Times Literary Supplement

HASTINGS AND HAESTINGAS

Finding belonging through the footnotes of British history

by  Oonagh Devitt Tremblay, TLS Review, 8 Sept 2024

Chinese-British novelist Xiaolu Guo chooses East Sussex to explore themes of migration and memory…
Virginia Woolf would be proud.

By Catherine Taylor, July 17 2024

“The past is a foreign country”, writes the Chinese-British film-maker and writer Xiaolu Guo. “This is true for me. But the past of Hastings and Anglo-Saxon history is doubly foreign.” My Battle of Hastings – the third and final instalment in the author’s triptych of memoirs, following Once Upon a Time in the East (2017) and Radical: A life of my own (2023) – charts a year in the author’s life. After the death of her parents, Guo receives an inheritance and sets out in search of a place that she can afford, and where she can “find a room just to write and think by myself” – away from London, where she has been living with her partner and daughter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the “very few books” she keeps in the flat include two of Virginia Woolf’s novels.
Her account becomes a meditation not only on how history has shaped Hastings, but also on what it means to locate oneself within history. A preface describes the “mass killing” that occurred during the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and the book is then split into four sections (each subdivided into easily digestible short chapters), one for each season. Guo is intent on learning about her new home and does so by exploring the area on foot and reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. “Perhaps by reading the footnotes of British history,” she writes, “I might be able to enter the Western world.”
Guo also interweaves large-scale events such as the war in Ukraine, the tribulations of British politics and climate change with her quotidian efforts to write, combat the damp in her flat and be a mother. (“I have to sometimes live alone and this aloneness is something I have to protect and pursue, even if at the same time I suffer the disapproving gaze of other mothers.”) But the book is very much preoccupied with her efforts to understand the city: “if I live in Hastings long enough, I will internalise this history, physically and intellectually”. Guo learns that Hastings was originally “the name of a tribe that lived in south-east England from the fourth or fifth century”. (“Of course at that time, the concept of ‘England’ didn’t exist yet.”) As she learns about the history of the battle and its aftermath, she feels an affinity with the “new generation” of children who grew up in England afterwards and spoke a hybrid of French and Engsh. "We are the bastard of language - the Languages of conqueror and conquered”.

In the final chapter, by now one of the local, Guo is walking home along the beach, thinking about the night ahead. *I will plunge into my bed. I will sleep. Just like all other people in Hastings. All the Haestingas, ancient and modern.’

My Battle of Hastings: Chronicle of A Year By the Sea
by Xiaolu Guo
published by Chatto & Windus, August 2024, 208 pages

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