Name: The Fell
Rating: 4.4 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9781529083224

Sarah Moss

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Summerwater, The Fell is a novel for our times - the story of a woman in quarantine who can't take it any more and goes hill-walking at dusk . . .

The Fell

Moray Lyle McIntosh

It's November 2020 and Sarah Moss invites us into a small Peak District community and the affect of the pandemic on its residents. There are Kate and Matt, a single mother and her teenage son, days into self-isolation after being contact traced. Alice their neighbour, still shielding due to cancer. Suzy her daughter who joins her for FaceTime dinners, worn down by remote working expectations and resenting the “holiday” given to the furloughed. They are all struggling with isolation and the different pressures of their situations. Juggling rules with their own needs and wellbeing. Kate, used getting through the days with long periods outdoors and the freedom of the woods and hills breaks her quarantine. Just for a while, just for a short walk, alone, and far from other people. Her son Matt, frustrated by prolonged close contact with his mother and bored of being indoors alone, soon realises that she’s been gone too long, and the hills are dark. Matt is alone, barred from human contact and there are large fines for breaking the rules but his mother is missing and there could have been an accident…

This is the first “lockdown” book I’ve read since the pandemic began. I’ve read plenty of apocalyptic fiction and a few things that reference Covid but nothing yet that tackles it head on. But I can’t resist Sarah Moss’s work and lockdown is a subject made for her recent style. Her ability to create tightly-wound tension and creeping foreboding, as honed in the brilliant Ghost Wall and Summerwater, has reached almost supernatural heights (or would depths be more appropriate?) in The Fell. Moss describes the “accumulating dread” of the threats of modern life, from Covid to climate emergency and accumulating dread is an apt description of the Fell’s anxious narrative. The claustrophobic, fearful atmosphere of lockdown is almost unbearably reconstructed with all the frustration and loneliness. The moral mazes of rules -bent and broken - and the justifications for doing so. She captures both the community spirit of neighbours looking out for one another and supporting the shielding, and the curtain-twitching resentment and blame. The inner voices of her characters coalesce all the contradictions of the situation and each is painfully human.

Most importantly Moss reveals the incredible power of fiction for creating empathy. The language of the media with its (claimed) objectivity is often an invitation for judgement, the selectively gathered and presented facts encouraging certain conclusions. By imbuing Kate and Suzy and Alice and Matt with so much life Moss allows us to really see and understand the different ways that lockdown affected people and to feel what they felt. The saying “we’re all in the same storm but we’re in different boats” gained some traction in 2020 when the unevenness of experience, from furlough to free school meals, became clear. The Fell takes you right into the cramped confines of its characters’ boats, feeling each calm and swell and how both could be unbearable for different people. The meticulously crafted voices of the characters are truly a window into the minds of others with all their vagaries and humours, their contradictions, and their idiosyncrasies. Kate’s story in particular is heartbreaking as she assesses her choices and considers her mistakes, suffocated by her home, the lockdown and her life. Yet Moss finds warmth and humour and affection in all of them, moments that break through the oppressive atmosphere like breaths of crisp, clean air. 

It's also a hymn (Kate sings several on her walk and its aftermath) to the importance of the outside world, places as well and people. She particularly captures the strength, wildness, and consolation of the natural world. Beautiful, cruel and vital, she brings to life the rugged landscape of the north of England. Kate’s [removal] from the outside precipitates the disaster of the book just as humanity’s distance from nature has created the climate crisis that lurks here in the warm October and haunted the lakeside in Summerwater. 

It’s a difficult read for a pandemic that is still ongoing and at times was almost unbearably true and clear but it is phenomenally powerful for reviving and remembering that time. I know that in the future, this is the book I’ll turn to when I need to look back on 2020.

Gabrielle Griffiths

A riveting novel of mutual responsibility, personal freedom, and the ever-nearness of disaster.

At dusk on a November evening, a woman slips through her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of a two-week mandatory quarantine period, a true lockdown, but she can’t take it anymore—the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. And anyway, the moor will be deserted at this time. Nobody need ever know she’s stepped out.

Kate planned only a quick walk—a stretch of the legs, a breath of fresh air—on paths she knows too well. But somehow she falls. Injured, unable to move, she sees that her short, furtive stroll will become a mountain rescue operation, maybe even a missing person case.

Sarah Moss’s The Fell is a story of mutual responsibility, personal freedom, and compassion. Suspenseful, witty, and wise, it asks probing questions about how close so many live to the edge and about who we are in the world, who we are to our neighbors, and who we become when the world demands we shut ourselves away.

The Fell

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