Bill has devoted his spare time – and that of his family – to the pursuit of the past, but this is perhaps not so much out of love or interest as a desire to eradicate the modern world, with mind-rotting TV, feminism and junk food, from their lives. As the group live out a pastiche of an ancient life, hunting, cooking in pots over open fires, learning to kill and skin animals, forage and become a part of the landscape, there is an eerie sense that the earth is somehow reclaiming them and that they are becoming more feral. The novel opens in the ancient past, with a young girl being sacrificed to the bog, and her terror and material symptoms of fear are swiftly and convincingly outlined, providing a context for the events which follow. In the uncomfortable relationship between Silvie and her father are traces of the dysfunctional relationship we see in Fiona Mozley’s Elmet, while the focus on the ancient landscape and human relationships with it recall Paul Kingsnorth’s Beast, though Moss’s book is very different. Bill is a bus driver, whose passion is for ancient history and archaeology, and the narrative is sprinkled with his urges to be authentic, which often involves violence and the subjugation of women. Her mother, Alison, is quiet, often ignored or treated as unimportant by both her family and the university group but Silvie’s father, Bill, rules the roost and moves the plot along. There is Silvie, a teenager whose life experience is very limited and whose home life is clearly troubled (and her name is really Sulevia, ‘an Ancient British goddess’ who turns out not to be particularly British after all). The focus, however, is on a family who join them. The students have fluctuating enthusiasm for this, and the academic seems rather on the fence about it too, not wanting to put the students off by being too strict about how ‘ancient’ their experience must be.

The events take place during a hot summer week when a group of students, with a somewhat bumbling professor, take part in ‘experiential archaeology’, living as though in the Iron Age for a week. This time, it’s set in the more recent past (late 20th century) but looks back to an ancient past that can only be reconstructed to a certain point. I’d been looking forward to reading Ghost Wall and was delighted when a lovely former student sent me a copy, and it’s a strange (in the best possible way), brief novel which I read in a couple of evenings. I’ve previously read Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children, both set in the nineteenth century though with powerful modern resonances. Ghost Wall is Sarah Moss’s sixth novel, and enthusiasm for her novels – diverse though often historical – seems to be growing, and rightly so.

Ghost wall novel