Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
This short novel from 2018 starts in a striking and rather disturbing manner as a young girl, a member of an ancient English hunter-gatherer group, is led to her own sacrificial killing as part of a religious ceremony. Then we zoom forward to the late 1980s with a group of people living like hunter-gatherers in a remote north England forest. This mismatched tribe consists of three students and their professor researching how Iron Age Britons would have lived, and a working-class northern family whose father Bill is a bus driver fascinated by the life of these ancient Britons; he and his wife and daughter, whom he drags along, are using their annual summer holiday to take part in a re-enactment which Bill clearly hopes will allow him to make a connection with some unspecified sense of racial identity and national tradition.
The novel was written in the aftermath of Brexit and the resonance of this momentous national event seemed obvious to me – not, apparently, though, to my book group when they discussed this at their December meeting. For once, I don’t think I am guilty of imposing a political dimension onto this family and character based drama. Bill expresses suspicions about the changing nature of English society and his desire to live in what he perceives as an ancient English style.
Anyway, the set up with the two groups living like hunter-gatherers is well-handled by Moss, with some lovely comic set pieces as the students struggle to secure enough produce to eat and with other subsistence activities. Molly, one of the students and a sassy, appealing character, manages to secure supplies from Spar to get her through the whole experience which for her is all about gaining good course grades. However, even in these scenes there is a sense of Bill’s underlying anger and aggression. He is a frustrated man and this frustration is exacerbated by the lack of seriousness about the re-enactment that he, rightly, perceives in the students.
I think my reaction to this book was similar to my friend, Sue, who like me was unable to attend the book group meeting. She wrote: “I did read the book and could admire it without particularly enjoying it”. I also admired many things in this book, not least the quality of the writing and the cleverness of the structure. However, something stopped me responding fully to this book and, interestingly, considering my love of novels that are ambiguous and explore their themes with complexity, it was probably the fact that I couldn’t grasp exactly what I should think or even feel about this book at the end that made me feel uneasy. Of course, this shouldn’t have been a problem because the denouement seems clear-cut. Molly obviously believes that his daughter, Sylvie, and her mum are the victims of a weird amalgam of physical, psychological and emotional abuse by Bill and that’s why she acts - this also seems a clear nod for women needing to take the lead in tackling toxic masculinity.
And yet, throughout, Sylvie makes us aware of Bill’s admirable qualities as an autodidact, his genuine feeling for an authentic, natural lifestyle as well as the fact that he has passed this love on to his daughter which gives her a wonderful hypersensitivity to the world around her. I know that the orthodox view would probably be that these feelings are the result of Bill's controlling behaviour and his wife and daughter are suffering some form of Stockholm syndrome in their loyalty to him. That, however, doesn’t seem quite to explain it for me and, again, Moss’ skilful writing keeps us on our toes as she contrasts Bill’s working class northerness with the privileged, unserious research students.
As already mentioned, I thought Molly was a great character, and she was often responsible for the set piece moments of comedy in the 'carry on hunter-gathering' scenes. I liked that about the book - the way it moved across genres and used the initial set up to cleverly explore a range of themes. I imagine the Ghost Wall, with its use skulls and bones of the hunter-gatherers' never fully dead ancestors, is used to represent the harking back of Brexit and a reverence for the past and tradition that seem part of the English national character and especially those who voted for Brexit. Then, those rather disturbing scenes at the start and with Sylvie at the end represent the patriarchal link between the little Englander fight for their freedoms and the fact that women tend to have to pay the price for this freedom. There’s also some bildungsroman elements in Sylvie’s narration as well as a comic look at the way, in our modern lifestyles, we have become detached from the natural world and the processes by which we get food, keep warm and so on.
As I said in an email prior to my book group prior to their meeting: “I guess this is what will form the basis of your discussion so I will say no more”. And I will say no more to you as the pleasure from reading this book is not only reflecting on what it all means but also important questions about the behaviour of different people in our modern, patriarchal, class ridden world.
No more conclusions from me, therefore, but here are a couple of brief responses from members of the book group:
"Although I felt that this novel did not quite fulfil its initial promise, the quality of the writing and the ideas behind the story have certainly left me intrigued enough to try some other works by Sarah Moss". - Angi