was my first win from Goodreads First Reads, I was very excited to start it, It's the story of residents in a small town called Hanmouth and takes place when a little girl goes missing, I enjoyed the characters. The writer did a good job making each character feel real and I felt like I knew what it would be like to live in Hanmouth, I would have rated the book higher except that it took a while to get into the writer's rhythm, I also thought there were a lot of characters to get to know, almost too many, I also think the middle portion of the book was too long and if it had been shortened it would have improved the overall flow of the book.
Far from London's crime and pollution, Hanmouth's wealthier residents live in picturesque, heavily mortgaged cottages in the center of a town packed with artisanal cheese shops and antiques stores.
They're reminded of the town's less desirable outskirtswith their grim, flimsy housing stock and chain storesonly when their neighbors have the presumption to claim also to live in Hanmouth.
When an eightyearold girl from the outer area goes missing, England's eyes suddenly turn toward the sleepy town with a curiosity as piercing and unblinking as the closedcircuit security cameras that line Hanmouth's idyllic streets.
But somehow these cameras have missed the abduction of the girl, whose name is China, Is her blankeyed hairdresser mother hiding her as part of a moneymaking hoax Has she been abducted by one of the lurking perverts the townspeople imagine the cameras are protecting them from Perhaps more cameras are needed
As it turns out, more than one resident of Hanmouth has a secret hidden behind closed doors.
There's Sam and Harry, the cheesemonger and aristocrat who lead the county's gay orgies, The quiet husband of postcolonial theorist Miranda everyone agrees she's marvelous keeps a male lover, while their daughter disembowels dolls she's named Child Pornography and Slightly Jewish, Moral crusader John Calvin's Neighborhood Watch has an unusual reason for holding its meetings in secret, And, of course, somewhere out there is the house where little China is hidden,
With the dark hilarity and unflinching honesty of a modernday Middlemarch, King of the Badgers demolishes the already fragile privacy of Hanmouth's inhabitants.
These characters, exquisitely drawn and rawly human, proclaim Philip Hensher's status as an extraordinary chronicler of the domestic, and one of the world's most dazzling and ambitious novelists.
Like many athcentury British novel, King of the Badgers opens with a detailed description of a town, in this case Hanmouth, a pretty coastal spot near the Bristol Channel.
That allseeing narrator's eye sees quite a bit more, actually, than the closedcircuit security cameras that a public safety committee has arranged to scan the picturesque streets, On the one hand, King of the Badgers is a classic story of a crime that takes place amid a varied cast of Hanmouth residents, On the other, it is a sharptongued commentary on the meaning of privacy and security, Not that any library patrons have asked me to recommend a contemporary readalike for Trollope's "Barchester Towers," but if they did, this is the book I'd hand them with fair warning that the goings on at the gay sex club meetings would certainly shock the Hanmouth public safety committee.
I love Hensher's fiction, and I don't understand why he isn't more widely read, The new novel by Philip Hensher, King of the Badgers, is an ambitious state of the nation novel, It is a sometimes entertaining, sometimes horrifying dissection of a community, It satirizes, illuminates and exposes current manners and mindsets in Great Britain,
Taking apart middle class snobbery and pretensions is not a new endeavor for Hensher, In a terrific earlier novel, The NorthernClemency he did the same thing on a much smaller scale and in a historical context, The distance that history provides gives a writer the luxury of faux hindsight, Hensher doesnt get that gift in King of the Badgers, His world in this new novel is contemporary and he works hard to keep it relevant,
Hensher uses a missing child from the wrong side of the tracks as the catalyst to peel away the picture postcard pretty of the seaside town of Hanmouth.
The missing child isnt from one of the many sanitized into respectability families, Eight year old China OConnor and her patchwork family are residents of the public housing that the more comfortable citizens of Hanmouth do not acknowledge as part of their town.
Chinas mother is a woman with many children, all from different fathers, When your last name is Rockefeller or Vanderbilt in some social circles this method of breeding would be considered acceptable but when you live in Hanmouth and your last name is OConnor this type of parent makes you trash.
Do not for a minute think that this book is a mystery novel, Despite the kidnapping of China and its effect on all of the characters in the novel this is no detective story, Poor China gets the ball rolling but even a missing child cannot break through the self absorption of these people,
The mighty of Hanmouth see Chinas disappearance as a vindication of their desires for more protection fromfrom everything really, One of the sad truths of the novel is the characters desires to be accepted and at the same time be free to express all the behaviors that they fear will label them as unacceptable.
The bigger canvas of King of the Badgers allows Hensher to impress us with his skills in manipulating a large cast of characters, It also provides a broader menu of pretensions to penetrate, He is certainly up to the task, Each of the many characters has a complete story and a role to play in this cross section of life lived in the proverbial nice place to live.
However the book is not a revelation a minute soap opera, There is a slightly documentary tone to the novel that juxtaposes nicely with the humorous elements of the book as it reinforces the honesty of Henslers portrait,
P. S. That cover What the heck Who was on crack the day that was selected Believe it or not it looks even worse in person, It looks like a cover you would find on a local historical society cookbook, Painful. Though the book is ostensibly about a child abduction, Hensher's main theme in King of the Badgers is the distinction between public and private, This isn't, however, a simple screed about the proliferation of security cameras and the culture of surveillance in modern Britain, Instead, Hensher does a brilliant job of showing you the complicated interplay between his characters' public and private lives, between their inner thoughts and their outer performances, between their selves and their roles, and all the time he's drawing his readers' attention to the power of the omniscient narrator, able to see and hear all, and go everywhere.
It's a striking trick, but the book is not tricksy, not at all, In fact, the best part of the book, for me, was his ability to portray even minor characters so fully and memorably, He's got a great ear for dialogue, and unlike other books I've read recently, where every character speaks with the same exact voice Ondaatje!, Hensher uses different dialects and registers to bring a whole range of English "types" to life.
The skewering he gives his bourgeois towndwellers and academics, in particular, is really great, biting and satirical but never mean, exactly, I loved this book, and can't wait to read more of his work, This novel is one of those guilty pleasures one is reluctant to admitting how much you enjoyed it, as Philip Hensher spares no sacred cows, pieties, scruples or morals in this often grotesque and lurid, but extremely funny, skewering of middleclass society.
Even the reader has his or her pretensions examined ruthlessly at one point, . . and found to be sorely wanting, of course, as is everyone else under Henshers ferociously intelligent gaze,
In the fictional English town of Hanmouth, on the Bristol Channel, a young girl by the name of China goes missing, presumably kidnapped, That her family is from the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak, is cause for much grievance among the upstanding citizens of
Hanmouth proper, as the sadly unwarranted event gives undue publicity to the less than savoury aspects of this semirural idyll.
However, Hensher is little interested in solving the mystery of Chinas disappearance, and simply uses this as a pretext to delve behind the curtains and closed doors of Hanmouth, to peer into its darkest nooks, crannies, desires, fears and hopes.
The irony of this, of course, is that the book is ostensibly about the invasion of privacy and the encroachment on human rights, as the stickintheass John Calvin of the local Neighbourhood Watch launches a onehorse campaign to increase the number of surveillance cameras in Hanmouth If you are not doing anything wrong you will not be afraid to be caught out, is the overall motto of this Big Brother benevolence.
Perhaps the highlight of the book is a bravua sequence contrasting a dinner party at one family, while a few houses down the local bears fat, hairy and happy gay men are getting down and dirty.
What I loved is that the book ends on such a sweetly domesticated note between the two lead gay characters, Sam and Lord What A Waste Harry, that the reader is totally wrongfooted by Henshers loving adoration for this doting couple, symbol of the true love, friendship and fealty that a proper community should be built upon.
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