A wonderful surprise gift from Alan Bennett, in his ninetieth year - a brand new novella, set in a home for the elderly; a glorious, darkly comic treat.
We have a choir and on special occasions a glass of dry sherry. It's less of a home and more of a club and very much a community.
Presided over by the lofty Mrs McBryde, Hill Topp House is a superior council home for the elderly. Among the unforgettable cast of staff and residents there's Mr Peckover the deluded archaeologist, Phyllis the knitter, Mr Cresswell the ex-cruise ship hairdresser, the enterprising Mrs Foss and Mr Jimson the chiropodist. Covid is the cause of fatalities and the source of darkly comic confusion, but it's also the key to liberation. As staff are hospitalised, protocol breaks down. Miss Rathbone reveals a lifelong secret, and the surviving residents seize their moment, arthritis allowing, to scamper freely in the warmth of the summer sun.
'Violet? She'll be having a little lie down,' said Mrs McBryde. 'She likes to give her pacemaker a rest. I'll rout her out.'
'A mini-masterpiece.' THE TIMES
'Full of wit and style.' OBSERVER
'A terrific cast of characters, and secrets and chaos aplenty.' iNEWS
'A geriatric Lord of the Flies.' SPECTATOR
Industry Reviews
Is Killing Time a parable? A satirical Lord of the Flies for tart-tongued OAPs? A joyously juicy series of character studies in a care home in which pretty much every line comes with some sharp observation? Yep, all of the above . . . This is the embroidering of a master, a writer who can make intricacy feel easy. - THE TIMES
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. - iNEWS
Alan Bennett is back with deadpan gallows humour . . . it becomes obvious that Bennett, with his gentle narrative voice, has lulled us into a story that takes the scandalous tragedy of care home deaths from Covid-19 as its true subject. - FINANCIAL TIMES
Bennett is in his element in such an establishment [as Hill Topp House], attuned to both the grim apprehensions of old age and its awful comedy, and shifts deftly between the two. It is familiar territory, but nobody does it like him . . . his sentences remain as devastatingly, casually precise as ever . . . The story's conclusion manages quietly, wryly, and without the least trace of sentimentality, to touch the heart. - GUARDIAN
Full of wit and style. Alan Bennett employs his pitch-perfect repertoire of satirical skills in his first book for five years . . . a wry little rejoinder to Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club. - OBSERVER
It's at the bottom of Killing Time's first page when anyone ignorant of whom they were reading might suspect Alan Bennett. 'He's dead, Mr Ellis. Mr Firbank was always the main man. Was it him you were wanting?' Any other writer would put, I think: 'Mr Ellis is dead. Mr Firbank was always in charge. Was it him you wanted to speak to?' The differences are small, but in them lies the key to Bennett's mastery, his ear for the tiny idiosyncrasies of language and all that they reveal. - SPECTATOR
