Review of Killing Time by Alan Bennett – older moments full of wit and style | fiction

ALan Bennett, now 90, hasn't published anything original in book form in five years. In the interim – the Covid years and the Johnson years and the Truss month – readers have had to make do with the incomparable annual diaries he writes for London Review of Booksannual proof that his special flair for English comedy and sudden pathos remains undiminished. This novella is, in part, his reflection on those years, inevitably set in a nursing home, the unlikely site of the national crisis during the pandemic.

Bennett, of course, knows his way around these institutional corridors. He inhabited it in perhaps the most memorable episode of his time Talking heads Series, Thora Hirds Waiting for the telegram. This episode was not re-shot when Nicholas Hytner re-shot the entire series during lockdown, partly because social distancing prevented this and partly because the atmosphere may have been too much for the nation to bear. However, the gap of a few years allows Bennett to frame this period with greater imaginative certainty.

The story is a kind of parable. The focus is on the residents of Hill Topp House, a confident, upscale establishment that promises potential “customers” “a choir on special occasions and a glass of dry sherry.” It is run by the authoritarian Mrs McBryde, who threatens her “community” with banishment “down the hill” to Low Moor, a simpler community facility, if any rule-breaking occurs – with inhibitions loosened by frustration and dementia, there are inevitably enough. Ms McBryde is confident that if the virus occurs it will not affect Hill Topp – the place is too thin for ordinary germs, “the wind would take care of them” – but of course such snobbery is no defense.

This broader tragedy provides the backdrop for a superficial comedy in which Bennett deploys his repertoire of Middle England satire: the expected pitch-perfect exchanges about pedicures, baby names or war memories, those conversational non-sequiturs that have survived intact from his troubled childhood. The first drama is caused by the oldest resident, Mr. Woodruff, the house's inveterate bright spot. “Aren’t you curious?” He asks Ms. Foss, a newcomer, about his habit. “No,” she says, “I was with the St. John Ambulance Brigade.”

In a way, the book feels like an ironic little rejoinder from Bennett to Richard Osman The Thursday Murder Clubwho has entered this territory without much nuance or subtlety. Death is omnipresent here, but it cannot be solved by the famous Five of Seniors. Instead, the virus' advance through Hill Topp becomes a vehicle for something stranger after Ms. McBryde herself succumbs, despite declaring in the emergency room that she can't be caught (“The disease was something that was meant to weed out old people and casual people Asian”). In their absence, the surviving residents take back control of their lives – “arthritis permitting, they run” – encouraged by Gus, the window cleaner, who guides the frustrated and curious – Men and women alike – provide additional services in the tool shed on a rotational basis.

Even as a young man, Bennett seemed fascinated by the taboo-breaking possibilities of older age. He expressed the loosening of his own buttoned-up nature in a more confessional tone Untold Stories (2006), which included his candid account of his mother's depressive illness, which overshadowed his childhood, and his openness about being gay. In his 2009 piece The habit of art, Over the last year of WH Auden's life, he wrote about locating his late style, the capital letters expressing his ironic meaning of this description: “I feel that I have only just arrived at a style, and now I realize that I'm almost at the end. I’m not entirely sure what Late Style means, except that it’s a kind of license, a permission for aging practitioners to go out on a limb.”

This little book proves he still enjoys finding ways to use that blue author's badge.