The Fell

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The author's lyrical yet restrained style is so lovely, and here again the prose is a stream of consciousness style that feels right in the claustrophobic context. But I have to wonder, as I do with Julie Otsuka and her clinging to the second person voice, if she will offer the reader another aspect of her writing. This is a book about three families in the pandemic. How life changes forever, how almost everybody struggles to keep their incomes, try to deal with children, worried about prices, and all that. A 4-star book, a little sad and dark for me.

I've been left sorely disappointed by the early crop of Covid novels, including Sarah Hall's Burntcoat, and it would be sacrilege to even mention the existence of Gary Shteyngart's painfully unfunny satire Our Country Friends in the same paragraph as earnest, good-faith literary efforts like this one. The story is told through a stream of consciousness narrative from the perspectives of four people- Kate, Matt, Alice and Rob. Kate’s thoughts flit between her financial worries compounded by fear of being fined on account of her breaking quarantine laws , her son Matt and the life choices she is made to reflect upon through a dazed and delirious conversation with a raven she meets on her expedition. Matt concerned for Kate’s physical and emotional well-being is made to mull over his own behaviors and feelings, realizing how much is at stake for him for his mother to return home safe and sound. On one hand we see him as a difficult self absorbed teenager while on the the other we see the mature way in which tries to remain hopeful busying himself with household chores while responsibly interacting with his next door neighbor Alice keeping with quarantine regulations . Alice is an elderly widow and cancer survivor struggling to adjust to the isolation brought on by the pandemic and recent widowhood , but tries to remain hopeful and keep up Matt’s spirits while making plans to lead a fuller life once the pandemic ends. Rob, the mountain rescue volunteer whose team along is tasked with finding Kate, ponders over whether Kate’s action were deliberate and whether she was driven to drastic behavior motivated by personal reasons while also questioning his own motivations for volunteering for such risky endeavors in his downtime often at the cost of his personal relationships. Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for giving me a chance to read The Fell by Sarah Moss, I have given my honest review.Alice is their next door neighbour, an older woman who has recently finished chemotherapy and is clinically vulnerable and isolating. Rob is a mountain rescue volunteer.

The main thing this did well is take into consideration the many different experiences we all had during the pandemic. The way some of us were forced to stay home despite home never having been a safe space. The way some of us resented working all through the pandemic while others were able to have the spring and summer off and then some. The way some of us had it off involuntarily and without government benefits to support, digging a deeper and deeper hole and not giving us so much as a stepping stool to help ourselves out. I can’t say it’s all encompassing, but I was impressed by how much it did cover.

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Where perhaps it loses out to that novel is in the absence of the natural vignettes that distinguished “Summerwater” – although we do hear have a raven whose imagined dialogue with one of the characters makes it effectively the fifth key character of the novel. Where I think it wins out is in avoiding an over-dramatic and rather manufactured climax. 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. 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.” A second point of view is that of her son Matt, a relatively passive teenager, who spends his time in his room gaming or pondering on his relationship with his best friend. I would have liked to hear more from Matt but his contribution is minor and mainly involves worrying what has happened to his mum. And now she is required to isolate for two weeks, deprived of the socialization of her job and hikes in the Peak District.

Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. Again and again, and always with steely precision, Moss has mined both the circumstances and the consequences of isolation . . . one of the very best British novelists writing today about contemporary life - if anyone can justify writing a pandemic novel, she's the woman for the job * Daily Telegraph *Moss has always been adept at plumbing the psyche’s inkier depths, and as she flits between people, channelling the free indirect style that gave her last novel, Summerwater, such polyphonic momentum, their anxieties heighten a gathering sense of existential doom. Interestingly, though these span everything from the climate emergency to the degradation of language and zombie mink, Covid itself is way down the list, functioning more as an intensifying trigger.