing its beauty’ – a phrase that could apply to Hall’s creative work itself. Written in the second person, it tells the story of English artist Edith as she deals with the long-haul effects of a pandemic virus.Halit and Edith become lovers very quickly - the sex is also brilliantly written - and then a global pandemic strikes. As Halit passes lockdown (“that strange aestivation”) with Edith in her warehouse on the rural edge of a northern city, there are shortages and looting, curfews and armed patrols.