This was an unusual and disturbing read. I wasn’t gripped all of the time but the world was well-realised and I was fascinated by the questions it posed. Worth a read.

I loved the style of writing and the prose was great. It was my first book by this author and didn't know what to expect.
It's a weird book, a lot of microstories and characters. I loved some of them but it didn't keep my attention and it fell flat.
Not my cup of tea
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

Thank you to HarperCollins via Netgalley for the eARC of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I don't really know what I thought I was getting myself into when I requested this book. I think it was the title first - I have spent a non-zero amount of time at Battersea Park over the last few years - and then the blurb, which promised a story about the lives of people who lived in SW London during the pandemic - same! The fact that this immediately made a jab at people who went for runs around Battersea Park during the lockdown (also me), meant we didn't exactly get off on the right foot. I dusted myself off, however, and gave it my best shot.

This is an odd one. It tells the stories of a plethora of different characters living in in the Queenstown Road area (as well as, for some reason, coastal Kent) during the various Covid-19 lockdowns. The book is split into sections that take on different storytelling forms- The Iterative Mood, Free Indirect Style, The Hero Undertakes a Journey, and Entrelacement. Our protagonist, if there can be said to be one, is a middle class author in his early fifties, living with his husband and observing the neighbourhood goings-on - the various tensions that are thrown up by the government rules, the rule breaking, the curtain twitching, the strange Grenadian woman who grows pomelos. Most of our characters are living an extremely bland life of Waitrose deliveries and Zoom meetings, and whilst the book seems to be going for a satire of sorts, this often veers into the plainly uninteresting. Why would I want to revisit the plain, unadorned dreariness that was lockdown? Though this did manage to extract a few amused snorts from me, it wasn't quite funny enough to stand on that leg alone.

The first section is the most grounded, with the subsequent sections taking on a more surreal feeling. The third section departs entirely from London, following a young man who has fled to Kent, which seems to have fallen into complete anarchy. There's no power, no food, and a gang of young men terrorise anyone who decides to stay. I really did not like this section in particular - I felt I couldn't get a handhold in the narrative. It was such a departure from the previous two sections that it felt like that song in a musical that nobody likes, but you need to have so that they can do big costume changes.

The final section is, I think the real strength of the book. (I will try to avoid spoilers here!) Veering between the two 'entrelaced' stories of two of our households from the first section, Hensher juxtaposes the physical health crisis of the coronavirus with the mental health issues caused by lockdown. I think it gets to the meat of what made lockdowns so traumatic, so effectively that revisiting it in this book is perhaps too fresh for the present moment. Despite this book's sardonic and skilful prose, I found myself wondering why anyone might want to read it in this present moment. Why re-experience the domestic 'iterative mood' of lockdown that brings up my heart rate and squeezes the stomach? In terms of my bodily response, this book is something like going over a hill too fast in a car. I wasn't prepared, and now I feel unsettled.

It is a book that makes you work hard to extract meaning - this isn't always a negative thing, but I can't help but feel like this isn't a subject matter I'm ready to work hard on. Maybe that's a me problem. It probably would read best as a one-sitting book, allowing you to keep all its moving parts in view from start to end. Every time I picked this up it took me a decent while to find my bearings in the narrative, to remember who 'the son' and 'the mother' were in any particular context.

If you're a big fan of Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet, you might quite enjoy the way this combines recent history with the slightly surreal. I don't think it's quite as successful though. Overall, I'd say this is well-written, and will almost certainly split opinion!

To Battersea Park is best understood as a collection of short stories of differing genres with some common characters. Though there are a dozen storylines, the novel can be split into three main sections. The first, the effects of lockdown isolation on different families. The second, how society is faring several years into the pandemic in the near future. And the third, a focus on a family from the first section, their marriage issues, and their son’s dreams.

The beginning of the novel is strikingly familiar in its depictions of the early days of lockdown. With a shared sense of growing insanity from being housebound and a lack of normalcy, relationships change and neighbours fight. Social gathering regulations are respected and ignored, and exercise restrictions are carefully avoided. Even, for some people, the monotony of lockdown offered a life they hadn’t known they were missing.

Some parts of the novel are very much grounded, then there are other sections that veer far from reality. Alongside this, characters are introduced haphazardly and disappear just as quickly. As such, reading the novel feels a little like being thrown around on a rollercoaster and mostly enjoying the experience but with an underlying feeling that you no longer know which way you were facing.

However, overall the novel dealt well with the themes of grief and uncertainty, with some achingly beautifully written phrases.

I’ve been a fan of Philip Hensher’s work over the years, but I’m afraid I just couldn’t get on board with this and had to set aside about half way through. I questioned whether to review on that basis, but have done so given what put me off may inform others.

There is much to admire here from a technical / structural perspective - as an academic exercise you can look at how this tackles the pandemic, and how to describe the experience of the pandemic, and consider the tools in the abstract. But, for me at least, form has to be underpinned by either narrative or character - this feels like experiment for forms sake. Some will find this an exciting approach, and perhaps I would on a different subject but I fear I’m losing / have lost my appetite for pandemic novels. I actually thought I couldn’t stand another covid novel, but the very next book I read was informed by the pandemic too… and I highly rate it (Tom Rachman’s the Imposters).

I’m sure there’s an audience out there for this but for me it was hard work with little reward.

It's not the book, it's me.
I can totally see the beauty and skill in it, but I struggled to maintain interest and to finish. I'm disappointed in myself because I KNOW this is good but it just didn't work for me.

I really tried as hard as I could and restarted the book several times particularly as this is an author who I have enjoyed many times before.

The premise was clever and the writing lush and skilful but the post pandemic allegorical plot simply did not grab me and for all Mr Hensher’s undoubted skill and ability as a wordsmith this just wasn’t for me.

Not really enough plot for me unfortunately. Not for me, disappointed as its set in the part of London I know best. However I know people who will love this book.