Sarah Hall's Burntcoat is a stunning 'memory piece' of love and loss

In Burntcoat, award-winning British author Sarah Hall has already set the bar high in the pandemic novel stakes.

Hall, who has had COVID, believes the virus has acted as a "clarifying force" exposing the fault lines of "ethnicity and poverty" in society.

In Burntcoat, the virus, called AG3, has been more deadly than our current COVID outbreak. This is a pandemic world in which even if you survive your first viral infection, it will eventually kill you, even if it's "domestic death behind closed curtains".

Hall's main character, Edith Harkness, dying at the age of 59, has managed to survive longer than most.

Edith, a celebrated, radical sculptor working out of Burntcoat, her studio warehouse, has been commissioned to produce her last work, a massive monument to the millions of pandemic's victims.

She reflects, "there will be controversy when it finally goes up . . . But I won't have to deal with the fall-out".

Edith sees the virus in artistic terms, "perfectly composed, star-like, and timed for the moment of greatest chaos".

Hall emphasises the importance of art and creativity in times of crisis. Working on the project is part of that process for Edith, who reflects on her life including her childhood trauma, raised by a single mother, whose personality fluctuated because of brain surgery.

Edith wonders, will telling "stories about who we are and make sense of, and meaning from, our existence" and "make sense of a disordered world?"

Burntcoat is episodic, reflecting Hall's skill as a short story writer, as it traces Edith's life and the interaction of art and love.

This takes particular focus in Edith's sexually explicit relationship with her now dead lover, Halit, a Muslim Turkish immigrant chef:

"You were the last one here, before I closed the door of Burntcoat. Before we all closed our doors."

Their love becomes a "denial" of the viral horror outside, the food riots, the army patrolling the streets and the borders closed. Hall says Edith "caring for the dying lover - is this not real, manifest love?"

Hall ultimately ponders, "how do we live with our own mortality? How do we prepare for what is unimaginable?". She has said her friendships during Covid "have been vital and fortifying and I have come to realise that women particularly tend not to let other women down in hard times".

Burntcoat is a stunning, sober "memory-piece", as Hall terms it, of love and loss, which reveals how art and caring relationships can provide light in the pandemic darkness.