Dystopias

Philip Hensher’s latest novel, To Battersea Park, is not the first Covid novel – Ali Smith’s turbocharged Summer got there two and a half years ago. Sarah Moss’s The Fell and Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat were also propelled by the narrative potential of pandemic and lockdowns. Hensher, though, has done something rather different and more precarious: written a book that is really a collection of novellas engaging in more or less autobiographical fashion with his experience of Covid.I say precarious because the book feels as if…

Image: TorDotComIf you are in the global north and want to migrate to a fictional dystopia, then you have lost your grip on reality but also, more worryingly, may have expat colonial/oligarch aspirations: your only possible reason for wanting to move could be to reinforce that dystopia’s ruling elite. This advisory is not for you.If you’re in the global south and being forced to migrate by your regional totalitarian/oligarch combination, war, invasion, climate catastrophe, or by economic/social devastation caused by that…