#NovellasInNovember: The Fell by Sarah Moss

I cheated a little by reading this at the end of October!

I’ve been reading Sarah Moss’s books since I was lucky enough to receive a proof copy of her eerie fiction debut, Cold Earth, way back in 2009, and I have read all the fiction she’s ever published. However, I’ve long been waiting for her to write a novel that I really, really love; The Tidal Zone probably came closest as a whole, while Cold Earth and Night Waking (which I’ve reviewed twice!) frustrated me with their moments of brilliance. The Fell, her latest novella, has made me realise that it’s perhaps time to give up this hope, as I don’t think Moss’s writing is moving in a direction that fits what I want from fiction. Like her previous novella, Summerwater, The Fell is told in stream-of-consciousness through multiple voices. Set in the month-long Covid-19 lockdown of November 2020, it focuses on Kate, a struggling single mum who can’t bear the constraints of her two-week isolation period any longer and so secretly strikes out alone onto the moors. We also hear from Kate’s teenage son, Matt; mountain rescue volunteer Rob; and Kate’s next-door neighbour Alice, who is shielding after having had breast cancer and lives alone after the death of her husband.

I imagine some people would have fits if they saw that I’ve tagged The Fell as a ‘historical novel’, but that’s what it feels like to me, set in a specific time, place and mindset that seems very long ago. This, I think, is going to be the problem faced by writers who want to write realistic fiction about the Covid-19 pandemic; it’s all so tiringly familiar and yet already out-of-date; it’s neither of the moment or of its time. This is the first fiction I’ve read to tackle Covid-19, but it already feels full of cliche. The overall message of this novella, conveyed none-too-subtly through anecdotes about baby monkeys clinging to cloth mothers and comforting voices easing patients’ need for pain relief, is that we all need human connection to be truly happy, and there is no real substitute. Moss lays it on even more thickly when the mountain rescue team pull together to rescue an injured Kate. The problem is that we’ve heard nothing else but the importance of human interaction since the start of this pandemic, so this really doesn’t feel like it needs to be said. It evades both more interesting questions about the value and pain of solitude and totally ignores the fact that everyone’s experience of the pandemic wasn’t sitting at home being bored and baking bread, being able to take walks in their private front gardens when they felt too cooped up. In this, it rehearses observations that are already so familiar from social media and journalism: ‘Social distancing, whoever came up with that, there’s not much that’s less social than acting as if everyone’s unclean and dangerous, though the problem of course is that they are, or at least some of them are and there’s no way of knowing.’ No lockdown fanatics or ‘freedom’ protesters here; everyone in this novella reluctantly accepts the need for lockdown and complains about it politely.

These, perhaps, are problems that would face any novelist who is one of the first to write about Covid-19, but I think this topic also posed particular problems for Moss. Alywnne writes in their Goodreads review of The Fell that ‘Moss’s story’s almost too realistic at times, preserving rather than creatively reinventing the territory it covers.’ This, I think, is spot-on, and explains my frustration with Moss’s more recent fiction, which has moved away from both the imaginative exploration of Cold Earth and the visceral historical material evoked in Night Waking, Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children, but yet is too slight and insubstantial when compared to the more realistic The Tidal Zone. Moss’s characters have started to feel too comfortable, too similar in their world-views, and her thinking a little stale. This passage near the end of The Fell is so sub-Reservoir 13 (and I thought Reservoir 13 was sub-Jon McGregor anyway!):

The raven flies down the valley. It’s hours yet, till sunrise. Sheep rest where their seed, breed and generation have worn hollows in the peat, lay their dreaming heads where past sheep have lain theirs. The lovely hares sleep where the long grass folds over them. No burrows, no burial. The Saukin Stone dries in the wind. Though the stone’s feet are planted deep in the aquifers, in the bodies of trees a thousand years dead, its face takes the weather, gazes eyeless over heather and bog. Roots reach deep, bide their time. Spring will come.

While, taken on its own, this is beautiful writing, the passage feels totally unearnt within the context of the novel, which doesn’t spend much time focusing on the connections between nature and humanity (and you really have to earn a line like ‘spring will come’). It feels like it was pulled from a draft of Summerwater, which also tried this trick (and while I didn’t like it there either, it was at least a theme more convincingly woven through the novel).

It’s a shame to write a review like this for a writer whose work I’ve enjoyed so much in the past; I hope Moss’s next book takes a different direction.

I received a free proof copy of this novella from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 11th November.