The Paris Review

Philip Hensher.

King of the Badgers, Philip Hensher’s seventh novel, comes on the heels of his ambitious, fictional survey of seventies Britain, The Northern Clemency. King of the Badgers focuses on the staged kidnapping of China O’Connor, in circumstances that inevitably recall the disappearance of Shannon Matthews. Shannon disappeared from her hometown of Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, in 2008 and, after huge national media attention, was discovered a month later in the home of her step-uncle, who was eventually convicted and jailed along with Shannon’s mother. It delves into the private lives of the community in the fictional Devon town of Hanmouth. I met Philip in a trendily minimal Fitzrovia café, where Philip spoke of his imagined world as alive and elusively present.

Let’s begin with Hanmouth, the setting for King of the Badgers. What kind of place is it?

Well, it’s one of those places with a betwixt and between status. It’s a town: it’s not a village and it’s not a city. Pressures in England are pushing most places in one direction or the other. Surprising places are suddenly being declared cities. Chesterfield is a city now. Brighton is a city now. If it’s not big enough to have a claim to being a city then it’s pushed down toward being a village.

I like those betwixt and between places, ones with about forty thousand people. They are small enough that people know each other, or recognize each other. Small enough that faces recur, but big enough for the chain of connections to stretch to a breaking point, so that people can still be strangers. Hanmouth is also an old town of the sort that are all over England. There’s history in them that people want to identify with, but at the same time modernity keeps cropping up. Read More »

Dear Lorin:
Father’s Day is coming up, and this year I want to get my dad something he’ll actually read. The last three books I am certain he has read are: something by George Pelecanos, Lush Life by Richard Price, and certainly something by Sue Grafton. What would be something different, but not too different?
Best,
Bryant

Bryant? My long-lost half-brother? Can it really be you?

On the theory that our fathers are the same person, I would recommend Pete Dexter, Scott Spencer, the oft-mentioned-in-this-column Elmore Leonard, and maybe most of all The Main, by Trevanian, about which I remember almost nothing except that Dad lent it to me once when I was home sick and said it was really good. (And that I liked it, too.)

Dear Paris Review,
I have been struggling to understand the final stanza of Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” for a month or so. The more I think about it, the more I doubt my thoughts. Could someone please help give an explication of the stanza? I’m having problems answering bigger and smaller questions—for example, why is the air “blent”? Who is recognizing “our compulsions”? And why are they “robed as destinies”? And by whom are they robed? And to what is “that” referring in the line “that much can never be obsolete”? The final two lines baffle me as well. I’m sorry. Usually I am a very good close reader, but I have failed with this one. Please help. —Caroline Grey

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

P.S. It wouldn’t hurt to remind your readers how to read poetry well. Consider this a general service, too.

Thank you for sending me back to “Church Going.” I enjoyed rereading it and thinking about it again. I’m afraid these (very rudimentary, very literal-minded) answers will have occurred to you, but here is where I’d start:

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