1 week Ago By Anna Bonet
It is no exaggeration to say that Alan Bennett has played a large part in shaping our national psyche. As the writer of The History Boys, The Lady in the Van, The Madness of King George, Talking Heads and much, much more, it is hard to imagine the UK without him. Now 90 years old, he’s a national treasure, yes, but the cosiness of the term belies the content of his work; his outwardly restrained characters grapple with torments of class, sex, and perhaps most of all, solitude.
His latest book, Killing Time, is a novella set in a care home during the outbreak of the Covid , but it is not his first pandemic publication; his lockdown diary House Arrest was a bestseller. Ageing and death have long fascinated Bennett. In BBC One’s 1987 one-act play A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, we watched the elderly Doris contemplate her demise, while his 2018 play Allelujah! was set on a geriatric ward.
In his new novella, we meet the residents of the Hill Topp care home, whose mortality is similarly imminent. These residents include Gladys, the beauty, whose hair has never been cut, “a grand suburban sphinx”; and Woodruff, who likes to flash his penis, even though his plastic incontinence sheath means that locating it involves “a degree of delving”. When fellow resident Mrs Vokes dies, Woodruff convinces the vicar that he should press the button that sends her coffin through the final curtains.
In a typically Bennet touch, Woodruff then presses the button adjacent, fetching it back. So accustomed are we now to Bennett’s prose that it takes a mental leap to notice just how good he is, how finely tuned his sentences, the microscopic power of his observation. Hill Topp’s residents, or “prisoners” as the sympathetic narrator describes them, bicker, spend “long and phlegm-flecked” afternoons watching television in The Library (which has no books) and have sex with the window cleaner, Gus.
Read Next The best new books to read in November 2024 They look down, both figuratively and literally, at the residents of another care home at the bottom of the hill, Low Moor. They go through their meagre remaining possessions to find donations for a tabletop sale. Sifting through their pasts, the oldest resident, Miss Rathbone, comes upon a bottle of perfume with an unexpectedly rich history; it may be empty, but its scent remains.
And then comes Covid. The many elements of the pandemic that I have mentally shelved are touched upon here; March 2020’s incessant handwashing, the decision of whether or not to hold football matches and horse races. Then there were the care homes like Hill Topp, their residents held captive as the virus came for them: Bennett tells this story from the inside.
“Singing broadcasts it, apparently,” says one resident, as another muses, “You can have sex if you’re in a bubble.” To read these passages is to remember just how mad we all were, how baffled, how afraid. The deaths come thick and fast and entirely without drama.
As the death toll grows, the weather turns – again, I experienced a twinge of recognition – and those residents remaining frolic in the sun. It’s funny – of course it is, this is Alan Bennett. But to focus on the humour risks missing the anger that is woven so carefully through the book.
There’s anger at the way care home residents were treated during the pandemic; in one passage, Miss Rathbone remembers watching London burn during the Blitz . Horrifying though it may have been, she still had the sense that there were better times ahead. “Now, she was not so sure.
” And there’s a wider grief, at how age robs humans of so much of their agency. Because this is Bennett, it’s a very British disquiet: “We’re all lost property now,” says Mr Raybould. From its low-key opening to its startling final paragraphs, Killing Time wields the mundane like a nunchuck.
Ninety he may be, but Bennett’s own bottle is far from empty. Published by Faber & Profile, £10.
