The author employs his pitch-perfect repertoire of satirical skills in his first book for five years – a novella about the residents of an upmarket care home during the pandemicAlan Bennett, now 90, hasn’t published anything original in book form for five years. In the meantime – the Covid years and the Johnson years and the Truss month – readers have had to be content with the peerless annual diaries he writes for the London Review of Books, yearly proof that his special ear for English comedy and sudden pathos is undimmed. This novella is in part his reflection on those years, set inevitably in a care home, the unlikely frontline of national crisis during the pandemic.Bennett, of course, knows his way around those institutional corridors. He inhabited them in perhaps the most memorable episode of his Talking Heads series, Thora Hird’s Waiting for the Telegram. That episode was not remade when Nicholas Hytner recast the whole series during lockdown, in part because social distancing prevented it, and in part because its sentiment might have been too much for the nation to bear. The gap of a couple of years, however, allows Bennett to frame that period with more imaginative certainty. Continue reading...