Keeping feet firmly planted
Archaeology students dig up more than Iron Age relics in a story that drags you in.
Bogs are terrifying. Recall that scene in The NeverEnding Story, in which the lovely white horse is slowly sucked under. See also The Lord of the Rings, the bit where Frodo and Sam cross the Dead Marshes. It takes them an eternity, squelching through mud that likes to drag men down and trap them
there, leering up at the living.
Ghost Wall is a third, compelling, case in point. Sarah Moss sets her shocking little book in the moors of Northumberland. Bogs are all around. So are the dead.
The story turns on a small group of archaeology students and enthusiasts who are camping on the moors, recreating the lives of Iron Age “bog people”. They dress in scratchy tunics, forage for burdock and bilberries, pick mussels off the rocks. Some members are extremely interested in the fact that the people of the Iron Age made human sacrifices to the bogs.
Like the Dead Marshes, over time the moors seem to work a magic. Boundaries are absorbed, giving way to primitive group dynamics. Moss makes much of the relationship between one’s feet and the ground. Her central character, teenaged Silvie, trusts her soles and little else: she is aware at all times of what is underfoot and whether it might harm her. She relishes warm rocks and solid ground.
She is unusually aware of light, too: at sunset, “the shadows of trees and grass leant long through air hazy with slanting gold light”; on a scorching day “the shade under the oak trees felt cavernous”.
Such careful observation makes this book – Silvie’s story – feel other and eerie. We soon find out what has made her so watchful. Her father is violent towards both her and her mother. Moss reveals this in telling glimpses. Silvie and her parents hear laughter through the trees. “I glanced at Dad, who didn’t always like it when people laughed.” Someone says “tits”. “I looked again at Dad but he wasn’t looking, wasn’t listening.” Oh, Silvie. Like the Iron Age woman whose torture and sacrifice we witness in flashback in the opening pages, she is reduced to “a body in fear … [a] fearful body”.
Moss doesn’t leave it there, though. She makes room, too, for the intuition of women and the kindness of strangers; for the sort of spirit that refuses to be submerged.