Review: Ghost Wall — Sarah Moss

A book with a good idea, but an unattractive narrative

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss is a complicated book, in a good way and also in a bad way, and I’ll tell you why.

This book tells the story of Silvie and her family, who live in the North of England, far away from modern civilization and isolated in the forest. Silvie’s father is an Iron Age fanatic, so they literally make this period their lifestyle.

For a few weeks they host a group of students and a professor who is interested in the Iron Age period. They get to live and experience a life without internet, isolated, where they have to hunt rabbits for dinner or pick mushrooms, bathe in the river and other peculiarities belonging to this period.

This is the first time I read a book by the author, when I saw Ghost Wall in the bookstore the synopsis caught my attention, the reviews seemed good and I decided to give it a chance. The book has only 152 pages and it took me a long time to finish it for one reason: the narrative dragged.

The book is narrated in the first person by Silvie, and her narrative is full of descriptions. This is not 100% negative, but the excess of description in a narration that remains without much movement makes us lose interest.

I believe that this slow narrative is also due to the character’s personality. She is someone who is in the shadows, a victim of structural sexism and also of violence, since her father is literally a man of stones, full of prejudice and who takes out all his anger on his daughter.

Silvie and her mother live in this abusive environment, at the hands of a barbaric man.

These are aspects that we notice between the lines: how the character is cornered by male chauvinism and violence. The routine of the characters is slow, there are many details of the search for food and hunting, the dialogue follows little by little, and Silvie forms a knot in our throat that won’t go down.

When I was near the end things started to become clearer to me. Silvie reminded me a little of the character in Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star. These are characters that have nothing special, but provide strong stories that mark the reader.

In short, Silvie is a nothing to the men in this book, a worthless object. The only people who see her as a human being are the two other women in the story.

I confess that in several moments I was bored with the reading, because of the narrative style, the excess of details, the linearity of the story and its slowness, the dialogues not being separated which demand a much more attentive reading from the reader.

This non-separation of dialogues in a first person narrative can confuse the reader a bit. The character is in a thought flow and suddenly a dialogue enters, I think authors who do this are brilliant, but it can be off-putting depending on how the story follows.

When I finished reading, I thought: the last two pages were worth the whole book. Because there I felt a much stronger emotion, at this moment I didn’t want the book to end. It was the emotion that I didn’t feel in the previous 150 pages.

I’m not saying that I loved the book, nor that it made it onto my favorites list. To be honest, I’m still on the line between liking it and not liking it.

However, it was interesting this mirror that the author built, showing that maybe our society is not so different from the one in the past. That maybe even some values haven’t changed that much.

Silvie’s relationship with her parents is also very interesting, so the book offers several psychological points that are worth a closer look.

So, I can say that I enjoyed the ideas the book brings and the reflections it provides much more than the story itself. Narrative, structure and plot were not very appealing, but the author knew how to touch on points worth thinking about.