Burntcoat

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Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Military curfews are introduced as society collapses in Burntcoat.

This was the last of my Christmas books, and my first of the new year, and I am in two minds about it. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. The novel is written in Edith’s voice, as she reflects upon her artwork and the impactful relationships of her life.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. This sounds like such an amazing book, it’s not one for me at the moment as I don’t have the resilience for it, but it’s one I will recommend to people, more so since reading this review. In Edith’s art school, she was the only woman interested in metal-working (and she was mocked for it), it was considered transgressive when she later wanted to learn the art of Shou Sugi Ban (women obviously have trouble controlling fire), and when her first public commission was revealed (the massive Scotch Witch rising triumphantly out of the gorse at a highway junction island, complete with provocative gashes at the mouth and crotch), male revulsion must be quelled by the female patron who funded the project who quips that it’s the perfect response to millenia of marble statues with their little white penises.

Friends with houses in the Victorian wards thought I was mad to want to live here, until I explained how much space I needed. Not only is Edith a carrier, she is also finalising a national memorial for the dead, an installation set to endure long after her death. It is narrated by 59-year old Edith Harkness, a survivor, who surveys the life-changing pandemic with the benefit of intervening time. As the streets teemed with food riots and racist attacks, and the government and health care system seemed on the brink of collapse, Edith and Halit retreated to her fortress-like building to wait out the storm.

Readers are taken from her past to present and back again, as the timeline shifts fluidly in her remembrances. This is a virus that kills everyone it infects; people don’t usually survive in remission for as long as she has. Even renovated, Burntcoat is ugly by most standards, a utilitarian warehouse, but it stands beside the river’s lambency– a hag in a bright mirror.