She compares modern humans to the Ancients, and neither of us come out looking too good.

People who look to racial purity, our ancestors, gender roles, and building (ghost) walls as ideal examples of how to live. Moss's criticism here does not seem to be of men who abuse their wives and children, but of people who revere the past. As is revealed through the conversations and the digging into the past in this novella: there has never been such a thing. In a time of Brexit, this is a smart and subtle evisceration of 'taking our country back' of going back to some time of pure Britishness.

What Ghost Wall is really about is identity and misinformed ideas of racial purity. The domestic abuse is only part of what this book tells us, and it is only the very surface level of the story. Still, it surprises me that so many see this as simply a feminist tale about abuse and downtrodden wives. The harrowing prologue drew me into this book, but the mostly quiet pastoral story that follows belies how dark and deep the themes of this novel truly are. But, of course, it all has a sinister twist. Out in the countryside of Northumberland, they hunt for rabbits and gather roots. Silvie's father is an angry and dissatisfied bus driver whose obsession with Iron Age tools and rituals leads him to force his family into isolation. Ghost Wall tells the tale of Silvie and her family, who attempt to live like Iron Age Britons in the North of England. 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. 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 ghost wall sarah moss