After a break last year, I’ve decided to return to my novella a day project in May. I always try and give myself a head start of a few posts and I’ve not managed as many as I would have liked this year, so we’ll see how it goes… My TBR is ridiculous so if I can stick to this, it will hopefully help!

The Fell – Sarah Moss (2021) 180 pages

I wasn’t really in the market for a pandemic novel, but I was so impressed by the previous novellas I’d read by Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall and Summerwater (particularly the former) that I decided to give The Fell a try.

This novella is reminiscent of Summerwater, written just a year earlier, in its use of multiple viewpoints. There is no direct speech but the story progresses from the points of view of Kate, a furloughed waitress; her teenage son Matt; their elderly neighbour Alice; and local volunteer Rob.

Kate and Matt have been told to self-isolate in their cottage in the Peak District, having been exposed to someone with Covid-19 infection. Kate is really struggling, while her son is more stoical:

“I know, she said, I’m making a fuss, I just find this really hard, I knew I would. Not, he thought, as hard as getting sick, not as hard as Deepak’s dad who was in Intensive Care for three weeks or the grandparents of kids in his class who’ve died this year or his maths teacher who’s back at work but can’t get enough breath for sentence half of the time, compared to that doing the garden instead of going up the fells is actually quite manageable, so how about he games and she does yoga the garden and they hope neither of them starts with the fever and loss of taste and smell.”

But Kate breaks the isolation, risking spreading the disease, a £10,000 fine or imprisonment, in order to go for a walk on the fell. She doesn’t take her phone with her and she reasons she won’t see anyone up there anyway.

“Damp, not quite raining. Keep moving, get warm. The relief of it, being out, being alone, starting to warm up from her own effort, wind and sky in her lungs, raindrops on her face, weather.”

Alice, her neighbour who is classed as extremely vulnerable due to her cancer diagnosis, sees Kate go.

 “Self-isolating, one of those horrible new nonsensical phrases. Social distancing, whoever came up with that […] medical distance, they should call it, or why not just safe distance, and when did ‘distance’ become a verb? Language is also infected. Return, George Orwell, England has need of thee.”

Alice was my favourite character, baking biscuits and worrying about her weight, blasting out tunes to cheer herself up, and refusing any self-pity:

“More Springsteen, there’s a reason they don’t write protest anthems about well-off retired people feeling a bit sad.”

The pandemic means that as well as isolation and frailty, she also has to contend with Zoom calls with her daughter’s family:

“Sometimes Alice thinks she’d rather have a Radio 4 podcast than Susie with her dinner.”

Kate’s walk doesn’t go according to plan, and she ends up stranded with one, possibly two broken limbs. Rob and his team of volunteer Mountain Rescue therefore have to risk themselves coming together to try and find her, and Matt is old enough and astute enough to pick up the police’s hinting questions as they try and ascertain whether Kate is a suicide risk.

All this means Kate is not a sympathetic character, but her harsh self-judgement and realisation of the impact of what she has done portrays her as a flawed human who took a really bad decision. And now she is being haunted by a raven:

“Go away, Kate thinks, bugger off. Are you a spirit guide or my mother? Oh God what if it’s both.”

Five years on from the time portrayed, and surely written very close to it for a publication date of 2021, The Fell has aged well. It captures a lot from the pandemic, and certainly reminded me about elements of daily life then which I had largely forgotten. However, it is not beholden to its pandemic setting. The characterisation is strong enough that it is a story of four people bound together psychologically by an extreme situation, while remaining entirely physically separated. It explores what survival means for different people, and the prices paid for endurance.

“You’d just sometimes rather have dark conviction than the appalling uncertainty of hope.”