“A generation of people who had always struggled to define themselves against the terms of their parents’ totemic conflicts finally had their own war.”
Still in the middle of battle, it feels too early to read a novel set in contemporary times. There is no distance for the writer, no hindsight, no chance to properly reflect on what the poet Will Burns refers to in his debut novel as the "privations and anxieties and traumas barely imaginable only a short time previously".
And yet, The Paper Lantern manages to chart and interrogate the public mood and understanding of the Covid-19 crisis even as it still unfolds. It is a remarkable achievement in a book that feels at once timely and deeply considered, an antidote to the clickbait, flashing headline style of journalism that has, perhaps understandably, proliferated during the pandemic.
The unnamed male narrator of the novel lives at home and works in his parents’ pub, The Paper Lantern, in a village close to Chequers, the rural residence of the British prime minister. Even before the pandemic, the narrator is viewed locally as an oddity – almost 40, no degree, no career, no partner, no children, a poet whose output is sporadic and underpinned by self-doubt and inertia.
Like many people across the world, the narrator is jolted out of ordinary life by the pandemic, which acts as a wake-up call that forces him to take stock. It also, crucially, gives him a focus. Something to think about, which in turn provides something to write about. The pandemic gives him his material. He has, in other words, his war.
From the first page, the insights come hard and fast. There is a pared-back lyricism and clarity to the writing, commentary that is both intelligent and sensitive to the surrounding world. Split into three parts, the first (and to my mind the best) section starts big, like a 19th-century novel, offering a rich, lucid picture of a country in crisis.
Amid the panic and fear and surreality are moments of humour. The family sets about drinking the pub stocks that will otherwise go to waste. As the weeks pass and tensions mount, the narrator notes that they “ ‘social’ distance even indoors, and not so much because of the chance of infection, but because of the fast-fraying tempers and deteriorating psychological states of the three of us”.
Also documented are the positives of lockdown, the restrictions that slowed the world down and harked back to an older era. His parents use bicycles for the first time in decades. Around the village, meanwhile, there is plenty of home improvement: “Time on people’s hands, an opportunity to scrub up, to make good.”
The backbone of The Paper Lantern is the author’s searing way of detailing the inequalities and issues of modern society, which become so obvious in the stark light of the pandemic. As the world stops, everyone is forced to watch.
This book questions what it means to be an Englishman in a place that values “the more sinister aspects of Home Counties homogeneity … the status symbols of so much village life – the jobs, the schools, the huge and brutal cars”. There are meticulous arguments on climate change, capitalism and class, particularly the “dull and rapacious middle class who appeared to me to propagate themselves on a particular kind of mutual congratulation and self-satisfaction”.
Through anecdotes of pub regulars, there is the casual racism of small-town England, which a younger generation is challenging: “The young woman told him to keep his pet racist on her lead if she couldn’t behave.” Elsewhere, “the scam of higher education that was so ubiquitous as to be both worthless and inevitable and finally, cripplingly expensive” is tackled with the vigour of someone whom that system failed.
Burns began publishing poetry in 2014, when he was named a Faber & Faber New Poet. He is a long-time contributor to the online nature-writing journal Caught by the River. In The Paper Lantern, the narrator goes on long walks in the Chiltern Hills, resulting in authentic descriptions of landscape, “where roads belonged to the foxes and muntjac now, and the skies to the birds”, and a wider sense of the village and community – the local raves in secret valleys, the history of landmarks such as Halton House and Aston Hill.
The careful attention to nature and community echo the novels of Sarah Moss. But unlike Moss’s writings, The Paper Lantern is hugely introspective and offers largely just a single viewpoint. The pace of it will not be for everyone – later parts flag and overall there is a lack of shape to the narrative – but this will not bother readers who enjoy a thoughtful ramble through the English countryside with an engaging narrator who is both old and wise before his time.
