Sarah Moss

TL;DR: She’s really cool go read Ghost Wall.

---

I picked up Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss because I came across it during one of my insomniac YouTube forays in the small hours. It’s a novella about some people who are reenacting life in Iron Age Britain, as part of an experimental archaeology programme where archaeologists attempt to gain academic insight by physically replicating ancient ways of living. The book blew me away. The very same day I walked into Waterstones and spent 30 quid’s worth of book vouchers on every other Sarah Moss novel they happened to have.

I’m not sure when this happened, but I’ve become the kind of person who puts down a novel and asks, Now what was that really about? Because Ghost Wall cannot possibly be about some people making gruel in Northumberland, it has to be about the pervasiveness of sexism, how chauvinists idealise history, and how our activities as a species will always be circumscribed by whether and how we can subjugate the natural environment around us.

Sarah Moss (b. 1975) is a lecturer on literature and creative writing, and writes novels that tend to feature neurotic academics stuck in areas of natural beauty, battling oppressive gender roles. I read four of her books in a week: Ghost Wall (2018), which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019, and frankly the best thing I’ve read this year after Nabokov’s Ada; then Cold Earth (2009, her first novel), about an archaeological dig that is stuck in the wilderness of Western Greenland; Night Waking (2011), about a woman trying to cope with two small children, an absent husband, and her career in academia; and Summerwater (2020, her latest and seventh one), a collection of vignettes featuring holidayers at a Scottish cabin park on a very wet day.

Which is to say, all of them are about sexism, xenophobia, the environment, and general existential dread.

I don’t often get round to reading so many books by the same author, let alone in such close proximity. It’s been interesting to trace her writing style and main thematic concerns across a decade. There are surface-level recurrences, like Spar being the convenience store of choice; and narrative tendencies, like neurotic female narrators, close proximity to academia and academics, or syntactic constructions of sometimes near-virtuosic contortion. There’s also recurring motifs that illustrate thematic concerns, like holidaying (‘holidays are for imagining who we would be if we didn’t work, if we didn’t live where we live, if we were not who we are’, Rain, essay by Sarah Moss), or the pervasiveness of gendered social roles and expectations that ultimately hinder women’s self-determination.

Moss’ skill as a novelist perceptibly matures across these four books. Both Cold Earth and Night Waking could do with being a hundred pages shorter. Where Cold Earth is meandering and borders on self-indulgence with its stream of consciousness monologues, Summerwater, which employs a similar structure, is far better paced and achieves greater distinction between its narrators. On a separate note the toddler’s speech in Night Waking is gravely improbable, the child following no known trajectories of morphosyntactic development known to linguists.

Cold Earth manages to allude to some wider thematic questions, like the actual worth of academic work, or how the obstinacy and self-righteousness of a single person can be responsible for disaster. In comparison, Ghost Wall successfully juxtaposes a whole host of social issues with far greater clarity, at half the length of the earlier book. Indeed I think that’s the best thing about Ghost Wall, how it identifies issues that you didn’t think were all intimately related (delusions in academia and domineering personalities as in Cold Earth, but also sexism, domestic abuse, class divides, chauvinism’s conceptualisation of history, nature’s importance to our survival, and coming of age), and proceeds to elucidate them all within the unitary context of some people going on an archaeological reenactment. The subsequent Summerwater seems to come full circle, by being allusive above anything else, its pivotal element characterised by omission and distortion rather than frontal discussion. The result is a heady impressionistic tessellation of internal monologues and natural landscape.

I like Moss’ books because they are intelligent. They deal with real issues – sexism, classism, xenophobia, parenthood, and environmental pessimism, in the ones I’ve read – not that they provide any solutions; but isn’t the framing of worthwhile questions the most important and interesting part? Indeed none of these four novels have thematic resolutions: the main conflict in the plot comes to a head, but this does not guarantee a solution to the deeper issues that caused said conflict in the first place. And I like them for this, that they raise questions and admit the difficulty of finding adequate answers.

I also like them because Moss writes about intellectual life, and about life as an academic. Moss herself being an academic, she knows how to write them; me an aspiring academic who grew up in an academic household, I know what good representation of academia looks like. I recognise the way Anna, the historian and mother-of-two who narrates Night Waking, is consumed by her investigations (after all what are the chapter epigraphs and Victorian letters if not part of Anna’s stream of consciousness, if not in linear order), the way she cannot get a work-life balance because when your main job is thinking you can’t shut it out, and how consequently her life and job fight for her intellectual and emotional energies. Anna, tired, sarcastic, and intellectual, relates the sexism, elitism, and ceaseless competition of the academic world, as well as the emotional tumult, unfair division of labour, and societal expectations of married motherhood. These are issues that are relevant to me; this is realist fiction of a world that I intimately recognise. I hope that when it’s my time to find jobs and contemplate family, academia and mother-/womanhood will be kinder, less discriminatory places, but in the mean time, I appreciate Moss’ honest and entertaining portrayal.

Sarah Moss is a brilliant writer, and only seems to be getting better – I will be looking out for her next book due this winter. Much as she tackles a range of topics in her novels, her style and central themes have stayed largely constant. If she sounds niche, it’s because she kind of is. But it’s my kind of niche, and I seriously recommend it.