The Paper Lantern

Will Burns

Average Rating 7/10 (1 Review)

Set in a shuttered pub - The Paper Lantern - in a village in the very middle of the country adjacent to the Prime Minister's Chequers Estate, an unnamed narrator embarks on a series of walks in the Chiltern Hills. As he charts and interrogates the shifts in mood and understanding that have defined a transformative period in his own history and that of the surrounding area, he reveals a past scarred with trauma and a present lacking compass. Traversing local raves in secret valleys, to climate change and capitalism, The Paper Lantern creates a tangible, lived-in complicated rendering of a place, at the moment when the very sense of place itself is being questioned.

'Full of acute social observations, it's a time capsule in the making.'

Review by Ben Macnair (010124) Rating (7/10)

Review by Ben Macnair
Book Source: Not Known
Rating 7/10
The Paper Lantern is one of the publications that sits between genres. It is part novel, part factual re-telling, part state of the nation study, part political diatribe.

It is 2020 and the first Lockdown is trickling in. The book’s narrator works in the pub that his father owns in a small Buckinghamshire town that relies on passing trade and tourism to keep going. Lockdown and Covid19 put a stop to all of that, and so the family struggled on, missing the camaraderie of working in a pub, missing the certainty of an income, missing the certainty of their small lives continuing.

As the weeks drag on, and uncertainty becomes despair the author finds his walks around the small village taking on more meaning. The history of the place becomes of great interest, the legacy of the pubs, his pub, its history, and the people who have left become more important. He remembers old school friends who have left, and ones who have died, and grows to welcome the ones who have stayed, for their connection to his past, which seems to be slipping away from all of them.

The book is both completely of its time, and would not exist without Covid 19 happening, but at the same time, some elements are timeless, that look at the natural world, and how it continues without the traffic, the people, the pollution. The book is also set in a post-Brexit world, and this also has some sway over the narrative direction that the book takes. Will Burns is an award-winning, published poet, who writes about nature, and these two elements of his life are pushed to the fore in the writing style, and telling details of his book, which is an important snapshot of a time that many of us have lived through, and would hopefully never have to again.
Ben Macnair (1st January 2024)