Kate is out and moving, going somewhere, the hill rising under her feet and the sky ahead of her. Wind in the trees and her body working at last, climbing, muscle and bone doing what they’re made for. She won’t be long, really she won’t, only a sip of outside, fast up the lane and over the fields, just a little way up the stone path for a quick greeting to the fells.
The Fell wonderfully captures the reality of our recent pandemic lockdowns — this isn’t metaphorical or an imagining of how some fictional pandemic might play out — this is the essence of November 2020. Set in England’s Peak District (in view of the orange glow of Manchester but the details are so relatable to this Canadian), as yet another stay-at-home order pits the essential workers against the furloughed, the rule-followers against the scofflaws, frazzled parents against bored children, one woman decides that she’s had enough. Although only on day eight of a two week quarantine (single mother Kate and her teenaged son, Matt, don’t have symptoms but they’ve apparently been exposed to someone with COVID), Kate is fed up with being locked down. Used to a daily ramble on the nearby fells, Kate grabs her rucksack as the day is waning — convinced she won’t meet anyone as the sky starts to drizzle, she doesn’t intend to be out long and doesn’t even say goodbye to her son — but when Matt realises she’s missing and the night turns dark and cold, he’s uncertain where to turn for help: Do you call the police when your Mom is breaking the law and risking a huge fine? As employed so well in Summerwater, author Sarah Moss uses rotating POVs to look at the pandemic (in this case, from four different perspectives; all believably real characters having varied experiences), but this is mostly Kate’s story, and as it unspools, we realise that it’s her fragile mental health that’s forcing her to act out. This is a short read — under 200 pages — so while it could have gone into more depth, it’s hardly shallow. Rounding up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I know, she said, I’m making a fuss, I just find this really hard, I knew I would . Not, he thought, as hard as getting sick, not as hard as Deepak’s dad who was in Intensive Care for three weeks or the grandparents of kids in his class who’ve died this year or his Maths teacher who’s back at work but can’t get enough breath for a sentence half the time, compared to that doing the garden instead of going up the fells is actually quite manageable, so how about he games and she does yoga in the garden and they hope neither of them starts with the fever and loss of taste and smell.
The lockdowns feel like a different world to me now, and like Kate’s neighbour, Alice (a retired widow whose recent battle with cancer labels her vulnerable; although comfortable and secure, she resents that her life has been narrowed to delivered groceries and meals with her family over videocall), I might find it hard to pinpoint what’s so terrible about being told to stay inside my cozy home, but it felt lousy nonetheless. Between all four of the characters featured, many of the common lockdown experiences were noted, and as for Kate, hers proves to be a story of what happens when the strain of the lockdowns is experienced by the mentally vulnerable:
She wishes sometimes you could just sign a disclaimer, like a Do Not Resuscitate order, promising that if you get sick you won’t go to hospital, won’t make any demands or expect any help, and in exchange you could take your own risks, decide how much you want to stay alive and at what cost to your sanity, but of course that’s not how it works, it’s not that the government care if you feel ill or die cheaply at home, it’s that they care if you pass the illness to people who will die expensively in hospital so it’s no use individuals trying to opt out, we’re biologically connected to each other and anyway that’s not how society works, she knows that, you can’t sign out of community and it’s not that she’d usually want to. She doesn’t disapprove of lockdown or masks or any of it, not on principle, only the longer this goes on the less she objects to dying and the harder it is to understand why other people don’t feel the same way.
One of the things I liked best about Summerwater were the various bits from the POV of animals and nature at large (a technique I also really liked in Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13; coincidentally also about a person gone missing while on a hike in the Peak District), and while Kate does hallucinate a conversation with a raven, the following was definitely to my tastes:
The raven flies down the valley. It’s hours yet, till sunrise. Sheep rest where their seed, breed and generation have worn hollows in the peat, lay their dreaming heads where past sheep have lain theirs. The lovely hares sleep where the long grass folds over them. No burrows, no burial. The Saukin Stone dries in the wind. Though the stone’s feet are planted deep in the rivulets, in the bodies of trees a thousand years dead, its face takes the weather, gazes eyeless over heather and bog. Roots reach deep, bide their time. Spring will come.
Ultimately: Yes, we’ve all been in this together, but we’re not all experiencing the pressures in the same way. Is a ramble in the fells the most selfish of acts if one’s mental health demands it? The Fell captures the essence of this question, and so much more about life in the pandemic, and it has the feeling of a durable artefact. Lovely little read that gives much to ponder on.
