THIS MORTAL COIL
In her pandemic-inspired book, Sarah Hall weaves a dark tale of life, passion and human connection
Burntcoat, Sarah Hall’s sixth novel, is a story of a mother and a daughter; a story of lovers discovering each other in the most challenging of circumstances. Edith Harkness, her narrator, makes monumental sculptures; her late mother, Naomi, was a writer whose books now have a cult following. Edith takes a lover, Halit, a chef as sensual as his cooking. All should be well — until all the world is both stilled and ravaged by a virus. Hall’s fictional illness is more deadly than Covid-19; the reader feels both the shock of recognition and the sense of having had a narrow escape.
Hall began writing in March 2020, immediately after the first lockdown was announced. ‘It was a kind of strange first-responder feeling. “Oh, God, what’s going on? What can I do?” We were all so scared and uncertain – I think I was just looking to ground myself among all that anxiety. Work has always been grounding for me; no matter the trauma or difficulty or compromise in my career, I’ve always managed to get the work done.’
One of our most accomplished novelists, Hall was born in the Lake District – where she has just returned after a spell in Norwich, to take up a professorship at the University of Cumbria. Her debut novel, Haweswater, won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel. She has since been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and last year became the first writer to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice, for her ‘timeless and unsettling’ story ‘The Grotesques’. Haunting intensity is her trademark and it permeates Burntcoat, with its striking depictions of the practice of art.
Edith is a land artist, ‘which is a very “masculine” form of art’, Hall says, referring to the austere materials, large scale and heavy lifting the discipline often involves. ‘So how does she achieve that? What is her background? And it seemed to me that living in the Lake District is one of the things that would do it, because you’re encountering sculptures of rock, you’re in this physical landscape. That seemed a good use of the intimate knowledge that I have of that place.’
As to her direct gaze on the pandemic, she admits to wondering whether readers may have had too much, or suffered too much, from the virus to wish to turn to it in the realm of fiction. ‘That’s the main question that I have,’ she says. ‘I know people want to escape.’ But she sees the book, rightly, as more than a reflection of present circumstance. ‘It’s a kind of symbolic questioning uncertainty,’ she says. ‘And an investigation of mortality. How do you live with the knowledge of your death, what do you make of your time, how do you live?’
We live despite what we must suffer: despite what we know is at the end of the road. ‘Love grows in the rich darkness,’ Hall writes. Like Edith’s work, Hall’s is embedded in the land, flowering from where she has grounded herself. ‘Burntcoat’ by Sarah Hall (£14.99, Faber and Faber) is published on 7 October.