May 14 2025, 09:00

Ghost Wall

Author: Sarah Moss

First published: 2018

Granta Publications. 145 pages, 250 words/page, ~36000 words. First person as Sylvie.

This was a tough read. The prose is lyrical, often beautiful, but the physical abuse Sylvie suffers was hard to stomach . It opens with the sacrifice of a young woman at some time in the past by the community she grew up in. Then we meet Sylvie who, with her parents, is on a field trip with a group of archaeology students in modern-day Northumberland.

Sylvie’s father is a bus driver with an obsession with the Iron Age, and he’s managed to tag along with a professor’s class who are to live as people would have done over a thousand years ago. They wear scratchy tunics, use similar utensils, hunt and forage in the local woodland, and wash in the nearby river. Sylvie wants to be more like the carefree students, but her father is strict and abusive, even in front of the others. Sylvie is attracted to Molly, one of the students, who notices marks on Sylvie’s back from her father’s beatings and decides to take action.

The story swings between the overbearing world of Sylvie’s parents and the freedoms of the students. Her father has a racist idea of being connected to the original peoples of Britain and believes women should be controlled at home. The professor ignores these attitudes and indulges him in long conversations about how things might really have been. The students know something is wrong, but only Molly steps up to help Sylvie break free. It’s a story about the complex feelings of being a victim of abuse, the suffocating patriarchal structures that exist now and all through history, and how in a group people often don’t challenge authority even when something is going obviously wrong.

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