HENRY HENRY

The complex life of an affluent young man.

There are a few things you’ll notice early on in Bratton’s novel, beginning with the fact that its protagonist goes by Hal and that he’s the “son and heir” of a wealthy titled man named Henry. By the time you get to Hal’s sporadic liaisons with an aging actor named Jack Falstaff, you’ll have a better sense of the Henry IV of it all. But there’s more here than an updating of a classic literary work. Set in the years just before the Brexit vote, the novel follows Hal as he traverses London and consumes various drugs—especially booze and cocaine. There’s a world-weary tone to the narration, including one memorable taxonomy of vomit and other evocative passages: “His own stink hovered about him: skunky weed, spilt Pimm’s and gin, cigarettes smoked in a flat that had had a lot of cigarettes smoked in it before, the vile mix of sweat and deodorant that had congealed under his armpits and was soaking through his pale blue Oxford shirt.” Hal begins a relationship with a fellow child of privilege, Henry Percy (at one point, Bratton describes Percy’s kissing as akin to “an anteater probing into a promising mound of dirt”). Hal also learns of his father’s impending marriage, which fuels much of what comes next. An encounter between father and son early in the novel suggests something is very wrong; gradually, Bratton reveals the extent of Henry’s abuse of his son—which casts both Hal’s own self-abnegating behavior and Henry’s devout Catholicism in a new light. At times witty and at others harrowing, Bratton’s book memorably explores the unexpected depths of its protagonist.

This novel revisits classic literature but never feels beholden to it.