“I went on grubbing at the burdock with a flat stone, feeling the soil lodging under my fingernails. The smell of damp earth rose in the heat. I switched from kneeling to squatting although both hurt the backs of my legs, tried to edge into the shade of the trees. A wind ruffled through the leaves overhead but I barely felt it on my hot face. No birds sang, no creatures scurried. The sun didn’t seem to move in the sky. Slowly, I unearthed the root. Sweat trickled. The plant began to topple and I found myself feeling guiltier about killing it than I had about gutting the rabbits. The whole of life, I thought, is doing harm, we live by killing, as if there were any being of which that was not the case.”
- Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall
This short but powerful read is surgically precise with its language and pace. Author Sarah Moss introduces us to Silvie, a teenager on holiday with her bus-driving father, Bill, and her oppressed cashier mother, Alison, as they spend two weeks in rural northumberland, England. Bill’s obsession with the Iron Age and its sociocultural structure is the driving force for the annual trip, and the family lives an ancient lifestyle for a fortnight; wearing rough tunics, hunting and foraging for sustenance, and employing primitive tools are all part of daily life. Set sometime post-fall of the Berlin Wall, This return visit to Northumberland includes, for the first time, a college professor and several of his students who have come along as part of a “experimental archaeology” course and hope to learn from Bill’s all-consuming well of Iron Age knowledge.
Ghost Wall manages to touch on societal issues that span millennia: the dangers of too-powerful patriarchies, the adolescent awakening of a girl-turning-woman, society’s fascination with purging through violence, and perhaps most of all, the threatening nature of nostalgic nationalism.
