User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
A dark, horrible, and powerful novella.Ghost Wall tells the tale of Silvie and her family, who attempt to live like Iron Age Britons in the North of England. Silvie's father is an angry and dissatisfied bus driver whose obsession with Iron Age tools and rituals leads him to force his family into isolation. Out in the countryside of Northumberland, they hunt for rabbits and gather roots. But, of course, it all has a sinister twist.
The harrowing prologue drew me into this book, but the mostly quiet pastoral story that follows belies how dark and deep the themes of this novel truly are. Still, it surprises me that so many see this as simply a feminist tale about abuse and downtrodden wives. The domestic abuse is only part of what this book tells us, and it is only the very surface level of the story.
What Ghost Wall is really about is identity and misinformed ideas of racial purity. In a time of Brexit, this is a smart and subtle evisceration of "taking our country back"; of going back to some time of pure Britishness. A laughable notion. As is revealed through the conversations and the digging into the past in this novella: there has never been such a thing.
Moss's criticism here does not seem to be of men who abuse their wives and children, but of people who revere the past. People who look to racial purity, our ancestors, gender roles, and building (ghost) walls as ideal examples of how to live. She compares modern humans to the Ancients, and neither of us come out looking too good.
The only downside is that the ending was a little weak for me.
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Rating: really liked it
Ghost Wall is a very short novel, but sharp and harrowing, packing a powerful punch as things that are already tense and disturbing spiral down even more, with rising unease and coiling dread and foreboding tension on every page.
“Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, we or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.”
A wall can be a powerful message — keep out, the place is ours by birthright and not yours. But a ghost wall - adorned with ancestral skulls - did not help the Ancient Britons keep the enemy out; the Romans still came. And now, in the early 1990s, a small group of “experimental archaeologists” spends a few weeks reenacting the ways of life of those Iron Age Britons. A professor, three undergrads, and an amateur history enthusiast (and an abusive, violent and controlling man) with his long-suffering defeated wife and teenage daughter Silvie - two women forced to be there because of his wishes. The students are there for a bit of fun, but for Silvie’s father this is very important, a way to indulge his nationalistically fervent reverence for times past and the nativist obsession with “original Britishness”.
And every obsession comes with a price, usually paid by someone else, someone weaker who can be hurt freely. “He wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night.”
This book is packed with so much in such a short space. The preponderance of cruelty. Emotional and physical scars of domestic abuse. A desire for identity at all costs. Nativism and xenophobia under the guise of fascination with one’s ancestry and roots. Longing for a mythical place that has never existed — but where you can be at home with your casual violence and ethnic superiority. The clashes between ideologies, classes and genders. Building walls to mark what yours, to make others - those different from you - stay out.
“Right, said Pete, you mean he likes the idea that there’s some original Britishness somewhere, that if he goes back far enough he’ll find someone who wasn’t a foreigner.”
———
“The Wall was only a ditch, that first day, but at least it was a Roman ditch, a physical manifestation of Ancient British resistance still marked on the land, and you could see Dad drawing strength from it.”
We see the idealization and veneration of the past and justification of the horrible things there in the name of the “natural order” of things. Resentment. Brutality. Violence. Anger and disappointment with your life that leads one down cruel paths of enforcing one’s masculinity by knocking others down, literally. The tenacious hold that the allure of the “stronger” lording it over the “weaker” holds regardless of the millennium you live in. The need for unquestioned control over others through instilling fear. The willingness to sacrifice someone else, a weaker one, one in your power.
“I did not know what my father thought I might want to do, but he devoted considerable attention to making sure I couldn’t do it.”
————
“If he had any sense, the bruises would come up in places where the rest of us didn’t have to see them.”
This book is full of palpably sinister atmosphere, with sense of threat escalating from subtle to not so subtle rather quickly. From the past there come the disturbing accounts of bog people who may have been victims of brutal ancient sacrifices - by the loved ones, possibly. And the present-day threat is coming from a violent and obsessive man who loves the idea of unquestioned obedience and doling out punishment while looking to the past for validation of the present. After all, as one of the characters notes,
“[…] One of the things you learn in my line of work is that there’s no steady increase in rationalism over the centuries, it’s a mistake to think that they had primitive minds and we don’t.” And awfulness and evil can be contagious, in a mob mentality way.
(I must admit, my SFF-loving self expected a careen into sinister unreality here — but taking all that happens into consideration, maybe I was not that far off after all. Horror does not need to be imaginary.)
“But now you’re here, I said, you’re not—well, you’re not exactly taking it seriously, are you? Well, she said, I’m joining in, I’m picking plums, I gathered mussels, I helped your mum wash tunics in the stream, I just think a lot of it’s boys playing in the woods. Your dad and Jim, have you noticed, they’re not much interested in the foraging and cooking, they just want to kill things and talk about fighting, why would I take it seriously? Because they are in charge, I thought, because there will be consequences if you don’t. I didn’t see how she could not know that.”
The passage above is a good example of the writing in this book - a flow of consciousness skipping dialogue tags and conventional chapters, atmospheric in allowing nature to become a character in itself — and yet very easy to follow. And it works so well for characterization and tension building, as by the end I not only felt the worsening unease but actually more and more of the visceral fear of Silvie’s father.
It’s a dreamy narration, but of the deliberately suffocating kind. “She looked at me. I looked away. He hits you, she said, your dad. He’s been hitting you here. You’re scared of him. No, I said, no, I’m not, of course I’m not, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I stopped. Maybe you’re jealous because your dad left you, I thought, because he doesn’t love you, because he doesn’t care enough to teach you a lesson. Haven’t you been listening, people don’t bother to hurt what they don’t love. To sacrifice it.”
The only issue I ran into, however, was
the strange abruptness of the ending where you’d think a few more pages would do the trick. A bit more of time for resolution would have allowed it to breathe a bit more and create more impact in its climax. I wish Moss had given the denouement the space it deserved — but even in its strangely abrupt way it still was a surreally tense gut punch, frighteningly believable after what we’ve been shown until that point.
4 stars. Not perfect but memorable and impactful jolt of a book.————
Buddy read with Stephen.——————
Also posted on my blog.
Rating: really liked it
My first read by this author, but it certainly won't be the last. I'm not sure I can even adequately explain why. It takes place in Northumberland, an archeological expedition, trying to imitate those that lived during the Iron Age. Silvie is seventeen, her father a bus driver with a obsessive interest in ancient Britain, and a mother who is somewhat of a doormat. Joining them on the professional end is a Professor with three of his students, including Molly who treats this experiment as more of a lark. Silvies father is an abusive man, who beats his wife and daughter for minor transgressions, instilling fear as a means of control. Needless to say, I despised him. Molly, with her modern ways, will show Silvie a different way of living, and awakens her to new possibilities. The site they are in was the place where an actual bog girl was found, sacrificed by her fellow community members. This fascinates Silvies father greatly.
There are mesnings here, and contrasts, some because I don't live in Britain that I didn't get. The history they are living now has an underlying meaning, the ghost wall they build symbolizing the Berlin Wall contrasting with the barriers Molly tries to remove around Silvie, or so I think. The thing is, this is another book short on pages but chock full of symbolism, intriguing. In fact I found her writing to be excellent, and this story to contain fascinating looks at history past and present, combined with a family strory, a young girls awakening, and at the very last a thriller.
I loved the end, though I was holding my breath hoping it wouldn't go where I thought it was. Where it went in the end, made complete sense, fit the story perfectly. So now I'm searching out this authors previous works to see if I find them just as intriguing.
ARC from Edelweiss.
Rating: really liked it
In a nutshell, I like my feminism a lot more nuanced than this.
A short novel about a family who go into the wilds to recreate as best as possible the conditions of an iron age settlement. There's a lot of (good) descriptive nature writing to pad out this very uneventful tale which always felt to me like a short story artificially fattened up.
Although set in the 1990s it felt more like the 1950s to me with a father who takes his belt to his teenage daughter for the most meagre of transgressions and a mother who is listlessly and slavishly submissive to the small-minded tyranny of her husband. Three of the four males in this novel are abhorrent, the other is irrelevant. The author's opinion of men comes across as the female equivalent of misogyny. For me, her hostility was way over the top. I wanted to blow a raspberry at the message that not much has changed since the Iron age with regards to the role of women in society.
Rating: really liked it
The line between past and present blurs in this brief narrative about seventeen-year-old Silvie and her family engaged in an archeological re-enactment of life in the Iron Age.
Ghost Wall has been described as slim or spare, as mere bones, the charred remains of a book glittering in the ashes. All fitting descriptions for this novella, but here's another take on it:
Ghost Wall is a tense short story bloated with filler.
The strength of this narrative is Moss' portrayal of domestic abuse, of the beatings inflicted in secret; never mentioned, always feared, ever and anon a threat to Silvie and her mother. Everything from the justifications and subtle, unyielding tension, to the hiding of bruises and the sense that Silvie is a prisoner rings with truth. And Moss' lyrical descriptions of nature provide a striking backdrop - beauty and innocence marred by the brooding colors of violence and fear.
There's a lot of potential here, a larger story simmering beneath the surface, but
Ghost Wall promises much more than it delivers. Much like fellow nominee, My Sister, the Serial Killer, this is a book to check out from the library, carefully navigate in one afternoon, and then return for the enlightenment of another.
Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.
Rating: really liked it
I've read so many fantastic short novels and novellas this year (On Chesil Beach, Convenience Store Woman, Tin Man) that I'm not sure why I insist on underestimating what can be accomplished in such a short page count. But the fact of the matter is, I picked up Ghost Wall without terribly high expectations, despite the fact that I'd been eager to read Sarah Moss for a while now. More fool me - this book blew me away.
It follows Silvie, a teenager from northern England whose family joins an anthropology course on an excursion to Northumberland, living for a few weeks as Iron Age Britons once did. From the very start, tensions arise between Silvie's survivalist father who idealizes ancient Britain, driven by nationalism and a yearning to belong to a society where he would be accepted, and the less stringent students who are only participating in the course for college credit. And as the line between reality and play-acting begins to blur, the constant threat of her father's violence draws ever nearer to Silvie, leading to a harrowing climax.
Not a word is out of place in this novel; Sarah Moss knows how to command language to navigate the themes of imperialism, violence, class, and gender roles that are all central to this narrative. Tension builds with unerring precision in just about every facet of this story; between the individual and their environment, between modern and primitive life, between Silvie's father and the rest of the group, and between Silvie and Molly, an older girl raised with feminist values who Silvie is drawn to, despite feeling that Molly is overly dismissive of Silvie's own rural upbringing.
I'm not sure what else to say, other than: read this book. Ghost Wall is subtle and shocking and absolutely masterful.
Thank you to Netgalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Sarah Moss for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
Eerie and atmospheric,
Ghost Wall brings to the surface a teenager's repressed resentment toward her patriarchal father. The novella follows seventeen-year-old Silvie as she and her conservative parents attend a campsite in northern England, alongside the students and professor of an experiential anthropology course, where the group pretends to live as Iron Age Britons. The soft-spoken teen's problems multiply when her already-abusive father begins to take too seriously the camp's Iron Age playacting, and starts to beat Silvie and her mother. As the story lurches to a terrifying ending, Silvie struggles not only with placating her father but also reigning in her desire for Molly, the course's sole female member. Silvie lacks the vocabulary or self-knowledge to ever name her attraction toward Molly, whom the teen admires as much for her beauty and wealth as her boldness and intelligence. Full of plain but moving descriptions of nature, the short novel convincingly renders the interiority of a young working-class woman prone to disassociation and denial, even if it moves too quickly to fully develop all of the many themes it takes on.
Rating: really liked it
Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019 What an atmospheric, haunting, and ultimately political read! Sarah Moss writes about teenage Silvie, whose father is obsessed with ancient British history, because he (incorrectly) envisions it as a time of racial purity, strong borders, and dominance as well as (correctly) male authority. He physically and emotionally abuses both Silvie and her passive and fearful mother, thus wielding a power he is unable to exercise in his job as a bus driver. When the family, who hails from the North of England, joins a group of university students and their professor from the South in a re-enactment of the Iron Age in Northumbria, the mentalities of the self-assured and fun-loving students clash with the grim seriousness of Silvie's choleric father, and while Silvie catches a glimpse into another world, things are slowly escalating...
It is wonderful how Moss describes the landscape and the sensations, both beautiful and terrible, people feel when they connect with or confront nature. Silvie's perspective and the way her father's abuse has shaped her worldview are utterly convincing, and the pacing is just perfect - what might happen slowly builds up, and when the revealing sentence finally comes, one still has to read it a couple of times because it is so shocking.
I think it is no coincidence that a book like this is written while England is slowly approaching Brexit, but although it is clearly a critique of an envisioned greatness in the good old times that have in reality never existed the way they are re-constructed in order to serve political or ideological goals, the mindset portrayed is not a purely British phenomenon. There are other places in which leaders are promising to make the country "great again" by aiming at abolishing gender equality, closing the borders and targeting minorities. Moss shows how this can result in a dynamic that helps to destroy the last moral taboos, and she wraps her message in a compelling story. The ghosts are not the spirits that are conjured in the ancient rituals, it's the people (in this story wearing loose tunics) who partake in the perversion of truth and science.
You can learn more about the book in our latest podcast episode (in German, as the translation Geisterwand is now available!).
Rating: really liked it
A brilliant little novella that can easily be read in one sitting. For a brief story with a simple plot, there is so much going on. It is set in Northumberland, in a hot summer in the early 1990s, in an Iron Age re-enactment camp. There is Professor Jim Slade and three of his students: Pete, Dan and Molly. Then there is the narrator, seventeen year old Sylvie (named after Sulevia the Northumbrian goddess of springs and pools) and her mother and father (Bill). Bill is a bus driver who is obsessed with history and spends all of his spare time researching the past, especially the Iron Age. He is also a violent bully and personifies the phrase coercive control. He beats his wife and daughter and feels that is entirely appropriate. History seems to show him that women should know their place. The title comes from the ghost walls built in the Iron Age; wooden with skulls on the top. Another central theme is a girl found in a bog who had been sacrificed by her community, hands and feet tied with a rope round her neck.
There are numerous themes here. Domestic abuse is obviously one of them and this illustrates that abuse isn’t a modern phenomenon. Bill is also seeking an “England” which never existed, a people who were purely British and who were fighting off alien invaders: shades of Brexit of course, the ghost wall being symbolic of attitudes to and fear of outsiders. Ironic, that as the Berlin Wall has just fallen, there is a symbolic reconstruction here. There is a growing tension between Sylvie and her father, she is seventeen and will soon be out of his control and he doesn’t want this.
The writing is excellent, especially in relation to the landscape and the heat and there are interesting descriptions of foraging and living off the land:
“I saw a bog myrtle bush leaning over the water downstream, pewter leaved, and picked my way towards it, rubbed a leaf between my fingers and inhaled the scent of eucalyptus and sandalwood. I squatted for a little while on the bank and listened to the sounds of the night, no birds now but the stream hurrying over stones it had worn to roundness, small lives rustling somewhere within reach, a distant owl and a nearer response.”
Of course the students soon discover the location of the local Spar shop. The naming of Sylvie assumes more importance and the plot builds towards a possibly brutal climax. Along the way Sylvie and Molly have built a bond which becomes significant.
This is a perceptive and telling reflection on our current times (Moss started writing it just after the Brexit vote). It shows just what “us and them” divisions really lead to.
Rating: really liked it
Sarah Moss is one of those authors I have wanted to get to for what feels like ages because I had this feeling that I would adore her work. But sometimes that feeling of a potential favourite author makes me too anxious to actually pick up a book (this is irrational, I know), so I finally jumped at the chance to read and review her newest novel, because it sounds brilliant and it is quite short (I love short books). And I still think that Sarah Moss might be a potential favourite author, even if this book did not quite blow me away.
This book is set over a period of a couple of days, days Silvie and her family are spending in a experimental archeological setting, together with a professor and a few of his students. While the students can sleep in tents, Silvie’s controlling and obsessive father forces his family to sleep in what he deems “authentic” huts. Silvie latches onto the sole female student, while trying not to make her father angry (and obviously failing, because he always finds something to be angry about). Moss uses this setting to showcast a variety of awful things: abuse and dysfunctional family dynamics, misogyny and sexism, classism and racism. She does so adeptly and impressively, but it does make for a rather grim reading experience.
The setting and the atmosphere are the biggest strength of this book. Told in long, run-on sentences (a style I particularly enjoy), Sarah Moss plays with the limited variation of their everyday life. The atmosphere becomes ever more oppressive and instilled with a sense of foreboding that made me very scared for Silvie. Moss is in perfect command of her language in a way that made me savour the words and excited for more of her books.
In the end, this book is more a collection of clever observations and vivid scenes than a cohesive whole – it is extremely well-done but did not always work for me. It felt longer than its less than 200 pages because spending time in Silvie’s life is suffocating and repetitive, and while I know that this was on purpose and done exceedingly well, I did not always enjoy my reading experience.
I received an arc of this book courtesy of NetGalley and Granta in exchange for an honest review.
You can find this review and other thoughts on books on my blog.
Rating: really liked it
Well written, atmospheric setting, loved the main character (17-year-old-Silvie) but the other characters, men & women, but the men especially, were such cardboard cliché's. And the story: just nope. The Lord-of-the-Flies-theme is so overused and predictable and the ending was cheesy and felt like the author said: "Well, I don't know, what do do with it all maybe I'll just stop here."
1.5*
Rating: really liked it
Full review here
If there was a contest of writing, that will require telling a story using the least amount of words, this book would win it this year.
A borderline novella, Ghost Wall is a powerful story that could easily be read in one sitting.
I loved the idea behind this novel. The sacrificed bog girls, whose remains found, as characters they are quiet and unknown, as if they never existed but the proof of them being very much alive is there, in contrast with today's abused women in hands of bad-seed men.
Silvie, short for Sulevia, a Celtic goddess, is living a hard life with her "almost not there" mother and abusive father. This father of Silvie's is a terror. He crushes both the mum and daughter both physically and psychologically.
The family is involved in an expedition-like setting, in Northumberland , vast moors, where there is a professor and some students investigating the lives of ancient Britons by replicating the same style of living.
Silvie's father, Bill, is helping the professor who is seemingly closing an eye on the ways Bill manipulates and uses his family. Bill is obsessed with 'ancient times' and mimicking the same style of living.
It is not a long story, and I don't want to go on talking about the plot. The story is very powerful and dense. There were bits turned my stomach, and other bits where I felt ashamed/stressed reading on Silvie's behalf. It is a dark and depressing novel, but very well put together.
Two things I didn't like about this novel,
1- The narration style. I am not sure if someone went out and about this year to young writers, and recommended them to write in a dreamy, first-person voice with long sentences that's shy to include punctuation to get long listed to awards? Why the sudden explosion of this style of writing? I am not a fan.
2- The ending. It felt a bit hasty. The start was intriguing, but find the ending the weakest point of the book.
Don't get me wrong, this was a really good book. When a book is good, you can't help thinking it could have been better. 4 stars and will definitely be reading Moss again.
Rating: really liked it
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION.
Silvie is the seventeen-year-old protagonist of this novel. Silvie’s mother works as a cashier, while her father drives a bus. Her father however thinks of himself as an historian and has a passion for England’s History, particularly the Iron age and how the people survived and lived back in this period. It is this passion which sees Silvie and her family invited along to a camping expedition to Northumberland by Professor Slade. Professor Slade takes a group of students out into the wild to live and survive as the ancient Britons did back in the Iron age as a part of his course. Things seem normal at first but as time goes on, we see the father’s true nature start to emerge. Silvie’s father’s views on life and women are as draconian as the lifestyle of the ancient Britons they are copying. Not only that, we find he has a violent streak, that he enters when he “punishes” his wife and daughter for anything he deems as punishable. I tend to use the word palpable too much, but it describes Silvie’s fear perfectly. You can feel how terrified she is of making some mistake which will result in her or her mother being beaten. The tension builds slowly for such a short novel and leads to a climactic ending. Moss’s writing is beautiful and very descriptive. I have never been anywhere near the bogs and marshlands she describes but after reading her writing I feel like I have. A wonderful, short, powerful book. 4 stars.
Rating: really liked it
This is the kind of 3-star rating that means 5 stars for some things, and 2 stars for others.
Ghost Wall is brilliant in some ways - but its political implications are not fully coherent, and there are details that don't ring true if you're familiar with the setting and subject.
Historical re-enactment and retro living doesn’t get a great press in fiction. (See for example, Todd Wodicka’s All Shall Be Well", Valentine in Nicola Barker’s The Yips, or more tenuously,
Confederacy of Dunces) Perhaps the authors who like the idea are writing historical fiction or history, instead of contemporary novels about efforts to live in historical ways, meaning those which are published hijack the subject as comment on politics and personalities.
With this being Iron Age re-enactment, and set in the 1990s, it’s possible Moss was inspired by the 2001 BBC reality /re-enactment show Surviving the Iron Age. A team of volunteers, some of them the adult children of participants from a similar 1978 series Living in the Past, tried to re-enact Iron Age life, argued and created a lot of drama, albeit not as lurid as this book. (With hindsight, it shows that this sort of thing may be best left to professionals such as Ruth Goodman and Peter Ginn. Incidentally, I would love to hear what Goodman's daughter - who grew up in a re-enactor family, clamoured to learn historical skills from her parents, and now works as a costume designer and textile historian - thought of
Ghost Wall.)
What’s great about the book:- The descriptions of landscape, interaction with it, and of bodily sensation are vivid and visceral and I found every one worth lingering over. (This was the full-strength, fresh-pressed stuff, whereas Daisy Johnson’s Booker shortlisted Everything Under, which I read straight afterwards, was like dilute from concentrate.) Sarah Moss captures and communicates exactly what it feels like for her narrator standing in a stream, or wearing a coarse fabric, or hundreds of other similar physical feelings.
- This narrative understands brilliantly what it’s like being a strong-minded teenager living with a problematic and equally strong-minded parent. (Or perhaps more precisely, what it was like before, but not very long before, the internet arrived in homes and reduced isolation.) There's a great evocation of the way a lot of stuff seems so normal experientially, whilst you also know it's not for everyone; Silvie usually narrates her father's rages with an underlying half-stoic tone of “oh, this shit again” rather than with the pumped-up horror some writers bring to similar material. I love the way Silvie keeps thinking about when she’ll leave home: I’ve always described it as years of holding your breath, but as Silvie shows, you’re also doing a lot of thinking and learning and storing things up during that time, and it’s really a lot more than waiting. I never had to put up with physical punishment after primary school age, or being hit with implements, but the way that Silvie details events that lead up to the beating (which doesn't even happen until 40% into the book), then almost skims over the moment itself without going as far as dissociation, rang very true from what I remember as a younger child.
- Moss understands the sorts of details that historians and re-enactors care about. I’ve always wanted to do re-enactment, but have never done it for health reasons. First I ruled myself out on accuracy grounds (I see now that nice people who have less hardcore-accurate attitudes than my own would have been fine with my participation, with a couple of adjustments and allowances, if I’d ever actually asked) and then later, with poorer health, I just couldn’t have anyway. I’ve thought before that if I’d been healthier and had a child I would have taken them along to do re-enactment and survival stuff. In the first third or so of the book, every detail and dashed expectation that winds up Bill, Silvie’s dad, for historical or environmental reasons, is something that would inwardly annoy me in this scenario - except that I’d have started out knowing I had to accept these sorts of preferences from a kid, even if I was secretly disappointed they didn’t want to stick to the level of detail I did.
(It's difficult to separate positive from negative neatly by topic here, and there were a handful of details about the re-enactment that seemed off the mark: for instance it didn’t make sense to me that they hadn’t tried the recipes out at home, even if that would have been with a modern cooker. There is absolutely no mention of Silvie’s grandparents or any other antecedents and family origins. In portraying the claustrophobia of an abusive family in another context, this would have only added to the atmosphere of isolation, but for a man so steeped in, or obsessed by, history, it was just peculiar that Bill never referred to his immediate ancestry. This was one of a number of points which seemed so odd to omit that I wondered if swathes had been cut out of the book after a much longer early draft.)
- It made me reconsider teenage favourite
The Secret History (which was incidentally, first published in 1992, a couple of years after
Ghost Wall is set).
Warning: spoilers for The Secret History follow. People, even nice people, getting carried away in atavistic, ectastic states. I think a lot of us
Secret History fans back then (at least not the ones I made friends with in my twenties) didn’t mind very much that it was Bunny they killed; we didn’t really like him either. If it had to be one of them, it should have been him. (Although it would have been better to just, y’know, stop speaking to him as soon as they could after college.) It was like we were bystanders, part of their crew. But here, it’s the sympathetic narrator who’s on the receiving end, not a distant and sometimes obnoxious rich loudmouth – she's likeable and strong in certain ways, but also victimised and vulnerable.
- Silvie’s tentative attraction to another girl was wonderfully written: at that time, and being from a strict home, even at 17,
just looking felt far more daring and deliberate than might be imagined in many parts of the UK in 2018. Moss shows how it was both very subtle and not.
On the other hand:- Yes there was a brief heatwave in summer 1990, but overall this is
not convincing weather for the Hadrian's Wall area and the Northumberland coast back then. Where's the relentless breeze whipping hair in your face and meaning outside, even in summer, rarely feels warmer than sitting in a draught under a meagre electric bar heater? I suspect Moss is basing weather on recent visits, and the weather is warmer now all over Britain than it was 25-30 years ago.
- I felt that details of the time in Britain c.1990 were about 50% beautifully observed, and 50% questionable, leading me to make dozens of notes about these things which it would be excessive to list in full here. (Moss is a few years older than I am, probably a contemporary of Silvie, so I would have expected her to get these things right.) A few examples: lovely to remember calling hairbands bobbles (scrunchies would have been too obtrusively modern to wear in the re-enactment setting) Good call mentioning cities in Eastern Europe which were newly, excitingly open for inter-railing, and how the fall of the Berlin Wall created a buzz everywhere. Very much on point to have the university students so squeamish about butchering rabbits and clueless about foraging: ten years or so later and they'd have likely been wanting to prove themselves, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall style. However, some of the phrases and ideas used about feminism and domestic abuse are very, very social media in the 2010s. And I think it's unlikely there would have been such loaded insinuation by twenty-year-olds about the idea of a 'proper British name' at that time: that's mid-to-late 2010s concern about the rise of the far right talking. I think in the 90s it would have just been a more neutral response like "so as far back as you can go then?" Silvie is somewhat sheltered from average teenage life by her overbearing father, but she goes to a mainstream state school in Lancashire: it's pretty much impossible she wouldn't know what 'the North' means in England and that Lancs is part of it, even if to Geordies Lancs is, jocularly, the Midlands.
- All this led me to wonder if Moss had researched which ideas were current in Iron Age archaeology in 1990. (The only contradiction I could see was that back then, nearly all the bog bodies on the news and in documentaries seemed to be male, whereas Silvie, via her father, perceives them as mostly female. Perhaps academic books gave a different impression, but given the attention that the media tends to pay to female murder victims, I remained sceptical.) I was frustrated to think that I might be reading anachronistic ideas about archaeology when I didn't know this era well enough to spot them. So another review of
Ghost Wall which I'd love to read is by someone who studied Iron Age archaeology at least 30 years ago, and has kept up with the field to some extent since..
- On the subject of one particular character, I found it impossible to believe that a student with poor results like Molly, who wasn’t enthusiastic about re-enactment, and went off to get processed food from the shop every chance she got, would have got a place on a specialised very small group trip like this. An opportunity like this would be very much in demand and would go to students who would obviously make the most of it. [November: A comment below reminded me that these were undergraduates, who aren't always that serious about their subjects, so not actually that implausible. Thank you!] She was one of several elements which felt shoehorned in for political and plot purposes. A female student who was enthusiastic about re-enactment, and also saw that Bill was abusive, would have been fairer to re-enactment and experimental archaeology as pursuits and communities, and to real women who are leaders or free participants, and not pushovers or victims roped in by men – and a more realistic character - but she wouldn’t have carried the convenient symbolism of “modernity (and implicitly consumerism and capitalism) is better for women”.
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Ghost Wall is really a political novel about Brexit, and about a somewhat intertwined literary-world conflict about the recent British nature-writing revival and predominantly theoretical links with right-wing politics. These subjects should have been handled with considerably more nuance and care - however that would probably have been difficult to do within the confines of a short novel with a neat beginning, middle and end. If this is the result, even in the hands of an author who can produce great prose, I think these issues are better left to discursive non-fiction.
Bill is moulded into an all-round bogeyman for the contemporary British left: nationalist, racist, male chauvinist, domestic abuser, misuser of history for his own political ends. It couldn't be more obvious that he'd have voted for Brexit, though one imagines him too wiry to be called a Gammon. (His anti-Catholic bit was odd: Bill is otherwise consistent about 'the longer ago the better' in history, and besides Lancashire was historically a centre of post-Reformation Catholic recusancy. A Lancastrian with a strong sense of history would be particularly likely to see Catholicism as having a deeper link to the past than Protestantism. I felt that Moss was trying to evoke the meme of Henry VIII's Reformation as the 'first Brexit', but to the well-informed reader this runs aground, and shows another example of this project's trading of deep character plausibility for superficial political shorthand.) Bill is the only working-class male character in the novel (there's not even a mention of his father, or a friend of his), and in a symbolic book with such a small cast, he inevitably looks like he is meant to represent his entire type. Silvie (whose knowledge and skills are as good as her dad's, and better than the students a few years older than her) does stand up against small instances of largely unwitting snobbery displayed by the students and their professor, but the overall effect of the alignments in the book is to say that working class white men, even when they are well-informed, are not well-informed enough, they are prejudiced, and that as laypeople with a specialist interest in an academic field, they're still doing it wrong, not properly like actual academics do. Middle-class professionals, academics and women know better than Bill: it's exactly the kind of smug-liberal juxtaposition that contributes to the problem of political division in this country. He confirms the lazy prejudices of metropolitan middle-class people who live in socio-political bubbles; this sort of thing is not part of the solution artistically.
Ghost Wall may also subtly initiate these readers into a currently small cultural and political debate about nature-writing and politics, which may not have touched them before, especially if they haven't read Melissa Harrison's recent novel All Among the Barley - which, by being set in the 1930s, explicitly indicates the roots of this anxiety, which is currently theoretical as far as the public is concerned: in 2018 there are no significant blocs of voters, or spokespeople in national media actually espousing Nazistic
blut und boden combinations of racist far-right politics with conservation. There are evidently small numbers of people incontrovertibly like this, and who also have an interest in nature writing and folklore, as evidenced by the Twitter hashtag campaign FolkloreAgainstFascism. (A bit about that halfway through this blog post.) However, so many cultural features of the last 20-25 years can be pulled into the idea of Britain having been on a slippery slope to that, via Britpop, Bake Off, Boden, and psychogeography - as in this extract from Joe Kennedy's new book Authentocrats that it will make some people want to say despairingly, "so we aren't allowed anything nice at all?" (I guess the time has passed for the 90s Cool Britannia idea that most other countries don't equate their national flag or pride in their country's cultural output with racism so maybe Britain shouldn't either. That also lacks a bit of nuance, but there has to be something decent inbetween rabid white nationalists, and reviving the British cultural cringe for the sake of political asceticism.) Now people who have never been racist nationalists feel like they have to apologise for tastes and opinions that were not in the least questionable a while back, because a few people at the other end of the political spectrum might share a few of those tastes. (e.g. here, third paragraph after the second picture.)
As Green politics and other forms of hippy-ism are still so strongly aligned with the left in the public imagination (in Britain at least - the UK doesn't have the big right-wing homesteader tradition of the US, or the Russian or Nordic trend of far-right involvement in neopaganism) these concerns are currently mostly an argument between a few social media posters and writers and artists. (I thought I was fairly aware of debates in this area, but other than the extract from
Authentocrats I hadn't seen the articles linked in the last paragraph until a couple of days before writing this review, and afterwards I thought it seemed best to move Paul Kingsnorth further down my very long Goodreads list of favourite authors.) Today I remembered - and made a note in - a four-year-old review of mine which has aged badly because of its scepticism about a dystopian scenario, so I shouldn't be too confident in what I say here. But I feel that increasing literary energy focused on attacking a minor tendency may be a cul-de-sac that distracts from pressing and concrete issues, like how the left can appeal politically to pro-Brexit voters, common interests and tastes that may unite people in an aggressively divided country, and the increasing urgency of addressing climate change, the depletion of nature and the disgusting extent to which humans waste resources. And compared with the literary authors and Twitter posters involved in this conversation, fantasy authors who create multicultural versions of British myths, like Ben Aaronovitch and Paul Cornell have a far bigger readership. (I haven't read Cornell myself, but thanks to Alex for mentioning the bit about the Asian vampire whom supernatural forces recognise as British due to his love of tea.) They connect better than any of these discussions and insinuations with my first experience, in my teens, of getting to know someone else who was as much into all this sort of history and folklore and tweedy, crickety Englishness stuff as I was, a friend who's mixed-race; we were both only half British by heritage and more into these things than the British people our age whom we knew, and so on a gut level I never felt these subjects to be automatically exclusionary, although that is the conclusion some draw from them.
Nonetheless, I doubt too many people will let
Ghost Wall put them off re-enactment if they feel like having a go - Goodman et al are too friendly as public faces and get a far larger audience - and I hope they won't be overly worried about re-enactors they may meet socially. (The ones I've met are all lovely and some of the least judgemental and most accepting people I've had the pleasure to be friends with.)
I decided to request a free ARC of
Ghost Wall on Netgalley because I thought I'd have a lot to say about it in a review. But I didn't count on taking 5 days, rather than 5 hours, to read such a short book (I paid such close attention, and thought and noted so much that I probably could have written the entire novella out by hand in the time taken) nor on taking a month to finish the last few paragraphs of the review.
Rating: really liked it
I enjoyed this book fantastically, although finishing, it depressed me slightly. I agree wholeheartedly with several of the critical points I've seen about this book but I still appreciated it, and read with graceless haste, four stars? Well maybe 3.499997, or possibly 3.877765, somewhere in that ballpark for me.
It reminded me strongly of the completely different, The Tidal Zone, in that book the view point character is the paterfamilias observing his teenaged daughter in her health crisis, aware on the of the strains on the whole family, in his book the teenaged daughter observes her father in relation to the world. The father is very controlling, clamping down, enforcing & isolated - the daughter is surprised late in the book by his friendly behaviour towards another man thinking that such gestures of friendship were not in his vocabulary. The daughter is correspondingly repressed to the extent that a fair chunk of the book is her recording what she doesn't say to people. The father's relationship with the daughter is visually manifested in the penultimate scene of the story (view spoiler)
[ must restrain myself from giving spoilers (hide spoiler)].
I did read the book in part as a Brexit parable, but then Brexit is currently an inescapable theme, the story though is set in the recent past when the idea of a referendum in Britain on EU membership was the cranky obsession of a few peculiar wealthy people not all of whom lived in France, ie the mid 1990s. In a broader and less immediately topic sense it is about the conflict between people seeking safety in tight closed visions of idealised communities or an ideal past and those seeking to escape the confines of such thinking. From the dramatic opening we are warned that this is a process that is unlikely to end comfortably. The ideal past is a fantasy, one that tastes of 1984:
Who controls the past, controls the future, and who controls the present, controls the past and the whole book is about power struggles and those who find themselves caught up inside them.
Ostensibly the book concerns a summer iron age re-enactment camp in Northumbria, in practise one sees this is more about boys playing in the woods at a pick and mix pre-historic fantasy (view spoiler)
[ nothing about what they are doing looks consistently true to any time period in particular, they appear to freely blend the mesolithic into the late iron age nor do they have any serious programme in mind to explore the past through experiment (hide spoiler)]. With the girls on hand to cook and tidy up - because obviously well swept camp sites and regular meals were a typical feature of prehistoric British life. Boys playing in the woods is not right because the game does not seem to be playful, more one about dominance and control which requires somebody to be dominated and controlled. it is plainly not going to end well.
This atmospheric and engaging novella worked particularly well for me because the controlling father reminded me of an ex-uncle of mine with similar political attitudes though he was not so liberal as the book father as to allow his wife to work after marriage. I suppose I recognised something in how other people become complicit to such abusive relationships, and how one knows (or could infer) and does not know at the same time what is happening behind closed doors and Moss suggested that very well and economically.
A grand piece of writing I felt, its brief 150 odd pages in large print packed full of bog bodies, ghosts and the walls that some seek to build in search of control out of, I imagine, a feeling of inadequacy. Moss achieved brilliant effects on me, catching at me with sharp sentences.
