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The Fell

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If there was any doubt whether the pandemic would inspire literature that will endure beyond the crisis, The Fell, a slender but illuminating lightning strike of a book, should put that to rest.”

Likewise, even to Kate herself, the suspenseful organising drama – her potentially lethal misadventure in the hills – can seem but a minor diversion in the larger metaphysical spectacle that is, well, life in the 21st-century. It’s no surprise, then, that the novel’s ending doesn’t provide quite the release or comfort that might be expected, despite its outcome. The Fell, with its one day in a pandemic focus, felt rather pedestrian and depressing. Kate, a furloughed single mom, is the main character and her quarantine breaking towards the hills behind her English village home goes very awry. Her teenage son Matt is game addicted, a recreational drugs user and in general bored. Then we have a bit better of elderly neighbour who very much fears the virus due to her recovering from cancer. Moss steps into other people's shoes with impressive ease. Her prose is clear, low-key and compelling, its power incremental . . . The Fell is about the hazards that lurk at the edges of life. Feelingly, but without sentimentality, Moss explores what happens when you find yourself teetering on the precipice * Herald * The only parts of her life she enjoys are her job, which provides her with social interaction and some extra food, and the wild beauty of the Peak District, the area where she lives.

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In England there were all the hotlines where you were encouraged to dob in your neighbours and there was nothing like that in Ireland That’s how I reacted to The Fell: baking bread and biscuits, a family catch-up on Zoom, repainting and clearouts, even obsessive hand-washing … the references were worn out well before a draft was finished. Ironic though it may seem, I feel like I’ve found more cogent commentary about our present moment from Moss’s historical work. Yet I’ve read all of her fiction and would still list her among my favourite contemporary writers. Aspiring creative writers could approach the Summerwater/ The Fell duology as a masterclass in perspective, voice and concise plotting. But I hope for something new from her next book. We also have the point of view of the elderly neighbor Alice who is sheltering at home due to the fact she is recovering from cancer. Her POV is the most Covid-relevant narrative. She muses on the restrictions and difficulties, the problems big and small, and her rather unsatisfactory relationship with her daughter’s family.

From the award-winning author of Ghost Wall and Summerwater, Sarah Moss's The Fell is a riveting novel of mutual responsibility, personal freedom, and the ever-nearness of disaster. She falls and breaks a leg and is stranded on the moors as night falls. There is another voice on the moors, a Raven. We are not in Poe territory here, as one reviewer has pointed out, it’s more the blasted heath of Lear and the Raven makes a good Fool. There is a gothic edge to the second half: Kate, an unhappy one, who couldn't stay in a place, if see her from the good side, an outdoor person. She is a single mum and really cares about her teenage son. In the beginning, she was just looking irresponsible. You see, with some patience, characters reveal themselves and this was beautiful. Moss’s characters aren’t just connected by proximity, or even by the process of living through unparalleled crisis, but by an underlying sense of peril, both immediate, domestic and more broadly existential. Their thoughts shifting from mundane commentary or overt distractions to their keen awareness of the instability of everything around them, political divisions, fractured society, and the spectre of climate change. There are moments too of coming together, acts of kindness, shared concerns. It’s a depiction of a reality that will be familiar to many, although there are also a number of absent voices: marginal and seen only in the distance, the homeless and displaced; figures like Kate’s neighbour Samira who puts in a puzzlingly brief appearance. I was reminded at times of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours similarly preoccupied with questions of connection, and how to live, how to deal with the weight of days but – although I find aspects of Cunningham’s vision deeply flawed - The Fell is less richly descriptive, less thoughtful in its stance. Moss’s story’s almost too realistic at times, preserving rather than creatively reinventing the territory it covers. Teenage Matt often seems quite peripheral, a minor function of plot, Alice is probably the most well-realised of the group, but even here there’s a tendency to edge towards cliché. Although the slightly surreal encounter between Kate and a raven, both alone in the November night, is an interesting attempt at disrupting this rather conventional story, it felt more of a gesture than anything else, it didn’t have the eerie, mythic force of the more satisfying elements of earlier books like Cold Earth. But even though this wasn’t the compulsive read I’d hoped for, I still found it engaging enough to hold my attention.

The Fell is a thought-provoking and evocative read, exploring as it does themes around isolation, anxiety and compliance during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

A masterfully tense, deeply empathetic novel about lives stilled and re-examined, and the uncertainty and danger of the world that surrounds them. I was completely riveted by the central questions of its narrative, and by its tender, insightful exploration of the times we are living through -- Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From It’s early evening in November 2020, Kate should be self isolating for fourteen days but she’s feeling claustrophobic and the lure of the Peak District Fells is proving hard to resist. Her elderly neighbour Alice sees her leave her property but it takes a while for her teenage son Matt to realise that she’s broken the quarantine rules. The story is told from several perspectives. The Fell is a funny, savage novel about the very recent past, and seems to do the impossible: hold a story that is still unfolding immobile enough to integrate into fiction.”

The story centres on Kate who seems to be almost completely inept at coping with the day-to-day requirements of life. She lives in a badly maintained cottage with her son who, rather than bringing her comfort, she sees as just another burden: eating too much food and creating too much housework. This desire to explore has perhaps been channelled into her fiction. Moss’s first novel, Cold Earth (2009), followed the fate of six archaeologists trapped in Greenland for an apocalyptic winter, a setup that “breathed authenticity,” wrote Jane Smiley in the Guardian. The book led to four further novels, three of which – Bodies of Light, Signs for Lost Children, and The Tidal Zone – were shortlisted for the Wellcome prize. Like Summerwater and the 2018 chef d’oeuvre Ghost Wall, The Fell is a slim book covering a lot of ground. In unfussy prose, Moss seamlessly blends quotidian concerns. “When you’re not dead, life goes on and there are buses to catch and lamb to cook,” she wrote in Cold Earth, with the most pressing issues of our time. Among her recurring preoccupations is class. Kate notes that she would have never thought it could be illegal to walk the hills alone, but “the authorities have never liked to have commoners wandering the land instead of getting and selling”.

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