Book Summary and Reviews of The Fell by Sarah Moss

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Cloggie Downunder

Topical, evocative and moving.
“This is like the seconds between falling and landing, you know it’s going to end and you don’t want it to, all you can want now is for time to go more slowly than it does.”

The Fell is the eighth novel by best-selling British author, Sarah Moss. The audio version is narrated by Emma Lowndes. It’s November 2020 in England’s Peak District. Café waitress and single mum, Kate, and her son Matt are eight days into their two-week self-isolation due to exposure to a close contact. While Matt is happy to spend time on video games or vegging out, Kate, very much an outdoor person, has already exhausted the possibilities of decluttering, and is quickly going up the wall. But breaking quarantine would attract a huge fine that she definitely can’t afford.

In the garden late that afternoon, looking up at the fell: “It feels like another country up there, especially in winter when there’s no one around, when you can walk an hour or two before you see someone else, you and the wind and the sky. She can see from here there’s no one on the path, she’d actually be further from another soul there, less likely to pass on disease, than she is here not two meters from Alice’s garden”.

She changes into her boots, grabs a backpack and goes. “She couldn’t come within spitting distance of another person if she wanted to, out here. And she won’t be long, just an hour before sunset, she’ll be back before Matt even knows she’s gone.”

But up there “… the point is that single parents should stay alive if only to earn the money, not that she’s earning enough money, and if walking a few more minutes, another mile or so, over the darkening hill makes it easier to stay alive, what harm does it do?”

Lying on the mountain with a broken leg and other injuries, delirious, Kate’s subconscious, in the form of a snarky raven brilliantly rendered by Emma Lowndes, batters her with criticism: “What poor decisions, Kate, what ill-advised acts, set you on this path? At what point in your life, Kate, would you say it became inevitable that you would end up a criminal, alone and injured on a mountain in the dark?”

Spanning less than twenty-four hours, the story is carried by three other narratives besides Kate’s: Rob, part of the Mountain Rescue Team, leaves his teenaged daughter at home on his access weekend, much to her chagrin, to help look for Kate; Kate’s neighbor, Alice sees her pass on the path and later alerts the police when Matt, concerned for his mother, asks for help; Matt sits at home, trying to dismiss, as he waits for news from the searchers, the questions about Kate’s mental state, because his mother would never take her own life. Would she?

Moss doesn’t use quote marks for speech. Instead, each narrative reads like a stream of consciousness, making it almost forgivable. She does give the reader some gorgeous descriptive prose: “There’s no summit, exactly, just a great expanse of moorland under the sky where you can walk for hours using the rocks and lonely rowan trees for landmarks. It’s like walking on water, like walking over ocean swell, and the wind ruffling the heather and the bog cotton the way it ruffles the sea.” Topical, evocative and moving.

Other books by Sarah Moss at BookBrowse

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