Reviews with content warning for Sexual content - Burntcoat

I read this after it was recommended by StoryGraph. It’s not my usual read, and I went in not knowing what to expect.

My only response is… wow. I finished it within 4 hours of starting it, and couldn’t tear myself away.

It was confusing to start, and that felt intentional. The lack of chapters left you having to really try to figure out at which point of time you were in.

The book is written as if a letter to someone. As the book progressed, in tandem you learned more about the narrator, and their life and illness. It was mysterious and haunting.

The first half read like a love letter, and then it becomes clear that it’s not.

The story, the writing, made me feel a lot of emotions, and I’m still reeling from it!

Content Warnings

memol's review against another edition

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dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

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tamarant4's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Is it possible to work with a material so long and still not understand its condition? We are figures briefly draw in space; given temporary form in exchange for consciousness, sense, a chance. We are ready-mades, disposables. How do we live every last moment as this -- savant dust? [p. 166]

My desire to read this short novel was sparked by my discovery that it was, in part, about the narrator Edith's relationship with her mother, who suffered a brain haemorrhage when Edith was eight years old, and effectively became a different person whom Edith knew as Naomi. (I was ten when I experienced something very similar, though I did not bestow a new name on my mother.) Edith becomes an sculptor of some renown, and the eponymous Burntcoat is her home, a converted warehouse that's spacious enough to accommodate her works.

But this is a pandemic novel, though not quite our pandemic. Burntcoat features a hantavirus called Nova, which she caught from her Turkish lover -- who in turn caught it when set upon by looters while trying to retrieve food from his closed restaurant. The frame of the novel is Edith looking back from the vantage point of her late fifties, aware that the long-dormant virus is reactivating in her body, and that she will soon die.

Burntcoat felt like a set of unfinished stories: Edith's relationship with her mother (who dies while Edith is studying art in Japan); Edith's father, who leaves the wife who's no long the woman he loved and remarries; the pandemic itself, its social effects recognisable, if magnified, from our own experience; the ways the world has changed. In the end I think it's a story about bodies. There's a lot of graphic sex between Edith and her lover, and the whole novel is replete with human physicality, from pissing as a sign of dominance, to the scars of Edith's mother's surgery, to the gradual putrescence of a corpse.

I wasn't exactly disappointed -- Hall's writing is never a disappointment -- but this was not the book I'd hoped it would be.

Fulfils the ‘one word title’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

Content Warnings

tirrato's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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samsearle's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

jay_hobday's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

Content Warnings

savvylit's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0

Imagine that COVID-19 was even more lethal. That's what the virus, aka novavirus or AG3, that's sweeping the world of Burntcoat is like. Hall wrote this book at the beginning of lockdown in March 2020 - and it shows. Hall makes numerous eerie and unsettling parallels to our own pandemic. I honestly found it difficult as a reader to reckon with a phenomenon that is still so current.

There are two primary threads in this story. The first thread follows Edith's experience with her lover Halit during the novavirus pandemic. The second is Edith's reflections on growing up with her mother, a stroke survivor. Ultimately, Burntcoat weaves a tale that is somehow both bleak and beautiful. In writing this novel, Sarah Hall has written a lyrical and humane take on the full spectrum of mortality.

Though I personally found this novel to be a little too on-the-nose, I am definitely looking forward to reading more of Hall's work. Her beautiful prose has enchanted me and I'd love to experience more of it.

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