There are tweaks – Ordnance Survey maps stand in for prehistoric foragers’ knowledge, and women and girls wear bras and knickers under their scratchy tunics – but they give it a good go: nothing to eat unless you catch or gather it, no clock but the sun, enforced cooperation.īut not all of the would-be “experiential archaeologists” are equal. It is some time in the recent past – before the advent of mobile phones and social media, but after the invention of CCTV and with the fall of the Berlin Wall still fresh in the mind – and a group has gathered in Northumberland to mount an experiment in iron age living. Here, Moss is again drawn to an adolescent female body, and although this time it is robust, its vulnerabilities and ambiguities provide ample opportunity for her to explore the fragile lines between inner and outer selves, function and dysfunction.

What comes next but human sacrifice?Ī story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the 'primitive minds' of our ancestors.S arah Moss is fascinated by bodies and isolation, and by bodies in isolation her last novel, the extraordinary Tidal Zone, portrayed the effects on a family when its teenage daughter is felled by a sudden, acute physical malfunction that she survives, but which may recur, with potentially fatal effect, at any time. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind. He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs-particularly their sacrifices to the bog. The students are fulfilling their coursework Silvie's father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession. They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age.įor two weeks, the length of her father's vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. The light blinds you there's a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside. A taut, gripping tale of a young woman and an Iron Age reenactment trip that unearths frightening behavior.

Ghost wall novel