King of the Badgers

From October 2012

Of the half dozen books I got through while on holiday King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher gets the nod as the best and is a huge improvement on his somewhat laboured 2008 effort The Northern Clemency.

KOTB was described by the Sunday Times as 'The sort of thing George Eliot would have written if she was interested in gay orgies and abducted chavs.' I haven't read any of George Eliot's stuff - I didn't know 'he' was a 'she' - but I'm quite keen to do so now. Although Hensher's novel is firmly set in the here-&-now it has a very old fashioned feel and despite the gay orgies / abducted chavs (in fact, there's only one of each) he describes life in an English seaside town in much the same way as E.F. Benson did in his (or her?) Mapp & Lucia novels in the 1920s.

My only disappointment was that there were no actual badgers in the dramatis personae. Still, you can't have everything in life.