Review: The Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

This is a curious little book (only 132 pages) that popped to the top of my library queue recently. I'd forgotten all about it and even why I thought I wanted to read it. It took me two tries to get into it but I'm glad I did as by the end I was totally engrossed in the story. The cover is brilliant, by the way. It reflects the story very well and in an imaginative way.

The Ghost Wall is a first person narrative from the viewpoint of a 17 year old young woman, Sulevia, commonly called Sil or Silvie, looking back on the events of a past summer. She, along with her father, Bill, and mother Alison, are re-enacting an Iron Age British settlement. With them are a professor and three students who are part of an Experimental Archaeology project. Their encampment is somewhere north of Hadrian's Wall and near the coast.

The ghost wall of the title is the last ditch defense of native Britons against the Roman invasion. It was a palisade with ancestral skulls arranged across the top facing the enemy. It might have been merely symbolic or considered powerful magic.

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The style of writing has be off-putting to some as there are no quotation marks to indicate when someone else is talking. For me, once I got into the rhythm, the narration took on the natural flow of Silvie's thoughts and, in this instance, I liked it better than if the dialogue had been delineated in the traditional way. Some reviews have also complained that nothing much happens in the first part of the book and it doesn't get interesting until it is almost finished. I disagree here as well. I think the author is setting up the ending. When I turned the last page,  I sat back and wondered how just how much agency Silvie had over the way the story finished. I love that the author left me with that wondering.

As the story unfolds we learn from Sil that her father is an amateur historian and obsessed with British pre-history, particularly the Bronze and Iron Ages. He is a bus driver most of the year but takes his wife and daughter into the country on his holidays. He seems to believe that the Iron Age was a purer time and living off the land is the way people are meant to live. He is also humorless, sexually uptight and repulsed by anything to do with women's bodies and functions, misogynistic, and verbally and physically abusive to Alison and Silvie.

For example:
After Bill rails about how women back then didn't need sanitary products and lived the way nature intended to which Silvie responds:

Or they died, I said, in childbirth, what with the rickets and no cesareans, but won't be wanting me pregnant, Dad, for authenticity's sake?

 This earns her a ringing slap.

For her part, Alison has been reduced to a worn down drudge of a woman. In another type of story she would be the character who finally snaps and plants a carving knife in her husband's neck. But here she is subservient to everyone elses' needs and stares into the middle distance when left alone.

The professor, Jim, and his students, Molly, Pete, and Dan, don't take the Iron Age re-enactment nearly as seriously as Bill which causes some unspoken tension since Bill doesn't like to contradicted and subsequently takes out on his family. Silvie develops an relationship with Molly who she admires and envies.

Silvie observes with a keen eye and a wry scepticism for the BS surrounding the re-enactnent. While she has learned much from her father about living off the land, she is not the true believer her father is. Her thought about the compromises made by the re-enactors are pointed  and humorous. She gets into trouble when she voices her thoughts.

While I was glad we weren't going to be hacking the guts out of deer in the woods with flint blades I thought the Professor's dodging of violence pretty much thoroughly messed up the idea that our experiences that summer were going to rediscover the lifeways of pre-modern hunter-gatherers.

When Bill complains that Sil and the students didn't bring back anything from foraging

[Bill] They wouldn't have had too old men supplying the entire community, you know the young people would have played their part.[Sil]  Had to, I thought, seeing as how nobody actually lived to be old, seeing as how you and Prof Jim would have been dead and buried years ago ...

Unlike the male students, Molly sees Bill's abusive nature and tries to give Silvie support. I think there is a hint that Silvie might be sexually attracted to Molly. Silvie wants to leave home but doesn't know how to do it. Molly suggests university will give her freedom but for her, going to university seems like postponing adolescence rather than making a clean break and getting out from under her oppressive father and passive mother.

Underneath the personal dynamics of the people in the encampment that color the narrative are interesting descriptions of what it is like to forage for food. Silvie takes the lead because actually is well versed, unlike the students. She also notes that wearing moccasins creates a different relationship between the feet and the land.

Toward the end, Bill and Prof Jim get more deeply involved in understand by replication Iron Age cultural beliefs and move dangerously close to taking things too far.