Doesn't it feel strange

[breathedout]

Doesn't it feel strange, I heard myself ask, putting your fingers exactly the way someone put hers only she's been dead for a few hundred years? Louise smiled, as if it was fine for me to join in. Not to me, she said, not anymore, anyway, I'm always trying to do what dead people tell me. And especially when I'm making a replica, spending days looking at and feeling and listening to some prehistoric object, I'm kind of trying to think their thoughts too. I mean, it would make sense, wouldn't it, that when I really concentrate on the spaces between decorative dots or the exact tension of a twist, my mind's doing what their minds did while my hands do what their hands did. I sometimes think I can tell when two pieces from the same site were made by the same prehistoric person, because the way my hands move is the same. I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the reenactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, we or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds. It's a shame I couldn't bring a loom, Louise was saying, it would have been interesting for you to see, perhaps I should ask Jim to arrange a session in my studio next term.

—Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

I am thus far enjoying this novella not only (predictably) for the meditations on hauntings and the ways in which our interactions with artefacts of a past world interface with our perceptions of our own world, but also for the painful but believable psychology of the first-person narrator, a 17-year-old girl bullied into submission by her father. Also for the portrait of said father's British-nativist xenophobia as filtered through the lens of a daughter who has maybe 2/3 of an analysis of what's going on there. It's very well done.

(Also, hello! Apologies for vanishing; the social media and meatspace-life juggle continues apace. How have you been, friends?)

Comments

[breathedout]

I keep thinking of you, actually, because her style strikes me as a poet's prose: spare, supple yet intentional, with a steady, well-realized voice. But it's interesting you didn't like her previous work; what about it?

I too LOVE evocations of occupying shared space with people of the past, and as such this book both plays into my weaknesses for that and also challenges them a little bit (because the narrator's father's worship of the past is all tied up with his xenophobia & investment in the supposed purity/superiority of a pre-Roman Britain--not a quality I share, but it does make me interrogate my own investment in the past as a concept, a bit). We'll see where she takes it; I'm only about 1/3 through.

[starshipfox]

So apparently I have been wronging Moss, because I was thinking of a completely different person when I said I didn't like her work. I'm not sure who I was thinking of, but Moss didn't write the book I didn't like. I guess if you read as many books as we do, you'll get mixed up sometimes! Sorry, Sarah Moss.

It's good when a book forces you to interrogate your own perceptions: for me, too, my interest in the past isn't tied up in the idea of purity or xenophobia -- or the idea that anything, aside from our proximity to environmental collapse, was any better -- but why am I so drawn to it? I definitely associate a proximity to the past with a sense of the numinous, which probably means I overlook its hardship and violence at times. Anyway, it sounds like Moss's book is interesting, and I shouldn't have been dismissing it so readily!