The Fell

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And then, there's my favorite tea quote: "And tea, Mum'll be glad to find tea in the pot when she comes in." 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

Maybe she’ll die without ever touching another human, maybe she’s had her last hug, handshake, air-kiss.” 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.IT WAS a matter of time until the first novels set during the still current Covid-19 pandemic would start to appear in print. A time during which so much that seemed impossible to imagine only two years ago will for ever leave its mark on our memory, and fiction can be a way to engage with some of those memories that seem far away already and yet also too close for a perspective that allows these to be truly in the past. The Fell explores the way individual freedom conflicts with collective responsibility . . . [It] crystalizes our shared moment of global danger and allows us to observe its different facets.” A second point of view is that of her son Matt, a relatively passive teenager, who spends his time in his room gaming or pondering on his relationship with his best friend. I would have liked to hear more from Matt but his contribution is minor and mainly involves worrying what has happened to his mum. It’s early evening in November 2020, Kate should be self isolating for fourteen days but she’s feeling claustrophobic and the lure of the Peak District Fells is proving hard to resist. Her elderly neighbour Alice sees her leave her property but it takes a while for her teenage son Matt to realise that she’s broken the quarantine rules. The story is told from several perspectives. I found The Fell a nuanced and thoughtful read, capturing many of the human emotions and preoccupations that the experience of living through a pandemic has raised. I certainly never had the impression, as some other reviewers have voiced, that the book is advocating an "anti-vax" or non-compliant position. Instead, I feel that Sarah Moss is espousing values of understanding, kindness and pulling together in adversity. Some personalities will inevitably find periods of isolation and containment more psychologically challenging than others, and many readers will have experienced the temptation to "bend the rules" a little as a managed risk over the course of the pandemic. Most of those occasions have presumably been relatively harmless, but it's in the nature of human experience for things to sometimes go awry - how would we ourselves deal with such a situation?

The Fell, with its one day in a pandemic focus, felt rather pedestrian and depressing. Kate, a furloughed single mom, is the main character and her quarantine breaking towards the hills behind her English village home goes very awry. Her teenage son Matt is game addicted, a recreational drugs user and in general bored. Then we have a bit better of elderly neighbour who very much fears the virus due to her recovering from cancer. In real life, I would have immediately leapt to sanctimonious judgment about brazen breakers of the Covid rules who thoughtlessly inflict their virality upon the old, infirm, and immunosuppressed, in radical denial of the common good. But I will admit found some measure of empathy for Kate, a vegetarian hippie who doesn't fit the profile of the right-wing anti-masker next door.A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. Despite Sarah Moss writing competently a lot of the book is characters musing on how the pandemic impacts them, what they can't do, worries nothing will ever be the same and reflecting on the overwhelming urge to do things they now can't. Unbearably suspenseful, witty and wise, The Fell asks probing questions about the place the world has become since March 2020, and the place it was before. This novel is a story about compassion and kindness and what we must do to survive.

One way of coping with this knowledge is to wax apocalyptic. Another is to find fair and just ways to live together – while we’re going through it, and after. Kate removes herself from the daily hum of pandemic life, and can see more clearly. Achieving this kind of perspective is precisely what fiction sets out to do, and what Moss does with great sensitivity. “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 – whisht, she thinks again, hush now. Walk.” The Fell is a funny, savage novel about the very recent past, and seems to do the impossible: hold a story that is still unfolding immobile enough to integrate into fiction.”This book is the latest by the author of (most recently) “Ghost Wall” in 2018 and “Summerwater” (in 2020). It will I think appeal strongly to fans of the latter as it shares much in common with that novel: a setting on a single day; a remote and harshly beautiful countryside setting; a build up of narrative tension; a series of third party point of view chapters (albeit in this book the chapters circle round the same group of four characters) – all written in a largely internal, loosely stream-of-consciousness style, often a little repetitive and circular (albeit in the way of people’s actual thoughts) and with clearly distinct internal voices for each character.

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! In addition to the drama of the search mission, we’re privy to the other characters’ concerns through their interior monologues. Rob is mourning the loss of a friend in a climbing accident he witnessed and butting heads with his teenage daughter, who accuses him of preferring the mountain to spending time with her, as her mother did before she and Rob divorced. The four characters of the book are: Kate – a single Mum, Matt her son, Alice her widowed neighbour recovering from cancer and so clinically vulnerable and Rob a divorced volunteer mountain rescuer with a teenage daughter he sees at weekends. Kate has been exposed to a COVID case so she and Matt are isolating, but when the claustrophobia of it gets too much Kate decides to walk up into the deserted moors (spotted by Alice who does not report her despite the attentions of her one child – a now married daughter with two children). When she does not return as darkness closes in, Matt alerts the authorities, while up on the moor Kate is in serious difficulties after a fall and Rob and his colleagues scramble to find her (Rob fearing she has deliberately gone to the moor to commit suicide). I THINK IT’S ready, Ellie says. Her hair, pale, silky, swings over her face as she peers into the oven. You get the plates, Dad. You’ll need the oven gloves, Rob hears himself say, and she sighs, as he knew she would. No, really, I thought it would be more fun to get like sixth-degree burns and spend the next four hours screaming in agony in the waiting room at A and E. Fourth degree, he says, there’s nothing after that.

Matt, 16, a touching character despite himself, is oblivious at first, and though Kate is spotted by their widowed neighbour, Alice, the older woman has been shielding for months so doesn’t stop her. Only the fourth of Moss’s characters, divorced Rob, has licence to be out and about; the fact that he soon will be, with night falling and the fog closing in, is a very bad sign indeed for Kate, because he is part of the mountain rescue service. One of its most unsettling attributes is the way it questions that elemental source of human succour: storytelling This is a book about three families in the pandemic. How life changes forever, how almost everybody struggles to keep their incomes, try to deal with children, worried about prices, and all that. A 4-star book, a little sad and dark for me. If there was any doubt whether the pandemic would inspire literature that will endure beyond the crisis, The Fell, a slender but illuminating lightning strike of a book, should put that to rest.” The Fell] exhibits truths and contradictions, and it contains a succinct, self-contained story that, simultaneously, encapsulates an author’s whole oeuvre.” 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.”