2023/169: The Fell — Sarah Moss

... when you deprive people of external stimulus their brains slow down, almost a survival strategy, who could bear to be running on all cylinders and locked in like this, you’d go mad, poison yourself with your own fumes. [p. 25]

Kate is desperate to escape the claustrophobic confines of the home she shares with her teenaged son, so she goes for a walk. But the country's in lockdown, and Kate is supposed to be isolating after a colleague caught Covid: she's breaking the law just by leaving her garden. And she's heading up to the fells, in November, without her phone and with dusk approaching.

This is a short but powerful novel about Covid, survival, the will to live, and the ways in which people's lives are inextricably intertwined. It's told from four points of view: Kate herself, with her lack of will to live ('the longer this goes on the less she objects to dying') and her frustration with lockdown restrictions; Matt, trying to make sense of his mother and occupying himself with online gaming and half-hearted attempts at housework; Alice, their next-door neighbour, who's a cancer patient and is terribly lonely; and Rob, a divorced father who volunteers with Mountain Rescue.

Moss's writing is spare and precise: I found it very evocative of that first winter of Covid, with the usual seasonal slump in my emotions magnified by hopelessness, loneliness (not something I generally suffer from) and rage. Kate's urge to be up in the high places, 'muscle and bone doing what they’re made for', enjoying her solitude, was immensely relatable: I also found Matt's helplessness and muddled emotions familiar, and I ached for Alice and her fear of her body's rebellion. Rob is, in a way, the outsider: but his sense of duty, and the guilt he feels at abandoning his teenage daughter to go out in the dark and the weather to search for a missing woman, is in sharp contrast to the inward-looking, self-absorbed narratives of the other three. (This is not a criticism of Kate, Matt or Alice: their circumstances force them to focus on their own lives, however much they'd like to be interacting with other people or with the wide open spaces.)

It's strange to read novels about the (ongoing) Covid pandemic, especially the first year with the lockdowns and the uncertainty, and remember how comprehensively it changed (and continues to change) my life. Moss, focussing so closely on her four characters, barely refers to the wider world, the political shenanigans and the massive social and economic shifts of 2020. I think I find this tight focus preferable to the novels which try to capture the mood of a nation, or a state, or a city. But watch this space!