The Fell by Sarah Moss
The Fell by Sarah Moss is an exquisite short novel examining, in intimate detail, the lives of a small cast of characters in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. If the thought of that topic puts you off - we are alike - but you'll love it anyway.
It's nice enough being warm and comfortable, but she can almost feel Matt through the wall, feel his fear.
Falling for The Fell
One of life's great, simple pleasures is choosing a book for it's haunting cover and finding the pages it binds together hold a story to match it's excellence. The Fell by Sarah Moss is one such book. Moss (author of the excellent 'Ghost Wall') turns her attention to the dark nights of a winter in the covid pandemic novel that explores loneliness, mortality and compassion under duress.
Had the cover not drawn me in, I would have donned full PPE, socially distanced and sanitised before going near a book about the pandemic. I like my fiction to be fictional and had no desire to relive those horrid years of tension, boredom and introspection. I'm glad this one got through the barriers because I would have missed out on a simple but stunning story that puts, front and centre, the tensions of self-isolation and social distancing and how we reacted when we or others bent the rules.
Self-Isolation
In The Fell, Kate (a single mother to the teenage Matt), is climbing the walls rather than climbing the Fells above her rural home. In the midst of a two week self-isolation due to having a close contact, she is trapped indoors and misses her escape onto the moors and being in the café she had worked in before being furloughed. She decides to swap the isolation of her claustrophobic house for the isolation of the expansive fell and, close to night fall, escapes the house to get some clean air, up where she will be alone but not alone alone.
Escaping confinement, Kate passes by the house of her elderly neighbour, Alice, who spots her as she passes.
But, the rules.
Moss cleverly uses the pandemic to look deeply at how society reacts to the crisis and how it affects the interactions between others in our community. In order to protect humanity, and their own sanity, our characters battle with questions such as whether it is always right to follow the rules. Whether we should admonish and call attention to those who break them and whether we need more understanding of the frailties we share.
At the centre of these questions is Alice. Kate's neighbour, immunosuppressed after fighting cancer, knows Kate should be indoors. She knows the dangers of people ignoring quarantine advice and she feels its deeply unfair that she is all alone at home because of risk, whilst Kate flaunts the rules. However, whilst Moss subtly highlights such frustrations, Alice shows no likelihood of shopping her neighbour to the authorities.
The Search
The problem arises when Kate does not return from her excursion. Matt realises his mother should not have left and should have been back by now. In desperation, he washes his hands and rings Alice's doorbell to see if she has seen his mum. He reassures her he won't come in, so as to keep her safe. There is a poignant scene here. Alice clearly wants to welcome him in to stay, to reassure him. This is exactly where you think it is leading but Moss heartbreakingly pulls the rug and what might have been a touching scene of elderly support, turns into a longing for Alice and for Matt that cannot be realised.
This stroke was and example of the superb conflict within Moss's writing. The Fell is not a book that tells you that everything will be alright in the end. It is a book that shows you that connection is something to cherish because you might have to get lost on a mountain in order to find it once it has gone.
Gifts for book lovers...
The Fell by Sarah Moss