“I felt Dad’s gaze on me,” Silvie says, “and knew with a shiver what he was thinking. They take turns saying what each would choose to sacrifice to the bog.
In one of the more chilling scenes in the novel, around the campfire one evening after the men return from a hike through Northumberland bogland, the group discusses the ancient practice of ritual sacrifice in the Iron Age. She is careful not to reveal to the others in their re-enactment group the truth of her heartbreaking situation, but spending time in the company of the students, especially Molly, and hearing about their studies and travel plans, about their freedom and independence, make an envious Silvie wonder, “How do you leave home, how do you get away, how do you not go back?”įor young Silvie, though, getting away seems unlikely.
A painful portrait of domestic abuse in this small family begins to emerge, with Silvie caught between her browbeaten mother and vicious father. The misguided zealotry that leads Bill to glorify the prehistoric past and its patriarchal structures drives his insistence on the brutal control of his family and the relegation of his wife and daughter to antiquated, subservient roles.
Silvie’s mother Alison has to persuade her husband to allow them to wear their own underwear, brush their teeth, and even use tampons: “Women managed well enough, he said, back in the day, without spending money on all that, ends up on the beach in the end, right mucky.” In pursuit of this absurd nativist claim, Bill has dragged his wife and daughter along on the strange excursion, doggedly determined that their every activity – from communal sleeping on bunks, to wearing uncomfortable tunics, to hunting and gathering every morsel of food – be authentic to the time period. By day, Bill is a bus driver, but his hobby – more accurately an obsession – is the study of early British history and the recapturing of the experience of an “original Britishness.” Her father, Silvie describes, “wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night.”
Ghost Wall’s seventeen-year-old protagonist, Silvie, is spending her summer holiday with her parents in the northern English county of Northumberland where her father Bill is taking part in an Iron Age re-enactment led by an archaeology professor and three of his students. Sarah Moss’s sixth novel, Ghost Wall, is a parable for our broken times, an eerie reminder that our darkest historical moments tend to repeat themselves in the presence of fear, irrationality, and a paranoid insistence on preserving a false idea of a more perfect past.
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