... pretty intense ... Burntcoat is marked by superb stylistic economy. As in her short stories, her concerns are expansive ... Burntcoat is a fierce, lyrical, not always controlled but compelling work. It sets a high bar for the pandemic novels to come.
What’s fascinating here...are Hall’s revelations about illness and its relationship to creativity and to sexuality ... Hall has always written sex well and seriously, has always allowed desire to effloresce even in the most unlikely situations, but now she makes sex the heart of the book, describing it lyrically ... The scenes where the feverish man and the exhausted woman come together in their infected bed have an extraordinary erotic intensity; it is there also in the brutally visceral descriptions of his final decline ... This terrible, ambivalent closeness takes all of Hall’s magnificent powers as a novelist to describe. I was left feeling that only she could write it. Just as powerful are her awed descriptions of the virus itself ... The hope in this sparse, sumptuous, brilliant book is that the work of finding meaning and truth can be continued even in extremity, even as art and love slip away.
Hall, the author of several previous novels, is best known as a much-decorated short-story writer, and Burntcoat carries a flavor of that form—in its lush intensity, its abrupt leaps in time and its reliance on mood and image and theme over scope or gradual development. There’s a quality akin to Marilynne Robinson, though Hall pays less attention to the intricacies of psychology ... an insistently poetic novel.
... a deeply unsettling and empathetic read ... Known for her searing, highly crafted writing that often incorporates elements of gothic and the surreal, her skilful blend of reality and fiction in this new book makes for an intense read ... a pacy, furious book that seeks to galvanise ... At times the narrative whirls and jumps about...but it is a small matter and presumably deliberate in a book that is frenzied from start to finish. That is not to say that clarity of insight is missing. Hall can deliver a blow in a simple, devastating sentence ... a book full of wisdom about the crisis of our times.
In the great tradition of the English Gothic novel ... Yet allusions to the Gothic novel and the supernatural are a red herring in a book that is actually a celebration of the body and physical contct in all its forms ... [A] temporally tricky novel ... Burntcoat is an elemental novel, of earth and fire and water, wood and mud and peat, graphite and charcoal, resins, pine tar and ashes. It is a novel woven from the language of the English landscape: branches, gorse, moor, sand, cold water, sodden oak. This is fertile territory for Hall, whose previous work has so brilliantly sung of the north.
Burntcoat is one of those new books with the unsettling quality of describing or approximating a great moment in history and its aftermath, as the reader is still living through it ... This could be trite, but Hall manages to make it compelling, tragic, and still sensitive in its handling of a love story during a time of terrible social upheaval ... Hall provides an achingly accurate description of an emotional and physical connection that feels as though it describes a whole life ... The book is littered with symbolism ... Burntcoat is a survey of a life at its very end, an odd autobiography of an artist whose life is marked by grief and the desire to create. Her artistic method is perhaps a bit of an overegged representation of this, a process which brings new life from destruction. It is immensely readable and beautifully told, so much so that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll read it deliberately slowly so as to prolong its life as much as possible.
Hall...writes with a clarity and precision that keeps her books on the short side, but they are dense with feeling, with perfect observations, and with the physicality of life ... For the first seventy or eighty pages, Burntcoat was a book I was enjoying, lost in Hall’s precise sentences, the way she reflects the world, so familiar but through a lens that seems to slightly shift all the colors ... Then the book shifts, developing on a subtle, unnerving intimacy and propulsive urgency. I tried to put it down and do other things, but I needed to know how bad it was going to get, in this nameless British town. I needed to know what Edith was going to live through ... When I got to the end of Burntcoat I was shaking as if I were sobbing, but there were no tears, just that feeling of being gripped and shaken, everything tied up in knots that take time to relax ... In Edith’s crisp, precise, reserved voice, so many things are perfectly clear.
... if every pandemic-inspired novel has half the intensity of Ms. Hall’s short, acrid book then my worries will be misplaced ... Ms. Hall’s rendering...is sensual and messy, hot on the page. And when the bliss of Edith and Halit’s confinement is transformed into agony by the intrusion of the virus the writing loses none of its rough, demanding physicality. The paradox of passion is always at the fore of the story.
It’s a novel that displays everything wonderful and unique about Hall’s fiction—the evocative, sensual prose, the excavation of her character’s deepest desires and fears—but is weighed down, even diminished by its genre element: the arrival of a calamitous global pandemic ... The first two-thirds of Burntcoat are truly sublime. It would be easy to get lost in Edith’s reminiscences which flip back and forth in time, and yet Hall’s choice of words, her subtle but noticeable changes in register, means decades can pass in a matter of pages, and we never feel unmoored ... (Hall is one of the few contemporary authors who can write an erotic, non-cringey sex scene) ... Then along comes the Nora-virus ... The last third of the novel is so shocking, so graphic, that our final impression of Burntcoat is about the devastation left behind by the virus and not those terrific, small moments that come before it ... For a novel that’s about the construction of large installations, Burntcoat felt like two very different stories crudely welded together.
Hall’s super-heated style, distinctive in a landscape of internet-flattened minimalism, has always combined sci-fi world-building with horror twists and a nature writer’s hyper-sensitive vision ... But while the narrative has the urgency of a disaster scenario, its texture is more mazy ... The book’s energy lies in Hall’s knack for alighting on the sort of authentic detail that brings a scene alive ... For all that, Hall’s best fiction is still to be found in her short story collections ... While the fluid structure of Burntcoat mimics the narrator’s roving memory, isn’t it also a convenient way to meld the quick strokes favoured by Hall’s vivid scene-making?
It is a rending read, and all the better for that. The characters are so deftly done, in all their ambiguities, that the catastrophe is actually meaningful ... Hall deploys an effective jittery jump-cut to the passage of time ... The book is frank, and had as much about menstruation as copulation. It seems more the descendant of writers like Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille in its yoking of the erotic and the violent, the morbid and the sublime. But: both prude and trigger warning, it really is frank. That the body is a source of joy and a site of decay is integral to the novel’s meaning. You might want to close your eyes at the sex scenes, but you’ll definitely want to when the descriptions of necrosis and suffering hove into view ... I found one of the most admirable things about Burntcoat the almost metaphysical musings on the virus. There is an aghast admiration for its adaptability ... There will be more that attempt to understand The Curious Years [of the pandemic], but Hall has set a bar, and few will be as finely wrought, intellectually brave and emotionally honest as this is.
... exquisite ... Hall’s relatively slim book packs a lot into it. Narrated in spare, fragmentary bits...the novel manages to be both abstract and precise ... Burntcoat touches on many powerful and relevant themes ... Hall also skillfully depicts sex, in scenes that are more visceral than erotic, and that pair powerfully with the very different kinds of intimacy required when the virus begins to take over the body ... Both apocalyptic and strangely hopeful, Burntcoat is the work of a talented, thoughtful novelist engaging masterfully and inventively with the pressing concerns of our time.
... a harrowing and memorable vision of decay, collapse and recovery ... Hall is perceptive, and her prose is often lovely, though a few of her sentences are horrendous. She's insightful about an underappreciated art-world dynamic...and conveys a tangible sense of what it's like to make art with difficult materials ... But Hall's sex scenes feature some laughable phrases...and her prose can be pretentious ... Nonetheless, Burntcoat is powerful and generally well constructed. Read it tomorrow or a decade from now—either way, it'll convey a palpable sense of what it feels like to be alive in 2021, another grueling year shaped by an epochal crisis.
Hall is one of the few authors on whose every word I hang ... Burntcoat feels like a culmination of Hall’s work and, in my opinion, it is her finest yet ... this staggering novel can be read in a matter of hours. It is an exquisite account of sexual intimacy, of maternal love, of our terrifying capacity for survival and our commitment to creating beauty out of the darkness.
Hall’s narrative takes the form of a series of chopped-up, spaced-out paragraphs. Most of them are detailed chunks which chart developments, convey emotions and relay memories and meditations. Some are vignettes comprising a mere sentence or two which make short, sharp points or add impressionistic dabs of colour. Each paragraph brings us closer to Edith; together they amount to a singular life and a satisfying whole ... Hall has written a novel which is, by turn, erotic, tragic and elegiac. It may not cure anything but it most definitely has the power to move and enthral.
Even when [Hall's] not writing about sex she might as well be. Her prose is sensual, viscous and fluid. Her novels and short stories luxuriate in the animalistic anarchy of sex, the sheer life and death mess ... Hall is not a social realist writer, and although her evocation of overwhelmed hospitals and unfathomable death counts recycles plenty of stock images from the past 18 months, it also draws on the apocalyptic imagination that has shaped much of her writing ... This is an odd novel, a hotchpotch of ideas, thoughts and sensual descriptions of art, mortality and the vulnerability of the human body. Its elegant phrasing almost blinds you to the novel’s abstract nature. However, the fragmented, backwards-looking structure is curiously enervating, constantly working against the novel’s ability to generate momentum ... But for Hall aficionados, perhaps the overwhelming impression is one of vague disappointment. Early novels, such as 2004’s Booker-shortlisted The Electric Michelangelo suggested a writer of rare imaginative daring, but she’s never quite fulfilled that promise; certainly she has yet to produce the book that establishes her as a truly great writer.
Hall’s writing tends to operate at two extremes, the richly allusive and the grotesquely visceral, often in the same sentence ... At times, Burntcoat feels like a bundle of short stories, with sustained, coherent narrative generally shunned in favour of episodic narration, fleeting impressions and vignettes, moving between different periods of Edith’s life ... There is, as you might expect in a novel about two new lovers locked up together, a lot of sex. The writing is oddly uneven: some of it is cheesy...but some of it is wonderfully graphic, in a way that resembles Hall’s descriptions of sickness later on in the novel ... 'Do stories make sense of a disordered world?' Edith asks early on in the novel. Burntcoat is an engrossing novel that tries admirably, at times brilliantly, to answer that question.
... this feels a bit overdone. The borders, bodies, quarantine, chaos, crime, arrests, protests, a prime minister addressing the nation and other more or less realistic details do little for our willing suspension of disbelief. As society collapses under the plague, on page after page, Hall’s dystopia feels at once familiar and hard to relate to ... the obvious parallels with the events of the past eighteen months inevitably leave us with the impression that now is not the time for the Great Pandemic Novel: too late for the sense of urgency, too early for historical perspective ... Sex in Hall’s work used to be dark and unpredictably exciting...but these descriptions of 'the wet map of intimacy' leave the reader cold ... Hall is at her best when exploring—often in fragmentary, non-linear prose—the mysterious ways in which art moves. We are reminded that trauma being channelled into art really is the oldest story ... But art in the time of plague requires the same attention—and that also means it has to wait for its moment to be launched into the world.
Hall’s writing tends to operate at two extremes, the richly allusive and the grotesquely visceral, often in the same sentence ... At times, Burntcoat feels like a bundle of short stories, with sustained, coherent narrative generally shunned in favour of episodic narration, fleeting impressions and vignettes, moving between different periods of Edith’s life ... There is, as you might expect in a novel about two new lovers locked up together, a lot of sex...The writing is oddly uneven: some of it is cheesy, but some of it is wonderfully graphic, in a way that resembles Hall’s descriptions of sickness later on in the novel ... It is a bold thing to write a work of literary fiction about an ongoing catastrophe, even if some details have been changed ... 'Do stories make sense of a disordered world?' Edith asks early on in the novel. Burntcoat is an engrossing novel that tries admirably, at times brilliantly, to answer that question.
Hall’s narrative takes the form of a series of chopped-up, spaced-out paragraphs ... together they amount to a singular life and a satisfying whole ... many of Hall’s...signature tropes are on full display, in particular her unvarnished depictions of sex and her more lyrical phrasings ... Hall has written a novel which is, by turn, erotic, tragic and elegiac. It may not cure anything but it most definitely has the power to move and enthral.
There’s a lot going on here and it’s hard not to suppose that Hall has overextended herself ... Any one of these plot streams would have made for a powerful short story and the novel is a reminder that it is the short form in which Hall really excels ... Writing about the physical and psychological effects of pandemic lockdowns in such close proximity to the actual experience of the past two years may prove a bit too close for the kind of distance such a meditation seems to demand ... The novel’s final page includes an explicit connection between Edith and her art, but the survival that opened the book is undercut by the realization that it is contingent — her resilience will inevitably run out. It’s a sobering notion that the novel is not quite substantial enough to fully inhabit.
Powerful ... Hall brings perfect harmony to the sweeping themes, such as a pandemic’s impact on culture and the difficulties faced by a woman in the art world, and the prose, rich in description, is never overdone. This will serve as a benchmark for pandemic fiction.
It makes sense for the reader to stumble along for a bit, hoping to catch up ... This may be no problem at all for some, while it may be a trial for others. Beyond that, the success of this novel depends on the willingness of the reader to turn pronouncements about the human condition and disjointed personal vignettes into a compelling story ... An interesting relic of a year when the world was in quarantine.
