The two-week trip is a required component of an Experimental Archaeology degree, a kind of hands-on learning taken to the extreme. Her jingoistic father’s obsession with British cultural lineage meant that he wanted, Silvie explains, to give his daughter “a proper native British name.” Dad leverages his longstanding obsession with the Iron Age, especially its violence and what he thinks of as its gender politics, to gain unofficial entry onto a field trip run by a professor who grows increasingly susceptible to his demands. Its seventeen-year-old protagonist, Silvie, is named after the Celtic goddess Sulevia. This is a novel that works its magic on the body and the mind.īookended by twinned accounts of ritual sacrifice on the Northumbrian moors, Ghost Wall is a powerful and unusual Bildungsroman. In the smell of bog myrtle on fingers, the soothing touch of cool water on sore skin, Moss produces a lived sense of place in its fullest, most wondrous, most unsettling complexity.

In some ways, as other reviews have declared, this is a novel about contemporary Britain: about the border between England and Scotland and defenses built against a marauding empire (once Rome and now, supposedly, the EU) about white ethno-nationalism and far-right desires to construct an ancient indigenous ethnicity, purified of racial anxieties about modern Britain and false fears of unchecked immigration about the pernicious intersections between resurgent white supremacy and patriarchal violence.Īnd yet Ghost Wall is most compelling for its sensory storytelling, and for the sophisticated way it links its tactile aesthetic to a complex understanding about the workings of trauma.

Underfoot and at this novel’s heart lie peat bogs in which bodies have been preserved for thousands of years, resurfacing occasionally to pique the interest of poets and storytellers-famously Seamus Heaney and now Moss herself, her tactile prose following in Heaney’s wake. Ghost Wall’s living landscape is the moors and the bracken, the heather and the ferns, the bilberries that grow abundant and wild across northern moorland and which were a deliciously bitter staple of my childhood.

Ghost Wall takes place in Northumberland, up near the Scottish border, beyond my beloved Yorkshire, my own corner of the north. If I came to Ghost Wall looking for a temporary escape from the pain of my present, I was surprised to find that Sarah Moss’s unsettling novel satiated that desire not so much by removing me from my world but by plunging me right back in it. In the midst of a painful divorce and the reckoning that precipitated and pursued it, I’ve found myself desperate for stories that would fully immerse me in their worlds.

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss