In 1885 Richard Jefferies, noted until then as a loving yet never sentimental observer of wild nature and country life, published his fantasy novel After London. The work was inspired by a fear of urban sprawl and suburbia’s ruthless advance, more particularly from the British capital’s southern edges, so that it seemed almost to menace the rurality of the author’s native ground in Wiltshire. In the opening paragraph of the first and most compelling of the book’s two sections, the words “after London ended” overshadow a vision of primal greenness taking back control, nature’s revenge for attempted ecocide. The civic infrastructure rapidly implodes as drains become clogged with willow roots, sewers burst open, roads grow impassable and bridges collapse beneath the impact of flood-borne tree trunks. Rewilding starts in earnest as domestic cats and dogs turn feral, feeding on swarms of vermin, while the human species quickly reverts to ancient tribal hostilities.
At the beginning of 2020 visions like this of general meltdown, with order and decency no longer taken for granted, were rife once it became accepted that Britain, like the world, was in the grip of a pandemic about whose causes, symptoms and therapy little seemed to be known. Covid, we were warned, was epochal, and nothing would ever be quite the same again. But while the world has, for many, returned to something close to normal, the whole experience is now being lived again through art, as practitioners in various fields, from dance and poetry to political theatre and haute couture, continue to shape their responses to it.
Philip Hensher’s To Battersea Park is one of the stealthier, more complex examples of this creative response. It is in many ways a novel about how novels come to be made, evidently written for readers with a deeply incised sense of literary perspective and likely to be undismayed by its frequent allusiveness. Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster and Charlotte Brontë are all invoked; a single sentence morphs easily into a quotation from W. B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”; and an entire episode in the book’s edgiest section, in which one of the characters, walking across a beach, casually murders a passerby, recalls Meursault’s “gratuitous act” of killing in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger.
Yet at no stage does To Battersea Park as a whole forfeit the basic atmosphere of alien originality that confronts the reader at the outset. Each of its four sections is a bravura stylistic exercise, embracing the pandemic’s various worlds, actual and hypothetical, via a different mode or idiom so as to mine their potential more richly than a traditional narrative technique might have allowed. Yes, it contains dramatis personae, individualized and sometimes named, but with one arguable exception this is not the story of any of them in particular. As if to enact more closely the situational disorders that Covid in its severest onslaught inflicted on us, To Battersea Park challenges everything we might have taught ourselves to expect from fiction. The title’s import itself remains vague even beyond the moment when William, the bookish child at the centre of the novel’s closing phase, achieves his ambition:
He had wanted, sometimes quite passionately, to go to Battersea Park. There, behind the gates that were glittering in the sun half a mile away, glittering and waist deep in the tranquil lake the rains had made, was a world of trees, of floating plants, of swans liberated from their confines that could now swim anywhere.
William has made the briefest of appearances in the novel’s first instalment, “The Iterative Mood”, where we find him earnestly studying “The Observer Book of Trees” and opening a door for his father. Looking on at them is an anonymous narrator who is himself an author, but confounded by the pandemic. “I could not write for the first time in my life. But the names of things emerged cleanly from the world around me, inside the house and out.” Hensher somehow contrives to suggest, via a certain skilful fastidiousness in the recording of detail, an unaccustomed acuity of vision that heightens the weirdness at the heart of prevailing circumstances. Under such an influence the narrator has begun to investigate an alternative identity through “the experience of constructing another version of oneself to be sent out into the world to engage with other brave versions of other people”.
The ensuing pages, under free indirect style, mark an abrupt and arresting shift in narrative stance, cleverly calibrated so as to register a decay of empathy and civility within group relationships and personal bonds. In “The Hero Undertakes a Journey Away from His Environment”, engagement of any sort proves still more problematic for Quentin, the protagonist of what looks at first to be the book’s most conventional sequence in terms of literary method, yet emerges as anything but. The kind of dystopian afterworld envisaged by Jefferies comes chillingly into play here as we are invited to contemplate a what-happened-next post-Covid pageant taking place along a stretch of Thanet coastline where Quentin goes to bathe. Gardens are untended and the lights have gone out in the seaside bungalows whose residents are living on canned food purloined from what is left in the super–markets. In the distance “the mad ballet of the wind turbines still continued, cycling their legs in the busy air”, though who can consume their power is no longer obvious, since all utilities have collapsed and locals visit the seashore to defecate. “Now everything’s finished”, says Simon, the boy next door, “and there’s nothing but people taking care of themselves, standing in the street with an iron bar waiting to do what they’ve always wanted to”, as the area is ravaged by terrorist gangs of evangelicals known as “Life-To-Come Boys”.
Redemption, if it is to arrive, lies in the hands of those like William, the boy we met at the beginning who lives through books. Hensher invests him with the dignified solitariness of those holy children worshipped in ancient societies, as he calmly surveys the ruin around him before setting out on his journey to Battersea Park and an epiphany in the shape of a woman who gives him a dinghy and fills it with pomelos. The writer feels it appropriate, somewhere along the way, to share with us his wisdom on the creation of novels, perhaps because William, nourished on the Andrew Lang Fairy Book series he keeps concealed behind others on the shelf, will himself go on to become a skilled artificer in the genre.
Every novel of Philip Hensher’s has so far eluded our attempts at pigeonholing its author, and this one is no exception. Wise, ingenious and passionate, To Battersea Park is, in whatever sense, a survival manual, showing us how to endure a profound existential crisis by calling on our fancy and inventiveness, those gifts that make things happen.
Jonathan Keates’s latest book is La Serenissima: The story of Venice, published last year
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