The Fell

Sarah Moss

Picador, £14.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

Where previously novelists relied on snowstorms or shipwrecks to trap people in an emotional pressure cooker, Covid 19 has turned every household and street into a desert island. In this, her eighth novel, Sarah Moss takes full advantage of the second lockdown to create a claustrophobic atmosphere of deepening dread and despair. Her simple plot, spanning only a few hours, is all the more powerful for being played out against a backdrop of kitchen appliances and facemasks.

At the height of the restrictions, single mother Kate and her 16-year-old son Matt are in enforced quarantine. Neither is ill, but both are suffering. They live on the edge of the Peak District fells, and until their obligatory self-isolation, no day had passed without Kate getting outdoors to clear her head. These are hard times, but she is feeling it especially keenly: “the longer this goes on, the less she objects to dying and the harder it is to understand why other people don’t feel the same way.”

Confined to house and garden, she begins to buckle. But as Moss quietly shows, her mental torment is not recent. Months earlier, she taped up their supply of paracetamol and put it in the car, out of easy reach. Her fragile state is the starting point for a novel that shows the toll the pandemic is taking on those already struggling.

Matt is a thoughtful son, but he cannot guess the depths of his mother’s distress until she flouts the rules and heads out for a walk. When she has not returned by nightfall, the screw begins to tighten. As a mountain rescue team gets into gear, Moss unleashes the full force of misery and anxiety felt by Kate, her son, and their neighbour Alice, who is recovering from cancer. The novel also encompasses one of the rescue team who, for reasons that gradually become clear, prefers the company of the rainswept fells to that of his family.

Recounted in a revolving series of interior monologues, as people’s thoughts unspool, The Fell is a cameo of the pandemic as well as individual plights. As in her other novels, Moss taps into the background static of everyday affairs that interfere with everyone’s mind. Reflections on plastic, home-made paint, eco-friendly toothbrushes that don’t do the job, workers on furlough, the new regime that encourages reporting neighbours – all add to the unease and turmoil. As the story unfolds, Moss’s protagonists give a decent impression, in AL Kennedy’s words, of attempting to survive our time. Except it seems Kate might not survive, nor even want to.

Moss steps into other people’s shoes with impressive ease. Her prose is clear, low-key and compelling, its power incremental. And, although there is little to distinguish between the way her characters think, none is a cliche. Kate is complex and frayed; Matt is not a stereotypical teenager, but nor is he weird. Alice knows that, despite the cancer, she is fortunate. After it was suggested she keep a gratitude journal, she thought: “grateful to whom, exactly, and for what, that my very ordinary virtues have been disproportionately rewarded in this world while worse things happen to better people?”

The presence of the Fell looms over them all, its breath chilling the plot. Yet without it, Kate would not cope. When she breaks for the hills, she thinks: “It’s like walking on water … like walking over ocean swell, and the wind ruffling the heather and the bog cotton the way it ruffles the sea, and like the sea the dangers are at the edges, where water and rock drop to the valleys.”

The Fell is about the hazards that lurk at the edges of life. Feelingly, but without sentimentality, Moss explores what happens when you suddenly find yourself teetering on the precipice.