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steve_32's review
5.0
As with previous Sarah Hall novels Burncoat is beautifully written.
We are in the grips of a pandemic that is indiscriminately infecting and killing people around the world which sounds familiar but is in some ways worse than what we are currently living through. The current situation helps us understand how nobody expects to live through such a crises and as the country falls apart trust in the government wanes. Those spared question why they have survived whilst loved ones died.
The novel centres around renowned sculptor Edith Harkness and looks back on her life. We learn of her childhood with her brilliant but damaged mother Naomi and during locking, how she cared for her lover Halit in her bedroom above her studios at Burncoat.
An intense and beautiful novel.
We are in the grips of a pandemic that is indiscriminately infecting and killing people around the world which sounds familiar but is in some ways worse than what we are currently living through. The current situation helps us understand how nobody expects to live through such a crises and as the country falls apart trust in the government wanes. Those spared question why they have survived whilst loved ones died.
The novel centres around renowned sculptor Edith Harkness and looks back on her life. We learn of her childhood with her brilliant but damaged mother Naomi and during locking, how she cared for her lover Halit in her bedroom above her studios at Burncoat.
An intense and beautiful novel.
brisingr's review against another edition
4.0
First proper pandemic book that I've read since the pandemic (hey, reading is escapism in most cases), but it fit through a personal narrative all the failures that we've seen happening: the governmental and social ones, and how much they can hurt and continuously damage. I maintain the novel's question: how do you go on after something like this? And how can you not?
ellagos's review
challenging
dark
tense
medium-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
4.0
suzea's review
challenging
emotional
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
amelia_reads_and_reviews's review
5.0
A small book that mercilessly interrogates those things from which we recoil and which fascinate us. Rot, disease, the physicality of sex, the body disrupted and the mind showing the limits of its machinations. Not everyone will vibe with such strong imagery or a book that takes as its subject the human condition at a time of extreme crisis. If you prefer a picture of a pristine forest to the fecund life and decay of the real thing, perhaps this is not the book for you. If you'd prefer that your lovers' ecstasies are of the mind exclusively or would rather not think of death as ghastly then this is not the book for you. Beautiful and raw and completely devastating,this novel tempers its heavier themes with crisply realised domestic moments and tender relationships. A unique, timely and imaginatively rich response to the lockdowns of 2020/1 which maintains at its core the emotions which will still bristle with familiarity for many in spite of their more dystopian emphasis.
The skill and ease with which Sarah Hall guides us through these moments of abjection is a truly exquisite thing.
The skill and ease with which Sarah Hall guides us through these moments of abjection is a truly exquisite thing.
teresatumminello's review
3.0
3.5
Informed by and written during our time of pandemic, the November book for the Nervous Breakdown Book Club is another selection worthy of the “club’s” name.
The story of a fictional pandemic, it’s told by an artist looking back on her experiences as she creates a commissioned sculpture to memorialize the victims. Her relationships with her partner and her mother are paramount, though she reflects on others as well. The story is written to a “you,” who is the aforementioned partner—at least at first. Addressed later is a different “you,” one she realizes has been with her since she was a young girl.
This is my first Hall, so I don’t know if it’s indicative of her style or not. I liked its thoughts and ideas, especially those concerning the role of storytelling and artmaking while facing down death. It gets one of my ambivalent ratings because I didn’t always connect to the story’s execution, though I appreciated its relevancy, its ambition, and the visceral rendering of the toll illness takes on the body and on caretakers. Hall has done all this in not many pages, effectively utilizing white spaces instead of chapters.
Informed by and written during our time of pandemic, the November book for the Nervous Breakdown Book Club is another selection worthy of the “club’s” name.
The story of a fictional pandemic, it’s told by an artist looking back on her experiences as she creates a commissioned sculpture to memorialize the victims. Her relationships with her partner and her mother are paramount, though she reflects on others as well. The story is written to a “you,” who is the aforementioned partner—at least at first. Addressed later is a different “you,” one she realizes has been with her since she was a young girl.
This is my first Hall, so I don’t know if it’s indicative of her style or not. I liked its thoughts and ideas, especially those concerning the role of storytelling and artmaking while facing down death. It gets one of my ambivalent ratings because I didn’t always connect to the story’s execution, though I appreciated its relevancy, its ambition, and the visceral rendering of the toll illness takes on the body and on caretakers. Hall has done all this in not many pages, effectively utilizing white spaces instead of chapters.
elkiedee's review against another edition
4.75
This is a short, intense novel. Edith looks back on her life, including growing up with her mother, who nearly died when Edith was a child but recovered enough to keep her daughter with her after her husband leaves. Edith eventually built her own life as an artist.
Central to her story is a love affair with Halit, a man who has settled here after being forced into exile. But the lovers haven't been together long at the start of a pandemic, and a society hit by crisis, fear and food shortages, and xenophobia.
I think this novel will be one of the best books I read this year, but it isn't always easy reading, with very explicit descriptions of sex and illness. Edith is looking back several decades later, and Sarah Hall in this story imagines a situation in which things got much, much worse, though eventually there was some return to a new normal. This may be a book that people should read, if they want to, in a time and place when they are ready for it.
(Review written 23 June 2022)
Central to her story is a love affair with Halit, a man who has settled here after being forced into exile. But the lovers haven't been together long at the start of a pandemic, and a society hit by crisis, fear and food shortages, and xenophobia.
I think this novel will be one of the best books I read this year, but it isn't always easy reading, with very explicit descriptions of sex and illness. Edith is looking back several decades later, and Sarah Hall in this story imagines a situation in which things got much, much worse, though eventually there was some return to a new normal. This may be a book that people should read, if they want to, in a time and place when they are ready for it.
(Review written 23 June 2022)
marc129's review
2.0
Gosh, what am I supposed to think about this? This novel clearly didn't work for me. And how come? Certainly not because of the portrait of a wayward woman, because the artist Edith portrayed by Hall is quite interesting. Certainly not because of the style, or at least not entirely, because that is sometimes very sharp-witted and multi-layered, but often also banal and clichéd. Certainly not because of the theme of coping as a child with a mother who, after a stroke, develops a rather brutal way of dealing with things, without compromises. And, of course, it's not the description of a devastating pandemic that is problematic (this is, to my knowledge, the first pandemic novel I've read).
So why didn't it resonate? Perhaps it was the very clichéd nature of the all-consuming relationship that Edith enters into with the Turkish-Syrian refugee Halit: Halit is too much of an archetype of mysterious primeval male power ('chick lit-warning'), and the sex scenes are very explicit, almost pornographic. That explicitness also appears in the detailed description of the process of deterioration Halit and Edith go through, due to the disease ('pain porn'!). And then there's the very gaudy stuff about Edith's idiosyncratic artistry ('arty farty'!). Finally, there are a number of passages that I really don't see what they're doing in this novel (the visit from the half-brother from Canada, for example, at the end of the novel).
I suspect I'm doing Sarah Hall an injustice, but at times it really felt like I was reading chick lit upgraded with some artistic flair and a pandemic sauce over it.
So why didn't it resonate? Perhaps it was the very clichéd nature of the all-consuming relationship that Edith enters into with the Turkish-Syrian refugee Halit: Halit is too much of an archetype of mysterious primeval male power ('chick lit-warning'), and the sex scenes are very explicit, almost pornographic. That explicitness also appears in the detailed description of the process of deterioration Halit and Edith go through, due to the disease ('pain porn'!). And then there's the very gaudy stuff about Edith's idiosyncratic artistry ('arty farty'!). Finally, there are a number of passages that I really don't see what they're doing in this novel (the visit from the half-brother from Canada, for example, at the end of the novel).
I suspect I'm doing Sarah Hall an injustice, but at times it really felt like I was reading chick lit upgraded with some artistic flair and a pandemic sauce over it.
kookikrissie's review
challenging
dark
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0