This is the kind of 3-star rating that means 5 stars for some things, and 2 stars for others. <i>Ghost Wall</i> 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 <a href=" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1350704.All_Shall_Be_Well_And_All_Shall_Be_Well_And_All_Manner_of_Things_Shall_Be_Well">All Shall Be Well"</a>, Valentine in Nicola Barker’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13395627-the-yips">The Yips</a>, or more tenuously, <i> Confederacy of Dunces</i>) 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 <a href=" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1118271.Surviving_The_Iron_Age">Surviving the Iron Age</a>. A team of volunteers, some of them the adult children of participants from a similar 1978 series <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_in_the_Past_%28TV_series%29">Living in the Past</a>, 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 <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2976506.Ruth_Goodman">Ruth Goodman</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/series/176413-period-farms">Peter Ginn</a>. 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 <i>Ghost Wall</i>.)

<u>What’s great about the book:</u>

- 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 <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2494203348">Everything Under</a>, 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 <i>The Secret History</i> (which was incidentally, first published in 1992, a couple of years after <i>Ghost Wall</i> is set). <b>Warning: spoilers for The Secret History follow.</b> People, even nice people, getting carried away in atavistic, ectastic states. I think a lot of us <i>Secret History</i> 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, <i>just looking</i> 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.


<u>On the other hand:</u>

- Yes there was a brief heatwave in summer 1990, but overall this is <i>not</i> 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) But I don't think nude-coloured bras were a thing until several years later, especially not in the shops in smaller towns. 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, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5805.Hugh_Fearnley_Whittingstall">Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall</a> 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. 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 <i>Ghost Wall</i> 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. 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”.

-----

<i>Ghost Wall</i> is really a political novel about Brexit, and about a somewhat intertwined lit-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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gammon_(insult)">Gammon</a>. (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 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, superior 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 isn't be part of the solution artistically.

<i>Ghost Wall</i> 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 <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36667206-all-among-the-barley">All Among the Barley</a> - 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 <i>blut und boden</i> 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 <a href="https://medium.com/@londonprmcultr/a-chill-snake-lurks-in-the-grass-d6ca1504f5f8">this blog post</a>.) 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 <a href="https://newsocialist.org.uk/sneering-english/">this extract</a> from Joe Kennedy's new book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40059443.Authentocrats_Culture__Politics_and_the_New_Seriousness">Authentocrats</a> 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. (<a href="http://thequietus.com/articles/23446-landscape-punk-nationalism-politics">e.g. here</a>, 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 <i>Authentocrats</i> 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 and the depletion of nature. And compared with the literary authors and Twitter posters involved in this conversation, fantasy authors who create multicultural versions of British myths, like <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/363130.Ben_Aaronovitch">Ben Aaronovitch</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/63341.Paul_Cornell">Paul Cornell</a> have a far bigger readership. (Thanks to Alex for mentioning the bit about the Asian vampire in Cornell whom supernatural forces recognise as British due to his love of tea.)

Nonetheless, I doubt too many people will let <i>Ghost Wall</i> 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 an ARC of <i>Ghost Wall</i> 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 spent reading) nor on taking a month to finish the last few paragraphs of the review.

Ghost Wall is an intense and masterful novel about the harrowing realities of a family affected by domestic violence and the lengths that people go to justify their behaviour; with Sarah Moss primarily focussing on the father’s use of early English notions of masculinity and gender dynamics to legitimise violent and oppressive behaviour. As the novel progresses, Ghost Wall begins to almost feel like the Stanford Prison Experiment in which the professor and, to a certain extent, the male students, are taken in by the warped ideology of Silvie’s father and how he believes males in the Iron Age would have behaved. It shows the realities of mob mentality; how people are better able to justify crueler and crueler acts if they are in midst of a group acting in the same way and the difficulty in standing against them. One character, Molly, points out at one point that their behaviour gradually descends into something that is very cult-like and honestly, I would never be able to describe it more accurately than that.
A ray of light in the growing darkness of Ghost Wall is Silvie’s strength, in the fact that she gradually begins to question the antiquated justifications for her father’s violent and cruel behaviour; to increasingly go against his wishes in small acts of resistance and defiance; and her growing feelings (romantic or otherwise) for Molly. It makes me have hope for her future and her growth beyond the short time that we get to spend with her.
All of this adds up to Ghost Wall cementing its place as one of my favourite novels of the year, and Sarah Moss being an author that I cannot wait to read more from. For such a short book, it has a truly enormous emotional weight and one that will weigh on me for a long time to come.

There's nothing more enjoyable than a Sunday afternoon on a wet day watching Time Team with a cup of tea to hand. And this book taps into that sort of dynamic as Sylvie - Sulevia - and her parents and various students set up camp in an attempt to re-create an Iron Age settlement life. Practical archaeology.


From the outset, the father is domineering and controlling and a strong sense of claustrophobia is created as Sylvie and her mother seem constantly on egg shells around him. The students from the University are more prone to the temptations of the modern world and more indulged by the Professor than Sylvie is by her father.


The novel contains elements of a range of narratives: there are mythical strands; it touches on the supernatural and horror; it is a family saga; it seems to be an analogy of religious fundamentalism. Personally, I'm not entirely sure whether it quite knew what it was trying to be - or whether it succeeded in weaving those strands together as successfully as it might had the author given it more space.

This book is masterful. I've gone and bought the print copy because I wanted to underline and annotate, and ever since reading it this summer it's lingered in my mind. How something so slim can feel so expansive and so immersive is some kind of magic. Wow.

This darkly poignant and compelling novella draws you in from the first pages and holds you to the very end.

The tale of Sylvie and her summer's experience with her family and small group of university student's opens her not only to the experience of iron age living but to the devastating climax of her time living as an iron age villager.

There are trigger warnings for violence in this book however, these are delicately handled and Sarah Moss had an almost lyrical way of writing that both draws you in to the surroundings and it's modern connection to times now past.

At times Sylvie is portrayed as just a teenager desperately seeking normality and yet at times darkly mirrors the demise of an iron age sacrifice.

This book is so far one of the best books of my year and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

This is my first book by Sarah Moss but something tells me I will reach for her work again.

Ghost Wall is a short but very well executed novel that combines the ancient rituals of the Iron Age with a contemporary setting. The novel takes place over a period of a few hot days in summer, towards the end of the 20th century. Seventeen-year-old Silvie and her parents have joined Professor Slade and a group of students on a camping expedition in rural Northumberland. At their camp, they plan to live as the ancient Britons did: hunting and foraging for food, dressing in traditional clothing and observing iron age rituals. Silvie's father Bill is an intense and abusive man: passionate about the past, he balances his day job as a bus driver with his studies at night, and fancies himself an amateur historian with excellent survival skills (hence his reason for being included in this 'experimental archaeology' project). As the week progresses, Bill's ideological views don't sit alongside with the jollity and more casual approach of the professor and his students, so tensions begin to arise and the atmosphere becomes uncomfortable.

What I really enjoyed about this book is Moss's brilliant sense of place. The story is set within a few square miles of countryside and we follow the group as they go back and forth over this territory on the hunt for food. Every detail of their path is described, so much so that we come to know it ourselves. We really get a sense, through Moss's writing, of the kind of physical contact Iron Age ancestors would have had with the land so many years before. We walk the land with these characters, we feel what they feel and witness the beauty of nature. But we also witness the darker undercurrent. With a close affinity with nature, there is often primal instincts and violence; a violence that Bill seems to advocate for. Giving himself license to practice sacrificial rituals and rule with an iron fist, if you will, he unleashes daily domestic abuse on Silvie, descriptions of which are subtle but on one occasion graphic.

While this is a very short novel - running just over 150 pages - it manages to create and build an atmosphere of extreme tension. There is a constant feeling of something being withheld, a tautness that carries us along, step by step through the plot until, finally, we land at the conclusion, exhausted but satisfied.

A modest but marvelous book, Ghost Wall affected me more than I anticipated and left me curious and in awe of its author. Sarah Moss is one to watch.

Silvie and her parents are re-enacting a period of Ancient History (the Bog People) for a few days in Northumberland along with a Professor and some of his students. Bill insists they live as close as they can be to the earlier lives whilst the Professor and pupils are alot less rigid. Silvie’s father is a brute it has to be said, who is very handy with his fists and/or belt. This book feels claustrophobic in the heat with a feeling that things aren’t right. Quite menacing really. I was very impressed with the amount of research done so that readers would get a good idea of how these people lived, the hardships they endured just to keep themselves fed, sheltered - all of this just to survive. Simply amazing!

I find myself not entirely knowing what to make of this one. I've read rave reviews of Sarah Moss and perhaps this was not the first of her books to come to, but the Netgalley Gods deemed it so, and so here we are.

More of a novella, this short book focusses on just a few days in the lives of these characters. Silvie, her oppressive father and downtrodden mother, are taking part in a re-enactment camp. They join up with a University Professor and his students to recreate the life of an Iron Age settlement. (The unorthodox nature of a member of the public and his family being randomly allowed to take part in this experiment is never fully explained to my liking - I do dislike it when I can't buy into a plot from the off)

The father, Bill, is a domineering, controlling and abusive character, both to his wife and his daughter and his cruelness to them makes for thought provoking, if depressing reading. He is a misogynist and a bully. I found it really interesting how the other characters react to him. How some can be sensitive to the abuse of others, whereas some (surprisingly, those in authority positions) willingly turn a blind eye, or assume it's 'none of their business'. The growing friendship between Sylvie and Molly lends an air of salvation to an otherwise depressing sequence of events.

A big thing that I struggled with is the narration style that Moss uses. This was obviously a conscious choice to write in this way, but I found the long rambling sentences with very little punctuation to denote who is speaking, hard to follow. It threw me out of the story on more than one occasion.

The parallels drawn between the 'Bog Girl' and Silvie are good, but for me, we needed a bit more of Bog Girl's story. It is hinted at in the prologue and then not again. I wanted Moss to return to it, but we never do. Towards the end, the menacing atmosphere does start to build, but I didn't find the whole book as atmospheric as others have. The ending has a real feel of 'The Wicker Man' about it, which I found genuinely creepy. I wanted more of that creeping sense of unease to be present through the whole book

It's fair to say that for a really short story, this does pack a lot in, but stylistically it just wasn't my cup of tea. I think it would be a great pick for a book club though, as it's a) short, b) got some really meaty themes to pick apart and discuss and c) will push people out of their comfort zones.

Ghost Wall, the sixth book by British author Sarah Moss is a short and sharp as a flint knife. The book is a coming-of-age tale that explores the power of the past to be used to inform and drive action. Along the way, Moss deeply questions the Brexit movement and gender power dynamics.
Ghost Wall opens in prehistoric times, with the death of an Ice Age woman at the hands of her tribe. Cut to almost modern day, sometime not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and teenage Sylvie has with her parents joined a university project in living experimental archaeology in the Northumbrian countryside. The aim of the project is for the family, along with the professor and his three young adult students to live as far as possible as people did in the Iron Age.
Camped in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall, an area of forests and peat bogs, they wear burlap tunics, eat gruel, foraged greens and caught rabbits and fish, and some sleep in a hut on straw (the students stay in tents). Moss’s feel for the landscape brings this experiment alive. It is not hard to picture the little encampment, the nearby creak or the Whether it is Sylvie leading the students on foraging expeditions in the forests or to the coast. Or when they take her back to civilization and along the local highway for sneaking visits to the local Spar.
Cracks start to appear in the group and as they buy into the re-enactment the group tension increases. Sylvie is caught between the students who she idolises and her strict, often violent father who uses the experiment as a justification for his intensely patriarchal views.
While set in the early 1990s, Ghost Wall feels like a post-Brexit book. In that Moss is exploring the mindset that drove people to vote to leave Europe. Sylvie’s father is looking at the Iron Age as a place of pure Britishness, corrupted over time first by the Romans and then by waves of other foreigners. With no evidence, he believes that he is connected to these early inhabitants of the Island.
Sylvie also has to deal with domestic violence. What starts off appearing as old fashioned chauvinism, emboldened by the Iron Age experiment, quickly reveals itself to be violent control. A state of affairs that Sylvie has become habituated to, accepting to a degree that if she is hit it is her fault.
he professor and his students, caught up in the experiment, are either oblivious or refuse to believe or act upon the violence in their midst. And Sylvie’s mother sets an example of meek acceptance of her fate. And over time, buying into the patriarchal interpretation of the experiment, many of the participants not only ignore the inherent violence but buy into it.
The ghost wall of the title is a woven wall of sticks, adorned with skulls. It is the construction of this wall and the related obsession of Sylvie’s father and the professor with the sacrificial practices of the Iron Age people where Moss starts to ratchet up the tension.
In Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss manages to walk that fine line between childhood innocence and adult knowledge. Sylvie understands more than she pretends to, hiding truths from herself but revealing those truths through both her actions and the actions and words of others. This is a multilayered tale where the underlying issues inform but never overwhelm the story. Making this both a violent coming of age story and a cautionary tale for those looking to the past for a steer on the future.

Stunning beginning, taut story, but an ending which didn’t quite work 3 ½ rounded up

I do like, very much, Sarah Moss’ writing. I did have some problems with this one – and I think this is because of all her books, the incandescent Bodies of Light created a benchmark which I can’t help but compare to this one.

She is assuredly a feminist writer, but is not, in the main, one who is demonising men en masse, or attempting to write all female characters as a hagiography.

However……..in this one, I was more aware of a tip into what sometimes felt like a kind of despair, dismissal of the masculine. Understandable in some ways, in the light of the widespread abuse of women which the MeToo movement has revealed.

Set in Northumbria at some time shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this follows a group of professional, training, and amateur archaeologists on a dig cum attempt at re-enactment of Iron Age life. The central characters, and where some complex issues are being played out are a young woman, Sylvie and her domineering, abusive, bullying father, Bill.

Bill has an obsession with a kind of dangerous ‘golden age’ illusion - when Britain was British, and the complexities of multiculturalism, the women’s movement, and fluidity of gender and sexual orientation either did not exist or were absolutely below the radar of access to any kind of power. It is, in part, this, which fuels his fascination with Ancient Britain. He also embodies powerful resentments about class and opportunity – Bill is not an academic. He is self taught, and has greater knowledge and skills in authentic re-enactment than the professor.

Ghost Wall, more of a tight novella than novel, has a stunning, powerful beginning, set in Neolithic times. There are gods, and the gods need propitiating. These kind of stories play out in classical texts, such as in Homer – but here, we are in a much earlier time.

The shadow of that past, real or imagined, imbues the story set in the present. Sylvie is more than a typical snarky adolescent, finding her family embarrassing and annoying – she has grown up with a tyrannical father and a submissive, bullied mother (Alison) and has been emotionally damaged. The small group of students, their professor, Bill, Alison and Sylvie become immersed in the recreation project. Some of them more than others.

In some ways, I felt that rather too much in terms of ‘about’ was being woven into this – patriarchy, sexual orientation, class, nationalism – even, inevitably the reader is likely to think about Brexit . Perhaps it is fairer to say that I felt Moss’s ability to tackle weighty themes but avoid polemic, because the themes are woven into very layered characters and a story which credibly holds them, was not quite working here. It was, particularly, an ending which felt rather rushed and not quite credible which lets it down

3 ½, raised to 4. I have to say, had this been the first Moss I had read I might well have clear 4 starred, and it is her excellence, and the expectations she raised for me, which is responsible for my disappointment

I received this as a digital review copy from the publisher.

Brilliant book! I loved all the historical detail,, the great descriptions of the natural world, the sassy and engaging main character, and, above all, the psychological complexity of the principal characters.Great portrayal of the deeply flawed and psychologically damaged father- reminding me of so many fathers in the plays of Shakespeare. One of my favourite reads this year- I definitely will recommend it to readers!

This was the first Sarah Moss I've read, it won't be the last. It was simply stunning.

Teenager Silvie goes on an experimental archaeology trip recreating Iron Age life with her parents to Northumberland, alongside a University Professor and 3 of his students. Isolated from modern day society with this small group of strangers, and her dysfunctional family relationships are laid bare in a very raw way. With such a short novel I don't want to say too much for fear of spoiling the experience for other readers, but it is remarkable how Sarah Moss looks at so many themes so deftly, we see themes of class divide, sexism, misogyny and the brutal truth of being part of a dysfunctional family, all done in such a tense, atmospheric setting. Not the easiest read due to subject matter, and I would give trigger warnings for abuse, but completely immersive and wonderful. I couldn't stop thinking about it for days after reading, and I'm sure it's one of those books that will stay with me.

Like many people, I was hugely impressed by Sarah Moss’ previous novel “The Tidal Zone” for the way its story meaningfully drew the past into the pressing concerns of its characters in the present. She uses a similar technique in her new novel “Ghost Wall” but in a much more compressed form that combines a tense story with a strong statement about issues in modern Britain. Teenage Silvie is taken on a unique archaeological trip in Northern England by her parents along with a few students and a professor. Rather than searching for artefacts they seek to recreate the feeling of living in Iron Age Britain as closely as possible. This means wearing nothing but burlap sacks, foraging for what food they can in the forest and living in primitive shelters. It also includes antiquated rituals like building a wall out of skulls and other unsavoury acts which grow increasingly alarming and bizarre. The values that Silvie’s father holds are skewed towards an outdated ideal of masculinity and gender dynamics which Silvie gradually comes to question. For such a short novel, this book builds up to a thrilling and memorable conclusion.

Since the vote for Brexit there’s been a lot of discussion about what Britain means as a country and a concept. Silvie’s father is an extreme example of someone searching for an ideal form of citizenship which retains a cultural purity without any outside or foreign influences. He’s angry about “Foreigners coming over here, telling us what to think” and longs to return to some pre-Roman Celtic tribe: “He wanted his own ancestry, wanted a lineage, a claim on something. Not people from Ireland or Rome or Germania or Syria but some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night.” Of course, such reactionary desire to inhabit some mythically primitive form of being British is exactly what stirs fear, xenophobia and isolationist thinking. Sarah Moss dramatically and poignantly shows how such inclinations are both spurious and absurd.

At the centre of the story is Silvie who was named after an ancient British goddess Sulevia. She develops a friendship (and attraction?) to student Molly who is from Southern England. She is headstrong, dismissive of the group’s blatant machoism and hilariously bunks off from gathering edible weeds and berries to buy prepacked food from the local convenient store. Molly has grown up with very different values from Silvie who feels that it’s natural that “Children’s bodies were not their own, we were all used to uncles who liked to cop a feel given half a chance and mums who showed love in smacked legs.” But Silvie also refuses to be seen as a rural working class stereotype and is wary of patronizing views about their lifestyle. It’s a tense dynamic and it raises a lot of challenging questions for the reader about the difference between cultural sensitivity and doing what’s ethically right. These questions are just as haunting as the image of Bog People performing a sacrifice in the Iron Age which prefaces this short, razor-sharp novel.

‘Ghost Wall’ is Sarah Moss’s sixth novel which tells the story of Silvie, a teenage girl spending her summer in a remote area of Northumberland taking part in an “experiential” archaeological experiment in which the participants attempt to recreate the exact living conditions of the original Iron Age occupants of the site. However, this is not a gentle comedy in the style of the BBC series ‘Detectorists’. Silvie’s father, Bill, is a bus driver and amateur historian who has obsessive ideas about the “purity” of ancient Britons and his domineering personality and prejudices begin to take over the trip led by archaeology professor Jim Slade accompanied by three of his students, Molly, Dan and Pete.

‘Ghost Wall’ is even more unsettling than Moss’s debut novel Cold Earth which also features an archaeological field trip in extreme conditions. It has been described by a reviewer for the Irish Times as a “Brexit fable” and the central theme of division is explored in many forms. The title takes its name from a structure topped with human skulls constructed as a means of psychological warfare and the story opens with the sacrificial murder of a young woman from the time when the site was occupied. Other physical walls also feature prominently with events taking place near Hadrian’s Wall and not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

There is an oppressively tense atmosphere at the site and it soon becomes clear that the family dynamics are controlled by Bill’s misogyny and cruelty towards Silvie and his wife, Alison, who spend much of their time trying to appease him. While Jim is prepared to be more flexible in terms of the accuracy of the group’s reenactment of Iron Age life, Bill is fanatical about authenticity and expects nothing less than total immersion in the experience, the consequences of which are laid bare in the terrifying conclusion. Meanwhile, Silvie is attracted to self-assured Molly and the pair make forbidden trips to a 7/11 supermarket still dressed in their Iron Age tunics in order to stock up on supplies of ice cream. However, Silvie still feels the need to defend her father when she feels that her family are being mocked by the students from more privileged backgrounds.

Overall, ‘Ghost Wall’ is an insightful state-of-the-nation novel and while it is the shortest of Moss’s novels to date at just 160 pages in length, it is also the most chilling. Many thanks to Granta for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

I picked it up with gusto and because I had read some rave reviews beforehand, I was expecting a brilliant read. Had I missed something? I did find interesting the concept of the modern girl/ancient girl, the lessons in Iron Age life. But it wasn’t for me sadly, I found I was drifting off and it lost my attention in several places. I really wanted to love it.

3.5 rounded down

In Sarah Moss's novella Ghost Wall, set in rural Northumberland, we follow a teenage girl called Silvie. Silvie's father is obsessed with the Iron Age, and takes his wife and his daughter to a camp where they spend the summer living this ancient lifestyle - foraging for food, following the rituals - isolated from modern society.

Silvie becomes acquainted with another young camper, Molly, a female archaeology student from university who is also at the camp with her professor. Where Silvie is reticent and follows her father's inane rules, Molly is wilful and plots trips to Spar to buy snacks. Where Silvie lives in fear of her father's reign of terror (he is abusive to both her and her mother), Molly fights against the sinister undercurrent that develops within the camp.

While the story is memorable and there are a number of strengths to the book - the observations on class stood out - somehow it didn't quite come together as a whole. The story gained momentum towards the end, but I finished feeling it could have been so much more.

I was drawn to this immediately by the fact it is based in the beautiful Northumberland countryside which is actually where I live, as well as the fact that i've started to really appreciate literary fiction recently. Even though it explores dark topics, I found there was a solemn calm throughout the novel which was almost eerie. Although only a novella, 'Ghost Wall' really packs an emotional punch within those short pages. Some of the many themes it explores are sexism racism and physical and mental abuse. With such challenging topics this is no easy read, and I felt uncomfortable for much of the story, which is testament to the authors talent. Told from the perspective of teenager Silvie whose father, Bill, has become obsessed with Neolithic ways of living. It soon becomes clear that this is because it allows him more scope to follow his twisted objectives.

Menacing, chilling and ominous to the end, this is a tale I know I will return to. Skilfully drawn characters add further intrerest to the story, and overall I thoroughly enjoyed this one. I will be looking out for more of her work in the future, and i'm off to purchase her other books right now. Highly recommended.

Many thanks to Granta Publications for an ARC. I was not required to post a review, and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

There are few joys in life more exciting than finding a new author that inspires you to read everything they've written. Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss presented me with that joy! It's a fascinating book full of stunning imagery -. "The beach underfoot had hardened in ridges, like walking over bones"- I loved that!. The narrative showcases the many levels and complexity of human relationships and of the inequalities in our society. There were so many themes in such a short book that I read it in one sitting and didn't want it to end! I'm off to find some more of Sarah's books!

This is a very short novella told from the perspective of a teenage girl whose father is obsessed with Neolithic ways of life. On a uni excursion to live in bronze age huts and eat like Hunter-gatherers, it becomes clear that the main reason her dad enjoys the old ways is because it gives him an excuse to be racist, sexism, and emotionally and physically abusive towards his wife and daughter. Not the most pleasant of reads, but refreshingly different and set in a completely new location to anything I've read before.

<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ghost-Wall-Sarah-Moss/dp/1783784458/">2018/49: <i>Ghost Wall</i> -- Sarah Moss</a>
<blockquote>... a ghost wall, said the Prof, sitting back on his haunches. I was just telling your dad, it’s what one of the local tribes tried as a last-ditch defence against the Romans, they made a palisade and brought out their ancestral skulls and arrayed them along the top, dead faces gazing down, it was their strongest magic. [loc. 946]</blockquote>

Silvie (short for Sulevia, Ancient British goddess of springs and pools) is a young seventeen. Her father, Bill, is a bus driver with an avid interest in archaeology: he, Silvie's mother Alison and Silvie have been invited to join Professor Slade ('call me Jim') and a trio of students (Dan, Pete and Molly) in an 'experimental archaeology' camp somewhere in Northumbria. Jim's interest is scholarly: Bill, on the other hand, would apparently like nothing more than to go back to those simpler, more honest times, free of immigrants and womens' rights and inequality. He is an emotionally and physically abusive husband and father, holding his wife wholly in thrall, and Silvie in a toxic bond of love and fear. Silvie is good at going away inside her head, but even there she doesn't escape her father's dominance.

Molly and Silvie become friends, and bond over forbidden trips to the nearest shop (why, yes, they are both wearing 'Iron Age' tunics and moccasins: but ice cream!) despite the issues of class and privilege that might divide them. Meanwhile, the men -- 'they’re not much interested in the foraging and cooking, they just want to kill things and talk about fighting' -- are talking about the ghost wall, the bog burials, the sacrifices, the liminal zone between life and death, and the rituals and curses by which the Iron Age folk protected themselves. But what about the victims? (The book opens with a short description, third person, of one such woman.) Silvie, at least, understands that you don't sacrifice something you don't love.

This is a very short novel, but quite chilling. A surprising amount of unease stems from the increasing friction (never discussed, of course) between the six members of the group. But there is also the constant presence of the <u>idea</u> of sacrifice, of the dead watching the living: the idea that the dead are not gone. "They had to be pinned to their graves with sharp sticks driven through elbow and knee, trapped behind woven wooden palings, to stop them coming back, creeping home dead and not dead in the dark." [loc. 912]

Moss' prose is poetic, and she's good at layering sensory impressions and simple words to build up ambience. I wasn't wholly comfortable with the way that dialogue and first-person thoughts were blended -- no speech marks, a great many run-on sentences -- but I think this technique did make the novel more immersive.

I'd add a trigger warning for domestic violence and child abuse: I don't know if the latter has any sexual element, and the lack of clarity on that point bothers me somewhat.

Thanks to <a href="https://www.netgalley.co.uk/">NetGalley</a> for providing a free advance review copy in exchange for this honest review!