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The Fell

The Fell

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Carefully, affectingly and with emotional veracity, Moss opens out Alice's secrets along with everyone else's: the mortal fears, the losses, the mistakes. Moss writes so compassionately about human frailty while her own work is as close to perfect as a novelist's can be * The Times * The only parts of her life she enjoys are her job, which provides her with social interaction and some extra food, and the wild beauty of the Peak District, the area where she lives. One of the very best British novelists writing today about contemporary life—if anyone can justify writing a pandemic novel, she's the woman for the job.” People primarily feeling sorry about themselves, or if not overtly that, then minutely describing what causes them inconvenience or self doubt. This first longer fiction I read about COVID-19 disappointed me. Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for giving me a chance to read The Fell by Sarah Moss, I have given my honest review.

That’s how I reacted to The Fell: baking bread and biscuits, a family catch-up on Zoom, repainting and clearouts, even obsessive hand-washing … the references were worn out well before a draft was finished. Ironic though it may seem, I feel like I’ve found more cogent commentary about our present moment from Moss’s historical work. Yet I’ve read all of her fiction and would still list her among my favourite contemporary writers. Aspiring creative writers could approach the Summerwater/ The Fell duology as a masterclass in perspective, voice and concise plotting. But I hope for something new from her next book. Yes at first, there were so many grump and fuss about limitations. I know it's hard and has a serious of consequences, but really? So bad you compare with world wars?! The only thing we have to do is stay at home, Okay it's our home, is it so awful? I'm not going to judge but this was too much.Incredibly, the author seemed to be implying that his ‘selfish’ pleasure derived from his volunteer work in some way equates his actions with those of Kate! I'm at that stage of life where I'm sorting out what's important and want to organize my 'stuff' and set loose any extra baggage. So, the following sentences resonated with me: I've been left sorely disappointed by the early crop of Covid novels, including Sarah Hall's Burntcoat, and it would be sacrilege to even mention the existence of Gary Shteyngart's painfully unfunny satire Our Country Friends in the same paragraph as earnest, good-faith literary efforts like this one.

If we’ve learned anything from this past year, it’s that autonomy is as illusory in real life as it is for fictional characters. Mia LevitinIndeed, one of the most profoundly unsettling attributes of The Fell is the way it questions that elemental source of human succour: storytelling . . . ‘Accumulating dread’ is what Moss atomises so brilliantly here but it should be added that this is also a very funny book.” A one-sitting read that's both thriller and stream of consciousness meditation on how Covid has changed our world . . . ambitious and immersive * Red * Moss has always been adept at plumbing the psyche’s inkier depths, and as she flits between people, channelling the free indirect style that gave her last novel, Summerwater, such polyphonic momentum, their anxieties heighten a gathering sense of existential doom. Interestingly, though these span everything from the climate emergency to the degradation of language and zombie mink, Covid itself is way down the list, functioning more as an intensifying trigger. The story is told through a stream of consciousness narrative from the perspectives of four people- Kate, Matt, Alice and Rob. Kate’s thoughts flit between her financial worries compounded by fear of being fined on account of her breaking quarantine laws , her son Matt and the life choices she is made to reflect upon through a dazed and delirious conversation with a raven she meets on her expedition. Matt concerned for Kate’s physical and emotional well-being is made to mull over his own behaviors and feelings, realizing how much is at stake for him for his mother to return home safe and sound. On one hand we see him as a difficult self absorbed teenager while on the the other we see the mature way in which tries to remain hopeful busying himself with household chores while responsibly interacting with his next door neighbor Alice keeping with quarantine regulations . Alice is an elderly widow and cancer survivor struggling to adjust to the isolation brought on by the pandemic and recent widowhood , but tries to remain hopeful and keep up Matt’s spirits while making plans to lead a fuller life once the pandemic ends. Rob, the mountain rescue volunteer whose team along is tasked with finding Kate, ponders over whether Kate’s action were deliberate and whether she was driven to drastic behavior motivated by personal reasons while also questioning his own motivations for volunteering for such risky endeavors in his downtime often at the cost of his personal relationships.

The narratives belong to forty-year-old, single mother Kate, her teenage son, Tom, their widowed older neighbour, Alice, and Rob, a divorced volunteer mountain rescuer. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

Summary

Perhaps Moss was just dramatizing the horrible endless kitchen-sink drudgery and banality of those days spent cooking, housecleaning, and online, but while I could personally relate to surviving months of Groundhog Days, I didn't want to relive them, and these characters' experiences with loneliness and isolation just felt flat and banal to me. One of the things I liked best about Summerwater were the various bits from the POV of animals and nature at large (a technique I also really liked in Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13; coincidentally also about a person gone missing while on a hike in the Peak District), and while Kate does hallucinate a conversation with a raven, the following was definitely to my tastes: Translating her fury at the impact on individuals into fiction was, however, a different matter. For a time she was, like many of us, “overwhelmed by the various kinds of fear and anxiety”, uncertain that our experiences could be represented in art and culture. A keen theatre-goer, she resisted watching live performances digitally “because they just made me desperately sad. I mean, I do not want to watch a live-stream play with no audience. I want to be in the theatre, and if I can’t be in the theatre, I’d rather have nothing.” In England there were all the hotlines where you were encouraged to dob in your neighbours and there was nothing like that in Ireland A masterfully tense, deeply empathetic novel about lives stilled and reexamined, and the uncertainty and danger of the world that surrounds them. I was completely riveted by the central questions of its narrative, and by its tender, insightful exploration of the times we are living through.”

The main thing this did well is take into consideration the many different experiences we all had during the pandemic. The way some of us were forced to stay home despite home never having been a safe space. The way some of us resented working all through the pandemic while others were able to have the spring and summer off and then some. The way some of us had it off involuntarily and without government benefits to support, digging a deeper and deeper hole and not giving us so much as a stepping stool to help ourselves out. I can’t say it’s all encompassing, but I was impressed by how much it did cover.The Fell is very much a novel of our time . . . it takes note of the moment, and captures what seemed unimaginable even a year before it was set. But it also offers hope . . . there may be a time when what is described here is, indeed, in the past, and a novel like The Fell will help us to remember * Church Times *



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