King of the Badgers: A Novel

by Philip Hensher

Overview

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 outskirts—with their grim, flimsy housing stock and chain stores—only when their neighbors have the presumption to claim also to live in Hanmouth.

When an eight-year-old 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 closed-circuit 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 blank-eyed 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 modern-day 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865478749
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/18/2012
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Philip Hensher is a columnist for The Independent, an arts critic for The Spectator, and one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. He has written one collection of short stories, a book on handwriting called The Missing Ink, and eight novels, including The Mulberry Empire, King of the Badgers, and The Northern Clemency, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He lives in South London and Geneva.

Editorial Reviews

Philip Hensher's wonderfully complex, paradoxical subject in King of the Badgers is the nature of privacy, and of its violation . . . [He] has established himself as one of our most ambitious novelists. His ear for dialogue, sharp sense of the absurd and appreciation of human self-delusion recall Kingsley Amis; his fiction, like that of Amis, is powered by a strong if unconventional sense of morality. And, like Amis, he is one of fiction's rarest creatures: a writer who can move readers to stifled snorts of recognition, and then to outright laughter.” —Helen Dunmore, Guardian

“Were he not so marvelously himself, he might remind one of Thackeray, with whom he shares a brisk, efficiency at moving about a large cast and an intense vivid skill at defining minor figures . . . With Thackeray, too, Hensher shares a rare quality of kindness and an engaging fondness of seeing through the eyes of the insignificant, the peculiar, the powerless . . . His enjoyment of his own cleverness and fluency is utterly infectious.” —Jane Shilling, Telegraph

“Like Angus Wilson, a possible influence on these scenes from provincial life, Hensher's forte is the social round: the party; the conversation in the grocer's shop; the fragments of repartee borne back on the high street breeze . . . One is struck, and seduced, by a coruscating intelligence, that manifests itself in dozens of literary allusions waiting to be uncombed . . . and hundreds of individual sentences burnished up to the max . . . Hensher is one of the few English novelists at work who a) is seriously interested in the varieties of modern Englishness, and b) has the intellectual resources to address them.” —Independent

“King of the Badgers is a rich and ambitious novel, which manages both to offer a convincing picture of different levels of English society today and to explore the shifting certainties of individual lives. It is certainly easier to read than to summarise, and this is as it should be. After all, any novel capable of being precisely summed up in a short review is rarely worth reading.” —Allan Massie, Scotsman

“Cleverly shifting gear from time to time to keep us on our toes, Hensher hovers on the edge of black comedy and satire, but the dark shadows cast by the little girl's disappearance restrain him from going too far in those directions . . . Hensher has used an exceedingly sharp scalpel for this dissection of Middle England, and it would be a great disappointment if King of the Badgers didn't follow his previous novel, The Northern Clemency, on to the Man Booker shortlist.” —Alastair Mabbott, The Herald

“A powerfully delightful book, rich in pathos and drama, rowdy with life . . . Hensher's unflagging attention to detail, both physical and psychological, is extraordinary.” —Edmund Gordon, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

Though well known in Britain as a novelist, a columnist, an outspoken advocate of gay rights, one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, and an all-around man of letters, Philip Hensher has made a mark in this country—to the extent that he has—as the author of The Northern Clemency. The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and published here in 2010. Set in Yorkshire from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties, it was a chronicle of England's transformation—or deterioration, as it may be—as it played out in the lives of the members of two families. That novel was to an extent an obituary tribute to an English past and, in fact, to any sense of connection with it. But it was also a celebration of human idiosyncrasy, a festival of caustic wit and comic brio, and a humane, thoroughly absorbing network of stories that left me, for one, wishing it were twice as long as its 700-plus pages.

Now here is King of the Badgers, another novel preoccupied with change, this time all-encompassing, intrusive, and ugly. Set in 2008 in Hammouth, a fictional town on an estuary not far from Barnstaple in Devon, it begins with what has become a form of mass entertainment in Britain, a full-bore media carnival of fear, grief, and voyeurism mounted over the disappearance of a child. In this instance, the victim is nine-year-old China O'Connor, one of her hairdresser mother Heidi's four children by three fathers. The family, which also includes Heidi's dimwitted, sexual miscreant boyfriend, live in one of the housing estates that have been thrown up around Hammouth. That these excrescences are also designated Hammouth is exceedingly painful to the residents of the town proper, itself a charming place whose property values have soared so obligingly in recent years.

The town, whose economy was once connected to the sea, has gone the way of many ports and become a bustling venue for arts and crafts. It is full of "lady merchants undertaking miniature shopkeeping endeavours?. Lacemakers, batik-printers, humble potters who referred to themselves as ceramicists, the perpetrators of macramé, paper makers, conceptual artists, jewelers and sellers of jewelry, watercolourists, bookbinders, handprinters." Still, it is not a frivolous place; it has a greengrocer and even a butcher, the latter being, in the narrator's view, "a means to register the life and independence of any English town."

Both the preciousness and the small-scale habitability of Hammouth stand in contrast with the unmoored Britain of child abductions, random shootings, and anonymous, exhibitionist sex (including something pretty foul called "dogging")—all of which figure in these pages. But the mentality of that world of fear and intrusion is moving into Hammouth, its vector being (the perhaps too aptly named) John Calvin. The case of the missing child, the throngs of ghoulish visitors it has attracted to the town, and the possibility of evildoers going among them, now and forever, have been a gift to Calvin. Head of Hammouth's Neighborhood Watch group, he is a tireless advocate of putting the whole town under the gaze of CCTVs. Like every apologist of the ever- expanding surveillance state, his mantra is that "if you have nothing to hide, you have absolutely nothing to fear." The loss of privacy, even of the very right to have a private life, is a large theme in this book. Indeed, the novel, which proceeds chiefly from the points of view of its different characters, does, in one instance, advance the story from what various electronic devices (email, cell phone, card swipes, CCTV) routinely record about an individual's once-private life.

The unfavorable attention brought to the town by China's disappearance is galling to the good people of Hammouth proper, but soon enough more personal matters reassert their sway. Among the residents is Miranda, a university professor and the formidable leader of the local book group. She and her husband, Kenyon, an NGO bureaucrat with a startling secret, have almost bankrupted themselves by taking on a tremendous mortgage. Their lumpish, unloved teenage daughter, Hettie, is an antisocial monster. Catherine and Alex Butterworth, who have recently moved to Hammouth, feel isolated and rebuffed by their neighbors. Their thirty-six-year-old, morbidly obese son, David, is coming to visit with what he is presenting as his boyfriend, Mauro. Mauro, a beautiful Italian opportunist, is not interested in David—though he does have a self-destructive habit that has made him a pariah.

Sylvie, an artist whose current work involves cutting out pictures of erect penises for decoupage, wonders when Tony, whom she has allowed to live in her house since his marriage fell apart, will move on. Sam, genial owner of the town's specialty cheese shop, and his domestic partner, Harry, are happy enough, but difficulties surround the planning of the next meeting of "the Bears," a group of men ("all middle-aged, mostly fairly hairy, mostly bearded, and comfortably a touch overweight") who convene periodically for orgies.

Hensher can be cruel, though rather cheerfully so, with his characters' appearance and unlovely ways; and he is positively brutal with the gawping, fast-food-chomping, TV-soused, fantasy-addicted lower orders. Nevertheless, despite one abduction and four deaths (two of them murders), the novel is a surprisingly happy one, culminating in a gratifying act of civic vandalism and the growth of friendship among an odd assortment of people. Described at times with gossipy particularity and exultant cattiness, life in Hammouth is a twenty-first-century version of life in E. F. Benson's Tilling (of Mapp and Lucia fame). At other times, the town and its people are presented as anthropological subjects, and the satire surrounding them is editorial and scathing. Taken as a whole, King of the Badgers does not possess the overall cohesiveness and narrative muscle of The Northern Clemency, yet it is engrossing in all its parts and astute in its social observations; it is funny and sad, disgusting and disgusted, and thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish.

Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.

Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers