Following his Booker nominated The Northern Clemency [Kindle], which Amazon's U.S. editors named the overall Best Book of 2008, Philip Hensher again proves himself a master of contemporary British life in King of the Badgers [Kindle]. Covering a panorama of characters in a Devon estuarine town Hanmouth (pronounced Hammuth), the novel's great pleasure is like the hyper-reality of large-scale photography in which every tiny detail is sharply in focus simultaneously.
Funny to say, it hardly matters that the book doesn't quite hold together as an exploration of eroding privacy. Don't be put off that the loosest thread throughout follows the disappearance of an 8 year-old girl named China and her working-class family who are a little too eager for publicity. The story soon shifts and stays with the core villagers: the many denizens of a book group, a young artist and the stiff new widow who becomes her friend, a tart-tongued university lecturer and her closeted husband who runs an NGO about aids in Africa, their thirteen year-old daughter in love for the first time with an American fourteen year-old boy, a weaselly gent whose Neighborhood Watch strongarms the police into installing outdoor videocams everywhere, a couple new to town and their overweight middle-aged gay son David who more or less pays a handsome Italian party boy, Mauro, to pretend to be his boyfriend on a weekend visit, and a local gay couple, Harry, titled and affable, and Sam his chatty partner who runs the cheese shop. Bringing the English comedy of manners into the 21st century, the gay couple hosts their group's monthly sex party the same night the new couple host their open house. A coked-up, horned up bisexual mechanic Spencer crashes both parties, straining social graces at a gathering dominated by men discussing driving directions and spinster sisters enthralled to spend 45 minutes talking about their Bedlington terrier, Poppet, who, as it happens, is also an uninvited guest underfoot.
Given the novel's ambitious scale, some readers may reach the end and say all the pieces don't add up. But most will feel amply rewarded by its scope, observations, and writing. Houses are "an uncontrolled mixture of pastels" and by accident a resident buys "the deliriously untalented local newspaper." Women are named Billa, Kitty, Miranda, Hettie, Heidi, Philippa, and Dymphna. This last woman is David's boss who told him she thought "gays were all right but she wished they didn't thrust the fact of it down your throat all the time." At work, she explains her precise ovulation schedule and when she and her husband will be intercoursing to conceive their second child. Their company supplies atmospheric English for aspirational foreign products: I Am Butterfly Connect and Rainbow Kiss the Lucky Bird and Nightingale Lovely World Dreaming, Yes, For Ever, Yes. Their largest customers are Chinese companies. The missing girl's name is no mere coincidence. Read this brilliant book and savor every connection.
UK readers can look forward to Hensher's next novel, a fictionalized memoir of his husband's upbringing in Bangladesh, Scenes from Early Life, coming in April.
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