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King of the Badgers

King of the Badgers is a novel about a small Devon village over a time period of a year. Like a previous novel, The Northern Clemency, it examines the state of England. The research questions were as follows: 1 To discover what necessity there is to solve a “kidnapping” plot in a novel, and how quite unconnected strands of plot can combine to form a whole. 2 To establish a naturalistic equivalent to the omniscient narrator of realist fiction. 3 To discover what proportion of characters can belong to a sexual minority before they are experienced by the reader as dominant. 4 to establish the current limits of propriety in sexual explicitness in a novel. 5 To explore ways in which a cast of nearly a hundred in a small village can be distinguished through technique and character establishment. The novel was based on a real-life kidnapping case, researched through interviews and the reading of contemporary newspaper coverage. Other research procedures included a good deal of reading in nineteenth-century “village” novels around Cranford and Mary Russell Mitford. The question of the line of sexual explicitness, which the novel draws as falling between an explicit account of a gay orgy and an allusive account of the sexual abuse visited on a kidnapping victim, gave rise to an interesting print debate after publication in The Spectator between me and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne.