{"id":26084,"date":"2019-05-28T11:58:53","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T15:58:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=26084"},"modified":"2019-05-28T11:58:53","modified_gmt":"2019-05-28T15:58:53","slug":"sarah-moss-ghost-wall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2019\/05\/28\/sarah-moss-ghost-wall\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Moss: Ghost Wall<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Ghost Wall<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Sarah Moss (2018)<\/span>
\nFarrar, Straus and Giroux (2019)<\/span>
\n144 pp<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"\"[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]S[\/fusion_dropcap]arah Moss\u2019s Ghost Wall<\/em> indicts fantasies of authenticity and tradition. These fantasies are pernicious because they confuse sacrifice with victimization. Moreover, they inflict their pain disproportionately — most of the victims are women.<\/p>\n

Like all of Moss\u2019s work — she has written four novels and a memoir of a year spent in Iceland — Ghost Wall<\/em> is really smart. But its ideas aren\u2019t stern, dogmatic, or bloodless. They\u2019re expressed in deceptively simple prose and arise seamlessly from a compelling story. (I wanted to say \u201cnaturally,\u201d but the point of the book is to critique naturalness, not as a meaningless concept but as one much open to abuse.)<\/p>\n

That story is told by seventeen-year-old Silvie, who, together with her parents and an anthropology professor and three of his students, spends two weeks in the summer of 1991 reenacting the lives of the Iron Age inhabitants of Northumberland. Britons, her father calls them; Celts, the professor demurs, citing the current preferred terminology. In making this distinction, the professor ineffectually pushes back against Silvie\u2019s father\u2019s desire to imagine a purely British origin story. Silvie\u2019s own name is short for Sulevia, a local goddess of springs and pools, or, as Silvie, quoting her father, half-reluctantly, half-defensively puts it, \u201cA proper British native name.\u201d As that \u201cproper\u201d suggests, her father\u2019s idea of authenticity is moralizing at best, overtly racist at worst: describing the Picts\u2019 resistance to the Romans (\u201cthe Romans are the end of what he likes\u201d), he says \u201cthere weren\u2019t dark faces in these parts for nigh on two millennia after that, were there?\u201d (he\u2019s already rejected Indian food as \u201cPaki muck\u201d). Her father, Silvie concludes, \u201cwanted his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night.\u201d What he has instead is a job as a bus-driver that supports his amateur archaeology and survivalist escapades, and a wife and daughter whom he terrorizes.<\/p>\n

The abuse is both psychological (\u201cI did not know what my father thought I might want to do,\u201d Silvie reflects, \u201cbut he devoted considerable attention to making sure I couldn\u2019t do it\u201d: an artful, even funny, observation that on a moment\u2019s reflection isn\u2019t funny at all) and physical. Here, for example, is what happens when the father comes across Silvie bathing naked in a stream:<\/p>\n

You should be ashamed of yourself, I\u2019ll not have my daughter a little whore, and only when I had covered myself and turned back to face him did he take off his Iron Age leather belt. Stand against that tree, he said, a rowan not much taller than me, the trunk against which I leant my forehead no wider than my face, and as his arm rose and swung and rose again, as the belt sang though the sunny air, I thought hard about the tree between my hands, about the cells in its leaves photosynthesizing the afternoon sun, about the berries ripening hour by hour, the impalpable pulse of sap under my palms, the reach of roots below my feet and deep into the earth. 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 skin it was made, about the sensations that skin had known before the fear and pain of the end. Itching, scratching, wind and rain and sun. About the flaying, the tanning.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The passage is the more terrible for its beauty: I am particularly devastated by the irony of the belt singing<\/em> through the sunny air, as if relishing its pain-making task. Is it to counter that tendency, to turn it into an ally, that Silvie begins to identify with the belt? Perhaps not, since the identification is with the animal from which the belt was made rather than the belt itself. What does it mean for Silvie to think this way? Is she asserting herself? Protecting herself? Or is that the same thing? Are her meditations on metamorphosis a way to master her victimization? What\u2019s clear is that Silvie displaces the assault on her own skin — the scars of which she will spend the rest of the book trying to hide — by contemplating the animal\u2019s. But reflecting on the animal\u2019s sensations of fear and pain only returns her to her own. By the time we reach the penultimate sentence, although we know logically it must refer to the animal, grammatically the absence of a subject makes it hard to distinguish between victims. Silvie, too, is being flayed and tanned.<\/p>\n

It is telling that Silvie moves from thinking about a tree to an animal. The characters spend most of their time gathering what food they can from the land (rabbits, fish, mussels, bilberries, burdock roots, wild thyme) which Silvie\u2019s mother valiantly seeks to make it into something edible. The emphasis on gathering, however, elides Iron Age reality, as Silvie is well aware: \u201cWhile I was glad we weren\u2019t going to be hacking the guts out of deer in the woods with flint blades, I thought the Professor\u2019s dodging of violence pretty thoroughly messed up the idea that our experiences that summer were going to rediscover the lifeways of pre-modern hunter-gatherers.\u201d Or, as she more bluntly puts it, \u201cthere has to be murder done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Silvie fascinates because she\u2019s at once in thrall to her father\u2019s mindset and critical of it. She sees that to maintain life we must take it, but we might wonder about her insistence on the ubiquity of violence: \u201cThe whole of life . . . is doing harm, we live by killing.\u201d At what point does realism about the facts of life and death (the \u201cflaccid pink slices\u201d of ham the students illicitly buy at the Spar, the local grocery, come from somewhere) become an excuse to justify one\u2019s own victimhood? Like many victims of abuse, Silvie and her mother blame themselves for their abuser\u2019s actions. Silvie\u2019s mother says to her daughter: \u201cIf you didn\u2019t wind him up all the time he wouldn\u2019t do it\u201d; Silvie tells Molly, the only female student: \u201cPeople don\u2019t bother to hurt what they don\u2019t love. To sacrifice it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Molly is the most skeptical member of the group. She is the first to sneak off to the Spar; later, when Silvie visits her tent, she is fascinated by the older girl\u2019s contraband:<\/p>\n

A sponge bag unzipped and spilling bottles of nail varnish and deodorant and face creams, a hairbrush webbed with pale hairs and a fruit salad of bobbles wound around its handle, crumpled crisp packets and sweet wrappers in a pile in the corner, a couple of battered paperback novels.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this description of the remains a future archaeologist might face, the \u201cfruit salad\u201d of Molly\u2019s hair elastics is particularly evocative. But Silvie\u2019s perceptive eye isn\u2019t drawn to the things as such. She cares about them because they\u2019re Molly\u2019s. They\u2019re a way for Silvie to covertly express her fascination with Molly herself, especially the body that is varnished and deodorized and moisturized. In ways she can only barely acknowledge, Silvie is attracted to women. Although the novel doesn\u2019t develop Silvie\u2019s nascent sexuality, it subtly shows how homophobia compounds the misogyny so prevalent in it. Pete, another of the students, grins lewdly when he catches Silvie looking at Molly: \u201cHe has seen me . . . wanting to touch her hair and her feet. He knew.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps what the man hates here — and in this he must surely represent at least Silvie\u2019s father, if not all the novel\u2019s male characters, or men in general — is a straightforward avowal of sameness, the way like can be drawn to like. Whereas he and the other male characters affirm difference (a different time, a different way of life, a different experience of the world), but their affirmation is false. Because what they really want to do is to make past and present the same, thereby affirming nothing more than their own will.<\/p>\n

In the book\u2019s most self-conscious moment, Silvie meditates on the allure — and risk — of identifying with the past:<\/p>\n

That was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, we or our dead?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The ultimate way to know the past would be to live it, to erase the boundary between then and now. Which would be to erase the self, or, in the dominant metaphor of the novel, to make the self a ghost. The paradox is that to fully access the past we would need to no longer be ourselves. But the self that wants to know, control, and dominate cannot accept such effacement. The \u201clogical\u201d conclusion is that someone else — someone less powerful, someone less valuable — needs to be turned into a ghost, which is when oppression gets dressed up as sacrifice. The professor and Sylvie\u2019s father urge the group to build a ghost wall, \u201ca last-ditch defense\u201d built by the Celts in their fight with the Romans: \u201cthey made a palisade and brought out their ancestral skulls and arrayed them along the top, dead faces gazing down, it was their strongest magic.\u201d Ignoring the suggestion of desperation in that description — \u201clast-ditch\u201d — the group stay up all night, drumming and howling at the moon. But that high fades, leading the men to go still further: they will reenact the tribes\u2019 human sacrifices, as memorialized in the \u201cbog people,\u201d whose remains have been eerily preserved by the acidic water. Silvie is forced to play the part of the scapegoat.<\/p>\n

Molly is horrified by the decision, Silvie scared. But the professor insists on his fantasy of complete immersion in the past, even if it requires hurt:<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why we should do this, he said, that\u2019s what we\u2019re interested in figuring out, the process of the killing, the momentum of the ritual.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Silvie, only a teenager, can\u2019t think of a way to say no. Thinking back to the bruises on her mother\u2019s arm, she remembers \u201cthe marks you get if you resist when someone\u2019s trying to hit you,\u201d but even her frightened acquiescence can\u2019t save her when the reenactment gets out of control (the men tie her hands behind her back, take a knife to her face to cut \u201critual\u201d marks, and amass a pile of stones ready for a final, quite possibly murderous punishment). Only a deus ex machina<\/em> can save her.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Ghost Wall<\/em> is filled with lovely things. It contains vivid scenes, like Silvie\u2019s childhood memory of falling into a bog on one of her weekly tramps with her father across the moors and being rescued by him. (The moment of course foreshadows her near-victimization in the reenactment, but it also shows the capable and loving, if not exactly tender, side of her father, without excusing him or making him sympathetic.) It is filled with expressions rooted in the Northern landscape, fitting for a book so interested in place: burdock roots are \u201cclarted\u201d with clay, pants are \u201ckecks,\u201d people are \u201cclemmed\u201d as much as they are hungry. And it offers beautiful metaphors, as when Silvie, on the verge of a panic attack, says, \u201cMy thoughts were beginning to flicker, my mind a bird against the window.\u201d The beauty here is in the precision and surprise of the comparison: what could be more desperate than a bird knocking itself against something it can\u2019t see? But what is the window? Is Silvie trying to escape herself?<\/p>\n

But this very example allows us to ask certain questions that have consequences for our ability to understand Moss\u2019s politics. What is the point of view here? When is this story being told? Which Silvie has the insight to describe her mind as a panicked bird? The teenager? Or the adult she becomes? In most of the book, the answer is clearly the seventeen-year-old, the one who says things like \u201cI was only bloody right.\u201d But then we\u2019ll be given an elegant metaphor or a gesture towards the future, paradoxically expressed by referring to the narrative present as the past: \u201cThere was no shade, I remember everything a little flattened as if in one of those overexposed photos it used to be possible to take<\/em>\u201d (my emphasis). If it\u2019s the adult, then we might feel more confident that abuse can be overcome, oppression escaped. But if that\u2019s what Moss wanted, why are those hints so faint?<\/p>\n

This uncertainty is amplified in the book\u2019s ending, which is beautifully ambivalent. Silvie, rescued from violent male fantasies of sacrifice, spends the night at the home of a woman named Trudi Kelley, a midwife that Silvie and Molly meet at the Spar, who serves as a kind of fairy godmother to the girl. The book ends with Silvie sharing a bed with Molly, who falls asleep cradling her, promising Silvie protection it is unlikely she can give (elsewhere, Moss has made it clear that class privilege — Molly comes from an upper-middle-class Home County background — can foster other kinds of fantasies, like the belief that people can simply will themselves into a different, better life). Silvie doesn\u2019t sleep: she lies \u201cwatching the full moon and then the dawn through the ivy-framed window of Trudi\u2019s cottage the rest of that short summer night.\u201d Is the window an escape hatch? Or just another barrier she will thrash against, like the bird in her metaphor?<\/p>\n

Even for a short book, the end of Ghost Wall<\/em> comes quickly, even abruptly. The first two-thirds are structured analogously to the aimlessness of summer. The sacrifice scene is a pretty surprising ratcheting up of intensity, and Silvie\u2019s rescue even more so. If the reviews at Amazon are anything to go by, some readers have found the end implausible. But if we read Ghost Wall<\/em> this way, we\u2019re falling for the same idea of authenticity it calls out as harmful fantasy. We\u2019d be confusing what\u2019s \u201crealistic\u201d with what\u2019s arbitrarily the case. When we say \u201clife isn\u2019t like that\u201d we make it harder for it to ever be otherwise. Fantasies can incite change.<\/p>\n

Yet Moss is evasive even in this regard. The English landscape, she seems to say, is objectively lovely. Nature, whatever that means, provides. But so does the Spar. We can find real solace in making things. But we might have more time for that making if we aren\u2019t just trying to stay alive. The past is interesting in itself, not necessarily better, and it shouldn\u2019t be used as a way to legitimate exclusion. That will only end in violence. We shouldn\u2019t use the past to authenticate the present or as a measuring stick to separate who belongs in our own society from who doesn\u2019t. Otherwise we\u2019ll be like Silvie\u2019s father, who likes museums, Silvie suggests, because \u201che likes dead things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Molly, by contrast, who imagines a future as a museum educator, wants \u201cto make things be alive again.\u201d A laudable desire, but the risk is that one fantasy simply replaces another. Vague ideas of freedom are better than oppressive domination, but they come with their own risk. Silvie knows all too well how dangerous the desire to make the past come alive is, how easily it devolves into a way to legitimate hurt, how much is at stake in \u201ctaking someone into the flickering moment between life and death and holding them there.\u201d In this vivid, generous, and thoughtful novel, Sarah Moss asks us to consider whether Silvie, like everyone else society deems expendable, has escaped that precarious in-between state.<\/p>\n

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