4.5 Stars
The protagonist is 17-year-old Sulevia (Silvie) Hampton. Her father Bill, an amateur historian, insisted that Silvie and her mother join him in rural Northumberland to re-enact the life of Iron Age Britons. Bill is especially fascinated with the bog people. Because of his “self-taught expertise in outdoor survival, foraging, and mountaincraft,” he was invited to join a professor and three of his students in an experimental archaeology program for two weeks. Dressing in tunics, the participants forage for food and even build a ghost wall, a defensive palisade crowned by animal skulls.
Bill is obsessed with authenticity so, for example, he wants everyone to sleep in the roundhouse “on the splintery bunks . . . padded with three deerskins.” The professor is less concerned: “Professor Slade said, ah well, after all, authenticity was impossible and not really the goal anyway, the point was to have a flavour of Iron Age life.” The students are even less committed and not above bringing in contraband food. Molly, the one female student, is most lackadaisical; she even refuses to take part in certain activities like butchering rabbits. When the others are not enthusiastic about authenticity or the professor disagrees with him, Bill is not happy and his typical reaction is noteworthy: “Dad didn’t say anything. He lifted his chin, locked eyes with the fire. Mum hunched on her rock, touched her arm where I’d seen the bruise earlier.”
Bill’s attitudes are relics of the past. He expresses racist and xenophobic views. He is also a misogynist: he tends to be almost totally dismissive of women and their views. Even menstruation he sees as a failing: “in the old days women weren’t going around forever bleeding all over the place anyway, all those doings started later in life when there was less to eat and everyone better for it.” He doesn’t like his wife or daughter buying tampons because “Women managed well enough, he said, back in the day, without spending money on all that, ends up on the beaches in the end, right mucky.” He constantly scolds his wife for being late with meals she is expected to make on an open fire. He criticizes her for being fat but doesn’t like her exercising; she enjoyed swimming and attending a fitness class but “Dad hadn’t liked her doing either. Surprised you’d want people seeing you in your swimming costume, shape you’re in, he’d said.”
Molly doesn’t behave submissively. For instance, Molly refuses to eat the rabbit stew. In response, Bill mutters, “You’ll eat what you’re given, girl. . . . picky lasses went hungry, back then, . . . it weren’t for the likes of you to say who gets what.” Silvie hates when Molly challenges Bill: “My stomach clenched. Stop it, you don’t know what you’re stirring up, you have no idea how this goes, you can’t speak to him like that.” Since he cannot punish Molly, Silvie and her mother become the targets of his violence.
Silvie is a well-developed character. She is very knowledgeable about the natural world so she can identify plants and knows their uses. She is proud of her outdoor skills. She is also spirited and has some rebellious tendencies which antagonize her father. As is often the case with victims of abuse, she defends her abuser. She does have happy memories of good times with her father when she was younger. Seeing his daughter growing up obviously upsets Bill. He often accuses her of behaving inappropriately in front of the male students. When she innocently asks if she can sleep in a tent like the students, Bill’s response is telling: “Don’t be daft, he said, of course you can’t sleep wi’ the lads, shame on you. . . . I did not know what my father thought I might want to do, but he devoted considerable attention to making sure I couldn’t do it.” Interestingly, it seems that Silvie’s nascent sexual interest lies elsewhere.
Silvie is really trapped. Does her father see the ghost wall as a way of keeping her trapped? When the group discusses what they would sacrifice to the bog “if you were really scared or really desperate for something,” Bill looks at his daughter: “I felt Dad’s gaze on me and knew with a shiver what he was thinking. My daughter. Break her and stake her to the bog, stop her before she gets away.” Silvie’s encounters with the students, especially Molly, show her a way out. She admits, “University would have been a way of escaping” but she doesn’t know how to ask the questions she really wants to voice: “How do you leave home, how do you get away, how do you not go back?”
One of the major themes is expressed by the professor: “there’s no steady increase in rationalism over the centuries, it’s a mistake to think that they had primitive minds and we don’t.” Like so many of the boys in Lord of the Flies, the men become infused with tribal passions: “the Prof drumming with his head thrown back to the moon, at Dad himself sitting straight as if in church and joining a wordless chant, the two sceptical boys in the end not exchanging glances but intent on the bone-faces on high and swaying to rough music.” They also become transfixed by a desire to “kill things and talk about fighting.” The women usually do the foraging while the men set off “on some mission of violence against the local fauna.” Certainly, the author suggests a connection between ancient sacrificing rituals and present-day abuse.
The style of the book is not traditional. Speech indicators like paragraphing and quotation marks are not used. As a result there are some confusing passages: “Come on, she said, come and talk. Mum needs these, I said, Dad said. Yes, well, she said, I say. Come on. Tell me what they said.” Comma splices and sentence fragments abound: “Haven’t you been listening, people don’t bother to hurt what they don’t love. To sacrifice it.” Dialect is also employed: “I’ve some kecks you can take while you’re about it. But give us dinner first, we’re all clemmed.”
Though a quick read, this book has a lasting impact because it is so thought-provoking. It is a coming-of-age tale but so much more; it challenges the reader to think about domestic abuse, toxic patriarchy, class prejudices, connections between ancient and modern societies, and the various meanings of walls.
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