Silvie’s own name is short for Sulevia, a local goddess of springs and pools, or, as Silvie, quoting her father, half-reluctantly, half-defensively puts it, “A proper British native name.” As that “proper” suggests, her father’s idea of authenticity is moralizing at best, overtly racist at worst: describing the Picts’ resistance to the Romans (“the Romans are the end of what he likes”), he says “there weren’t dark faces in these parts for nigh on two millennia after that, were there?” (he’s already rejected Indian food as “Paki muck”). In making this distinction, the professor ineffectually pushes back against Silvie’s father’s desire to imagine a purely British origin story. Britons, her father calls them Celts, the professor demurs, citing the current preferred terminology. That story is told by seventeen-year-old Silvie, who, together with her parents and an anthropology professor and three of his students, spends two weeks in the summer of 1991 reenacting the lives of the Iron Age inhabitants of Northumberland. (I wanted to say “naturally,” but the point of the book is to critique naturalness, not as a meaningless concept but as one much open to abuse.) They’re expressed in deceptively simple prose and arise seamlessly from a compelling story. But its ideas aren’t stern, dogmatic, or bloodless. Like all of Moss’s work - she has written four novels and a memoir of a year spent in Iceland - Ghost Wall is really smart. Moreover, they inflict their pain disproportionately - most of the victims are women. These fantasies are pernicious because they confuse sacrifice with victimization. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.Īny changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel.Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall indicts fantasies of authenticity and tradition.

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Ghost wall book review