The Fell

Product Information

The Fell conveys the particular anxieties of the time: the precautions about touching surfaces, the financial stress of furlough and the dread of denunciation by neighbours

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: Things go badly wrong for Kate and it changes what's only been a theoretical crisis into a real crisis. The narrative revolves between the perspectives of Kate, Matt, their older neighbour Alice who is shielding at home and rescue worker Rob. It movingly follows the mental process many of us have gone through when confined at home with all the attendant fear, boredom, frustration and self-pity as well as feelings of guilt for reacting like this when we reason that there are other people who are suffering in more severe ways than we are. 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?

There is always the electric touch of danger lacing its fingers through [Moss’s work] . . . It’s the end of the world, seen from a particular angle only the incisive Sarah Moss could show us.”

With Moss’s trademark attention to both the beauty and danger of the natural world, the moors come alive as almost another character. But Kate’s delight at having escaped outdoors is short-lived: with night approaching, she falls and breaks her leg. 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. Alice is their next door neighbour, an older woman who has recently finished chemotherapy and is clinically vulnerable and isolating. Rob is a mountain rescue volunteer.

I was not as impressed as others by the writing style but was quite good even though I tend to dislike stream of consciousness. However, it was not good enough to elevate my opinion of this book. 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 raven flies down the valley. It’s hours yet, till sunrise. Sheep rest where their seed, breed and generation have worn hollows in the peat, lay their dreaming heads where past sheep have lain theirs. The lovely hares sleep where the long grass folds over them. No burrows, no burial. The Saukin Stone dries in the wind. Though the stone’s feet are planted deep in the rivulets, in the bodies of trees a thousand years dead, its face takes the weather, gazes eyeless over heather and bog. Roots reach deep, bide their time. Spring will come. The author's lyrical yet restrained style is so lovely, and here again the prose is a stream of consciousness style that feels right in the claustrophobic context. But I have to wonder, as I do with Julie Otsuka and her clinging to the second person voice, if she will offer the reader another aspect of her writing.

There is wit, there is compassion, there is a tension that builds like a pressure cooker. This slim, intense masterpiece is one of my best books of the year.” The Fell reflects the lives we have been living for the last 18 months in a way no other writer has dared to do. There is wit, there is compassion, there is a tension that builds like a pressure cooker. This slim, intense masterpiece is one of my best books of the year -- Rachel JoyceUnfortunately, Kate's "harmless" stroll on the fell takes an unexpected turn when she ventures further than intended, falls and injures herself as night and bad weather descend. Without her mobile phone, Kate is in real danger, particularly as she has told nobody where she was going. At home, Matt becomes increasingly more concerned about his mother's whereabouts, conferring at a distance with Alice and wrestling with the competing pressures of ensuring his mother's safety, while not exposing her to the risk of a large fine she can ill afford to pay.

A masterfully tense, deeply empathetic novel about lives stilled and re-examined, 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 -- Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From I found it difficult to write a review for this book mainly because it was by far the most irritating book I read in 2021.The Fell] exhibits truths and contradictions, and it contains a succinct, self-contained story that, simultaneously, encapsulates an author’s whole oeuvre.” The Fell is a timely reflection on the human condition when subjected to unfamiliar stressors. I'd recommend it to any reader who enjoys quality literary and/or contemporary fiction, and those with a particular interest in the way individuals have experienced and responded to the worldwide pandemic. At dusk on a November evening in 2020 a woman slips out of her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of two weeks of isolation, but she just can't take it any more - the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. And anyway, the moor will be deserted at this time. Nobody need ever know. In England there were all the hotlines where you were encouraged to dob in your neighbours and there was nothing like that in Ireland