Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers is set in Hanmouth, a small English coastal town described so thickly that it is established from the outset as effectively a character in itself.
Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers is set in Hanmouth, a small English coastal town described so thickly that it is established from the outset as effectively a character in itself. Lovely to look at, the town is too small and insecure to be thought of as adult. In fact, it’s uncomfortably adolescent — a skittish concoction of class tension, shifting demographics and unwitting self-sabotage.
The novel is full of unexpected turns. It’s also brilliant, sustained and weirdly captivating. Thematically, it’s coherent: Hensher is concerned throughout with sex, class, surveillance, the keeping and violation of secrets. And yet it’s never quite clear what kind of novel you’re getting into.
Elements of it are inescapably — quite deliberately — sensational: an abducted child, a crazed gunman at a London train station, the grisly discovery of a murder.
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