Summerwater – Sarah Moss (2020) 199 pages

I was keen to read Summerwater by Sarah Moss, as I’d been really impressed by Ghost Wall when I read it for NADIM back in 2020. For me Summerwater wasn’t as strong as Ghost Wall, but it was still impressive and a compelling read.

Set in a holiday cabin park on the side of a loch, the narrative moves between the various tourists, building a picture of different families, the individuals and their relationships to each other.

It won’t stop raining and the enclosed small spaces are causing tension between nearest and dearest:

“It’s a thin partition, she says, I can hear everything, it’s not nice. It puts you off, lying there listening to aggressive peeing from someone who could perfectly well just bloody sit down but won’t because in his head the masculinity police are watching even in the middle of the night, hiding, peering through windows or crouching in the laundry basket.”

There are families with frustrated adult children, families with young children, happy marriages, tense marriages, the older couple who have been coming for years and own their cabin:

“He pours, from higher than necessary, admires the shape of the falling liquid and the steam curling from it, an indoor imitation of the mist between the trees.”

Although there is a lot of foreboding in the novella – the rain, the lack of phone signal, a traumatised soldier living in the woods, people with serious health concerns – there is a lot of humour too. The young couple trying to achieve simultaneous orgasms while one of them self-censors her less-than-woke fantasies made me laugh:

“You can’t expect a man to give you an orgasm if you keep thinking about particulates and genocides.”

It is resolutely a novel of its time, with references to Brexit and the pandemic (which is why they are all holidaying in Britain) but these elements felt well-integrated and while they will place the story I don’t think they will date it.

I think my reservation about Summerwater was the ending. It felt unnecessarily dramatic, as if Moss didn’t have enough faith in the rounded portraits and complex relationships she’d expertly created to let them play out and be enough. Although foreshadowed lightly, the ending didn’t feel integrated within the rest of the story. But there was still so much to recommend this novella and I’m looking forward to catching up on the Sarah Moss novels I’ve yet to read.

“She’s always liked thinking about birds and stars more than actually looking at them”