Sarah Moss has published nine novels, of which Ghost Wall (2018) is the sixth. Though it’s short at 150 pages, it’s not at all slight. (I had allowed myself two days at the beginning of this week to reread it and found that I had several hours to spare.) It’s the first-person narrative of 16-year-old Silvie (short for Sulevia) whose father, a bus driver and amateur historian, has taken her and her mother, Alison, to spend his two weeks’ holiday in Northumberland living as Iron Age foragers. They’ve joined a small group of university students and Professor Slade (“Oh, please, call me Jim”, p. 10), who are camping out as part of their course on “experiential archaeology” (p. 6). Silvie’s dad takes the importance of recreating an authentic experience much more seriously than do the students and their professor. He insists that the three members of his family sleep in a roundhouse (pitch dark at night) on uncomfortable deerskin bunks, and wear homemade tunics (“scratchy”) and moccasins. They must eat only what they can catch (and gut and skin, as necessary) or gather.

Professor Slade said, ah well, after all authenticity was impossible and not really the goal anyway, the point was to have a flavour of Iron Age life and perhaps some insight into particular processes or technologies. (p. 7)

The students, Molly, Dan and Pete, ask Silvie how she came to be named Sulevia, given that the goddess was not local to where her family lives. When she replies that her father “wanted me to have a proper native British name”, they exchange knowing glances. On first reading, I thought they were being oversensitive to political hints and clues, but it turns out that their suspicions were well founded: Silvie’s father uses racial slurs and appears to believe in a kind of ethnic continuity between the Britons who populated the region before the Roman invasion and the English of today.

Right, said Pete, you mean he likes the idea that there’s some original Britishness somewhere, that if he goes back far enough he’ll find someone who wasn’t a foreigner. (p. 20)

Pete goes on to say that Sulevia’s name is “obviously” a version of the Latin “Sylvia”, and Silvie counters by suggesting that Sylvia (and cognates) might be “a Roman corruption of a lost British word” (p. 20). I take it that both are wrong. Molly remembers that the professor had mentioned Sulevia as the “Northumbrian goddess of springs and pools” (p. 19), so there’s no necessary link between the goddess and woods.

The professor is generally conciliatory and averse to conflict but apparently can’t help correcting Silvie’s father when he refers to “carnyxes” rather than “carnyces” (p. 44) and mentions Boadicea: “we call her Boudicca these days” (p. 45). When her father asserts that the Britons managed to maintain an effective resistance against the Romans, ultimately driving them out and “there weren’t dark faces in these parts for nigh on two millennia after that”, and the professor starts to object mildly “hang on, we don’t —” (p. 44), Silvie adroitly directs the conversation into a slightly different channel. She has clearly learned very young to defuse situations where her is liable to get into a fight (unless she’s the one fighting him).

Their camp is near a bog, which has preserved items which have fallen or been deliberately cast into it, like a Victorian girl’s boot, with little buttons (and a heel, which Silvie’s dad ridicules as a “right daft thing to wear on a moor, an’ all”, p. 101).

In Denmark they found braids of human hair very much like Molly’s cast into the bog, because you give what you most want to keep. You would have been able to see your votive objects, Dad had told me, for months or maybe years, and there were special walkways and platforms built out over pools and marshes perhaps partly for the purpose of visiting the murdered things. People too, this particular book suggested, they weren’t necessarily gone when they were put into the bog but would have lain there, dead and still present, not going, faces wavering through the clear water, mouth and skin and hair arrested in the retreating moment of loss while time continued to pass for the rest of the community. (p. 103)

You “give what you most want to keep” because a sacrifice would be pointless unless its object were highly valued. The students discuss what they would offer up.

I felt Dad’s gaze on me and knew with a shiver what he was thinking. My daughter. Break her and stake her to the bog, stop her before she gets away. They weren’t dead, the bog people, not to those who’d killed them. They had to be pinned to their graves with sharp sticks driven through elbow and knee, trapped behind woven wooden palings, to stop them coming back, creeping home dead and not dead in the dark. (p. 104)

I’ve noticed that some parents (not always male ones) seem to regard their children as property or possessions, to be deployed and directed at the parent’s will. Worse, a parent will sometimes apparently feel that the child is actually a part of his or her body, and become angry and frustrated if the child doesn’t immediately carry out the parent’s wishes, as if the parent’s own limbs were evading his/her control. Bill Hampton is obviously an excessively controlling (and violent) parent.

When he and the professor come across Silvie washing herself in a pool of a stream, he thrashes her brutally with his leather belt. Silvie has been out foraging with the students for hours in the scorching sun without any water, and is sitting in the pool wearing only her underpants when the two men come “striding over the heather” (p. 61), carrying rabbits that they’ve caught. Having apologized to the professor (“maybe the second time I’d heard him apologise to anyone ever”, p. 61) and sending him ahead of them back to the camp, her father gets her to stand against a small rowan tree and gets to work with his belt. Silvie distracts herself from the pain by thnking “hard” about the tree, its photosynthesizing leaves, ripening berries, pulsing sap and downward reaching roots.

It went on longer than usual, as if the open air invigorated him, as if he liked the setting. I thought about the leather of his belt, the animal from whose skill it was made, about the sensations that skin had known before the fear and pain of the end. (p. 62)

The welts left by the belt prevent Silvie from sleeping: she can’t lie on her front because she doesn’t have a proper pillow and her back and both her sides are painful. Her mother can see that her husband has been “upset” (p. 64) but doesn’t know, or ask about, the details. She wishes that Silvie wouldn’t provoke him or wind him up. Silvie replies that this time she didn’t mean to, though sometimes she does.

Bill and the professor have been working in semi-secret on their “special project” (p. 102). which turns out to include a reenactment of the sacrifice/burial of a young woman in the bog. Silvie is the only plausibly suitable candidate for the role of victim, as the professor explains:

I can’t ask Molly, she’s a student and frankly her marks aren’t great and I don’t want her saying she was pressured into anything she didn’t want to do, it could put me in a very difficult position. (pp. 136–7)

Silvie is increasingly reluctant but her father has no hesitation in committing her to the project. Though she doesn’t exactly consent, she understands why.

Because I was the person you can hurt. Because I was the scapegoat, the sacrifice, the thing Dad wanted to keep. (p. 136)

Just before sunset, Silvie is paraded to the edge of the bog. Her father has put a rope around her neck, tied with a knot designed to strangle the victim slowly rather than break her neck. Her hands will be tied behind her when they reach the bog, but not before, to make it less likely that she will fall on the way. The two male students are drumming slowly, Molly has gone to look for help. “Strip her, said the Prof” (p. 143). The men start to chant.

The professor has promised Silvie that she will come to no harm, but the promise is broken when “they” cut her forehead along the hairline with a flint blade and her father makes two cuts on her arm with his hunting knife, “just done for the pain, like” (p. 144).

They came at me with sticks raised and I lost my balance and fell on the water’s edge, was set on my feet again for more. For as long as I could, I watched the infinitesimal progress of the moon along the darkening sky, listened to the calls of the last birds crossing the cool of the evening. There was pain. They had a pile of stones ready. (p. 144)

The supense has mounted unexpectedly and quickly over the novel’s final 15 pages. Throughout the book there has been an atmosphere of oppressive foreboding (and serious violence, as in the episode with the leather belt, and a incident, undescribed, when Alison allows the fire to go out) but the sudden escalation of the danger to to human (particularly female) life comes as a very effective shock.

Sarah Moss has taught creative writing at University College, Dublin (UCD) since 2020, having previously taught the same subject at the University of Warwick and before that literature at universities in the UK and Iceland. Until recently, she wrote a weekly column in The Irish Times. In her final column earlier this month, she revealed that she was stopping for several reasons,

… but mostly because the initially minor discomfort of being hated on the internet has begun to tint more of my life and sleep and thoughts.

The extremely hostile reaction of a particular demographic of readers to her columns did not come as a complete surprise.

I knew that thinking in public while female would incur punishment and that particular issues — cycling, gender equality, big trucks — attracted particular attention from angry men.

Some of these people “(apparently mostly men) wrote that I am vile and stupid, that they would enjoy driving over my body, that they wanted me to kill myself”. This reminds me of how genuinely shocked I was, around 2010, to read about the online attacks on an obviously well-meaning woman journalist who wrote (if I’m remembering correctly) about computer games: rape and death threats, with vivid fantasies of sadistic mutilation. The threats were so grotesquely out of proportion to even the most hostile interpretation of the journalist’s imagined “offence” that it seemed fanciful that a significant part of the gamer community could be so unhinged as to have written them, let alone posted them publicly. We’ve all had a lot of time since to grow used to preposterous yet serious forms that online misogyny often takes. It’s salutory to be reminded what it looks like from the viewpoint of someone like Moss, who has avoided social media since its beginning.

Her novel, Ghost Wall (which, of course, was written years before she began her Irish Times column) shows that misogynistic impulses to silence and control women and girls have long been a significant part of our human condition, if it took the invention of the internet to give them unprecedented expression and bring it home to many of us how deranged they are.

Edition: Granta hardback, 2018.