Review of THE FELL by Sarah Moss (New Release)

 4.5 Stars

I’ve read three other novels by Sarah Moss (Ghost Wall, The Tidal Zone, and Summerwater) and have loved them all.  The Fell is another excellent book. 

The Fell is set in November 2020 in the Peak District during a strict Covid lockdown in the U.K.  Kate and her 16-year-old son Matt are in the middle of a two-week mandatory quarantine period because of an exposure to Covid-19.  Kate is an outdoors person, someone “who needs to be out the hills every day no matter the weather,” so one late afternoon, after a week of quarantine, she sneaks out for a walk on the moors, certain that she will meet no one.  She leaves without telling Matt, believing that she will return before he even knows she’s gone.  Unfortunately, Kate falls and is injured. 

I loved the book’s structure.  Chapters alternate among four characters whose perspectives are given in interior monologues.  Besides the viewpoints of Kate and Matt, the reader gets to know Alice, a wealthy widow who is immune-compromised and lives next door to Kate, and Rob, a volunteer with the local search-and-rescue team. 

Each of the four characters is faced with a conflict around a question:  What is the right thing to do?  The quarantine has crushed Kate’s spirit and left her struggling with her mental health; she knows she isn’t supposed to leave her property but she believes she will expose no one and that no one will know that she has broken the rules.  Matt, when he realizes his mother is missing, struggles with reporting her missing when doing that could result in a major fine.  Alice must maintain social distancing because of her health but wants to help Kate and offer comfort to Matt.  Rob is divorced and has limited time with his daughter; when she is staying with him, he is called for a search mission and so is torn between his family responsibilities and helping his team find a stranger who has gone missing.

Because of the interior monologue format, the reader comes to know each of the characters intimately:  the important relationships in their lives, and their hopes, fears, and regrets.  Kate’s chapters also include imagined conversations with a raven that she encounters and accompanies her on her walk.  We see the impact of the pandemic and restrictions on individual lives, its emotional toll.  Alice, for example, knows she has no right to feel imprisoned in her “comfy house, mortgage paid off” but she misses human connection and human touch:  “No one’s touched her in months . . . Maybe she’ll die without ever touching another human, maybe she’s had her last hug, handshake, air-kiss.”  She decides that when restrictions lift, she will go to a spa and “have a massage, feel another person’s hands on her skin for as long as she wants to – two massages, or three – to be touched!” 

The book also examines the consequences of actions.  Kate’s actions, for instance, affect others.  Matt worries about Kate, as does Alice, and Rob loses time with his daughter because of Kate’s decision to go for a walk.  Kate’s choice will leave the reader both disagreeing and empathizing.   Though financially stressed, Kate knows she is not as badly off as others; she is safe in her home and not facing domestic abuse like other women.  Nonetheless, her mental health is suffering:  “the longer this goes on the less she objects to dying.”  Are the rules more important than her sanity?

I appreciated the novel’s balanced view; it recognizes both the need for Covid measures and the negative effects of Covid protocols.  Kate “doesn’t disapprove of lockdown or masks or any of it.”  While working at a café, she expects people to wear masks properly to protect others:  “it’s not as if it’s hard to wear a mask over your nose as well as your mouth for five minutes while you buy your bread and milk, is it?”  She’s “always been the one who says something [about wearing a mask properly], someone has to, what you walk past is what you tolerate.”  At the same time, she believes “indoor transmission is the problem, if the people in charge had any sense they’d be setting limits on how many hours you can spend inside, shooing people out into the wind and the fresh air instead of locking us in.”  She worries about life after the pandemic:  “And of course life won’t go back to the way it was, it never does and rarely should.  There will be holes in the children’s education, a generation that’s forgotten or never learnt how to go to a party, people of all ages who won’t forget to be afraid to leave the house, to be afraid of other people, afraid to touch or dance or sing, to travel, to try on clothes.”   And she worries about the long-term effects of isolation:  “no one knows how to unlock the cage and we’re all forgetting how to go back to the group.”

Though serious, there are some touches of humour.  Kate asks the raven, “Are you a spirit guide or my mother?  Oh God what if it’s both?”  And I couldn’t help but admire the author’s wordsmithing:  Kate has seen ravens around lambs and comments, “I’ve seen you at dying lambs, Raven, your kind.  Your unkind.”

I hesitated to read a pandemic novel, but I’m glad I read this one.  It captures the emotions we’ve all experienced:  the anxiety, depression, fear, and helplessness.  It reflects our waiting for the pandemic to end and “the appalling uncertainty of hope, the risk of letting yourself believe there might be good times again.”  In a strange way, the book was a comforting read because it shows that we are not alone in our frustrations.  Perhaps all we can do is to try our best because life has “to be lived, somehow.”  We might, like Kate, make mistakes, but “we all need saving from the consequences of our own idiocy once in a while.”

This is a short book covering a short time period, but it is not short on quality. 

Note:  I received a galley from the publisher via NetGalley.