The Fell

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The four characters of the book are: Kate – a single Mum, Matt her son, Alice her widowed neighbour recovering from cancer and so clinically vulnerable and Rob a divorced volunteer mountain rescuer with a teenage daughter he sees at weekends. Kate has been exposed to a COVID case so she and Matt are isolating, but when the claustrophobia of it gets too much Kate decides to walk up into the deserted moors (spotted by Alice who does not report her despite the attentions of her one child – a now married daughter with two children). When she does not return as darkness closes in, Matt alerts the authorities, while up on the moor Kate is in serious difficulties after a fall and Rob and his colleagues scramble to find her (Rob fearing she has deliberately gone to the moor to commit suicide). Perhaps Moss was just dramatizing the horrible endless kitchen-sink drudgery and banality of those days spent cooking, housecleaning, and online, but while I could personally relate to surviving months of Groundhog Days, I didn't want to relive them, and these characters' experiences with loneliness and isolation just felt flat and banal to me. In England there were all the hotlines where you were encouraged to dob in your neighbours and there was nothing like that in Ireland Yes, absolutely it does. I don’t consciously think about my books, but I find that the rhythms of walking and running and cycling and knitting, are very calming which helps clear the space for creative work somehow.’ I was not as impressed as others by the writing style but was quite good even though I tend to dislike stream of consciousness. However, it was not good enough to elevate my opinion of this book.

Moss is nodding at novelistic convention by building suspense – what will happen to Kate? – but Kate’s interior monologues work against the form, suggesting that the outcome is not the point. If anything, her walkabout appears to be an allegory for the pandemic itself: we’ve set out on this path, but we have no idea where we are on the mountain. I'm at that stage of life where I'm sorting out what's important and want to organize my 'stuff' and set loose any extra baggage. So, the following sentences resonated with me: A masterfully tense, deeply empathetic novel about lives stilled and reexamined, and the uncertainty and danger of the world that surrounds them. I was completely riveted by the central questions of its narrative, and by its tender, insightful exploration of the times we are living through.” I THINK IT’S ready, Ellie says. Her hair, pale, silky, swings over her face as she peers into the oven. You get the plates, Dad. You’ll need the oven gloves, Rob hears himself say, and she sighs, as he knew she would. No, really, I thought it would be more fun to get like sixth-degree burns and spend the next four hours screaming in agony in the waiting room at A and E. Fourth degree, he says, there’s nothing after that.The story is told through a stream of consciousness narrative from the perspectives of four people- Kate, Matt, Alice and Rob. Kate’s thoughts flit between her financial worries compounded by fear of being fined on account of her breaking quarantine laws , her son Matt and the life choices she is made to reflect upon through a dazed and delirious conversation with a raven she meets on her expedition. Matt concerned for Kate’s physical and emotional well-being is made to mull over his own behaviors and feelings, realizing how much is at stake for him for his mother to return home safe and sound. On one hand we see him as a difficult self absorbed teenager while on the the other we see the mature way in which tries to remain hopeful busying himself with household chores while responsibly interacting with his next door neighbor Alice keeping with quarantine regulations . Alice is an elderly widow and cancer survivor struggling to adjust to the isolation brought on by the pandemic and recent widowhood , but tries to remain hopeful and keep up Matt’s spirits while making plans to lead a fuller life once the pandemic ends. Rob, the mountain rescue volunteer whose team along is tasked with finding Kate, ponders over whether Kate’s action were deliberate and whether she was driven to drastic behavior motivated by personal reasons while also questioning his own motivations for volunteering for such risky endeavors in his downtime often at the cost of his personal relationships. With Moss’s trademark attention to both the beauty and danger of the natural world, the moors come alive as almost another character. But Kate’s delight at having escaped outdoors is short-lived: with night approaching, she falls and breaks her leg. Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for giving me a chance to read The Fell by Sarah Moss, I have given my honest review. The narratives belong to forty-year-old, single mother Kate, her teenage son, Tom, their widowed older neighbour, Alice, and Rob, a divorced volunteer mountain rescuer.

And now she is required to isolate for two weeks, deprived of the socialization of her job and hikes in the Peak District. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. Quiet yet deeply moving . . . Moss shines in creating the stream of consciousness of fully-realized, distinct characters.”Translating her fury at the impact on individuals into fiction was, however, a different matter. For a time she was, like many of us, “overwhelmed by the various kinds of fear and anxiety”, uncertain that our experiences could be represented in art and culture. A keen theatre-goer, she resisted watching live performances digitally “because they just made me desperately sad. I mean, I do not want to watch a live-stream play with no audience. I want to be in the theatre, and if I can’t be in the theatre, I’d rather have nothing.” At dusk on a November evening in 2020 a woman slips out of her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of two weeks of isolation, but she just can’t take it any more – 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.

There is wit, there is compassion, there is a tension that builds like a pressure cooker. This slim, intense masterpiece is one of my best books of the year.”

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The Fell, with its one day in a pandemic focus, felt rather pedestrian and depressing. Kate, a furloughed single mom, is the main character and her quarantine breaking towards the hills behind her English village home goes very awry. Her teenage son Matt is game addicted, a recreational drugs user and in general bored. Then we have a bit better of elderly neighbour who very much fears the virus due to her recovering from cancer.

Mark ended the interview by asking Sarah how she finds herself judging other people’s work. ‘I'm intrigued by the part of being a successful writer that involves commenting and judging on other people's writing, and you are going to be a judge for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aiken, Young Writer of the Year Award. How challenging do you find it judging the writing of other people?’ Expertly woven . . . This portrait of humans and their neighboring wild creatures in their natural landscape and in their altered world is darkly humorous, arrestingly honest, and intensely lyrical . . . A triumph of economy and insight.” The story centres on Kate who seems to be almost completely inept at coping with the day-to-day requirements of life. She lives in a badly maintained cottage with her son who, rather than bringing her comfort, she sees as just another burden: eating too much food and creating too much housework.

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IT WAS a matter of time until the first novels set during the still current Covid-19 pandemic would start to appear in print. A time during which so much that seemed impossible to imagine only two years ago will for ever leave its mark on our memory, and fiction can be a way to engage with some of those memories that seem far away already and yet also too close for a perspective that allows these to be truly in the past. Though at least there were dances in the war, weren’t there, and concerts, and sex, lots of sex, at least people were allowed to see each other."