Books |
Ghost Wall: A Novel
Sarah Moss
By
Published: Jan 10, 2019
Category:
Fiction
Walls? They’re in the news, I hear. So a novel called “Ghost Wall,” by a writer who gets 5-star reviews, has a certain interest. And it’s 144 pages — you can read it in an hour. And the beginning… well, just read it.
They bring her out. Not blindfolded, but eyes widened to the last sky, the last light. The last cold bites her fingers and her face, the stones bruise her bare feet. There will be more stones, before the end.
She stumbles. They hold her up. No need to be rough, everyone knows what is coming. From deep inside her body, from the cord in her spine and the wide blood-ways under the ribs, from the emptiness of her womb and the rising of her chest, she shakes. A body in fear. They lead the fearful body over the turf and along the track, her bare feet numb to most of the pain of rock and sharp rushes. Chanting rises, the drums sound slow, unsyncopated with the last panic of her heart. Others follow, wrapped against the cold, dark figures processing into the dusk.
On arrival, they strip her. It is easy; they have put her into a loose tunic. Against the low red light of the winter sunset, her body is white as chalk, solid against the wisps of fog and the tracery of reed. She tries to cover herself with her hands, and is not allowed. One holds her while the other binds her. Her breathing is accelerating, its condensation settling on her face. Exhaled breaths hang like spirits above each person’s head, slowly dissolving into the air. The men turn her to face the crowd, they display her to her neighbours and her family, to the people who held her hands as she learnt to walk, taught her to dip her bread in the pot and wipe her lips, to weave a basket and gut a fish. She has played with the children who now peep at her from behind their mothers, has murmured prayers for them as they were being born. She has been one of them, ordinary. Her brother and sisters watch her flinch as the men take the blade, lift the pale hair on the left side of her head and cut it away. They scrape the skin bare. She doesn’t look like one of them now. She shakes. They tuck the hair into the rope around her wrists.
She is whimpering, keening. The sound echoes across the marsh, sings through the bare branches of rowan and birch.
There are no surprises.
They place another rope around her neck, hold the knife up to the setting sun as it edges behind the rocks. What is necessary is on hand, the sharpened willow withies, the pile of stones, the small blades and the large. The stick for twisting the rope.
Not yet. There is an art to holding her in the place she is entering now, on the edge of the water-earth, in the time and space between life and death, too late to return to the living and not time, not yet, not for a while, to be quite dead.
Who is this woman? What brought her to this place?
You’ve read the terrifying opening, so I can tell you. Her name is Silvie. She’s 17. It’s summer, in the English countryside. Her father, a bus driver with an interest in history, has taken his family on an unusual vacation. They’re tagging along with an archeology professor and his students on a project: living like Iron Age Britons for two weeks. They’ll wear rough tunics, forage for food, re-enact Iron Age rituals.
So far, so academic. But her father has… issues. Is he playing Iron Age man — or is he reverting to that way of life? How far into that male-dominated past will he go? [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
You’ll have no trouble making the connection between 21st century domestic violence and primitive misogyny. You’ll note the passivity of the mother. And, of course, the effort to build a “ghost wall.”
Sarah Moss beats the now-and-then drum lightly. Her real interest is Silvie, the narrator, and what she experiences, minute by minute. The way her feet feel in moccasins. Finding berries in the woods. Preparing rough meals. Sneaking into civilization for relief. Finding herself propelled, step by step, into the past, into a doom.
The end of the book? My eyes raced, my heart pounded. But no spoilers here.
144 pages.
