Ghost Wall
“Packs a punch.” “Good things come in small packages.” “Punches above its weight.” (Weird how ‘punch’ does double time when it comes to idioms about outsize force relative to size…guess we really do think of impact vis a vis mass?) Those are a handful of annoying phrases that one could use to describe a “small but mighty” (ugh) book. “Slim.” “Compact.” “Trim.” “Slender.” All ways that short novels are described. (No shame there — I’ve used them all.)
But maybe it makes sense because often the soundest truths are actually quite simple. Strip humans of our tendency to overthink, and the complexities of life might just fall into easy formation. Sometimes it’s the long and rambling (and how about “robust”?!) that shield the obvious from us.
Sarah Moss’ Ghost Wall gives us Silvie, whose bus-driver father is obsessed (and I do mean *obsessed*) with Britain’s Iron Age and volunteers his family to participate in a university-sponsored week-long “experiential archaeology” field trip, wherein they recreate life during this time alongside a professor and his students. “…that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there.”
That all sounds thoughtful and interesting until one realizes that Silvie has no sense of what’s “normal” in the real world. It takes a clear-headed university student — just a couple of years older than her — to demonstrate to Silvie some simple notions of how a family should (or shouldn’t) function.
I think many of Moss’ books are on the slimtrimcompact side, yet I thought the length of this one was sort of the point of the whole thing. Obvious shouldn’t be obscured — though far too often, it is.
(OK, I’m officially obsessed — but not in an Iron Age kind of way — with Moss. Too bad I have 20 other library books to wrestle with at the mo. 🫠)
originally published on instagram