Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on March 1, 2022
At its heart, The Fell is a meditation on the effects of social isolation. Those effects have been exacerbated for some during the pandemic, but loneliness can strike even when isolation is not encouraged by health policies. The story morphs into a wilderness rescue, but the plight of the victim creates little tension. The primary focus is on the thoughts of the central characters: an injured woman, her young son, their neighbor, and a member of the search-and-rescue team.
Anxiety pervades the characters in The Fell. They live in or near the mountains and moors on the outskirts of Greater Manchester in the County of Derbyshire. They are enduring pandemic quarantine rules that trap them in their homes. People are allowed outside only for essential purposes. The police use drones to record and shame people who engage in recreational walking. The central character views the quarantine in the broader context of history, a reminder that “the authorities have never liked to have commoners walking the land instead of getting and selling.”
When life in quarantine becomes too much for Kate, she takes a walk in the fells. (I had to look this up, but “fell walking” in Northern England refers to walking in hills and high land.) Whether the walk is illegal (Kate seems to think so) or only strongly discouraged by government policy (as another part of the book seems to suggest), Kate and her son both believe she should have stayed inside. That becomes obvious to the reader when, quarantine notwithstanding, Kate falls in the failing light and breaks her leg.
Kate is Matt’s mum. He’s alone in house, worried at his mother’s absence. Matt is afraid his mum will be arrested for breaking quarantine. He knows he’s not allowed outside during the quarantine but he visits their neighbor Alice, who won’t let him in but calls the mountain rescue service. All the officials who talk to Matt stay outside or speak to him via telephone with a masked number, which seems improbably cruel given that the kid is home alone with no support system.
Like Kate, Alice spends her quarantine fretting. She thinks about death and cancer and worries about her children. She thinks about Mark, with whom she shared 45 years of life. Alice is the most opinionated character, although the characters all share attitudes of gloom. “Social distancing,” Alice thinks, “whoever came up with that, there’s not much that’s less social than acting as if everyone’s unclean and dangerous, though the problem of course is that they are, or at least some of them and there’s no way of knowing.” She also complains that the pandemic has infected language by turning “distance” into a verb.
Alice thinks rude thoughts about doctors who blame patients for socializing and acquiring COVID. Aren’t patients always putting themselves at risk (she asks herself) by deciding to drive or play sports or sleep with the wrong person or carry a big pile of laundry up the stairs? “Alice thinks, let us give thanks for our pure blind luck as well as our warm beds and safe houses, though the problem with giving thanks for your own luck is that you’re also giving thanks that the misfortune landed on someone else.”
Rob is a first responder. He rescues people who have gone missing on the mountain. Rob’s daughter Ellie is with him for the weekend. She isn’t happy when his job requires him to leave her to search for Kate. Rob, on the other hand, enjoys doing some good by volunteering for the mountain rescue team. He decided to be self-employed so he wouldn’t have to put up with employers who gripe that volunteers refuse to work overtime so they can be available for rescues when needed.
The Fell is a character-driven novel that is undisturbed by a plot. Kate’s disappearance is simply an excuse for the reader to tune into the characters’ internal monologues. After her fall, Kate’s mind wanders as she tries to summon the strength to crawl through the heath. Perhaps she is entering a state of delirium as she converses with a raven. Some of her thoughts turn out to be lyrics from Celtic folk music (I had to google odd-sounding sentences to discover that). It is a reasonable place for Kate’s mind to go, given that she dabbled with folk singing before she met Paul, her ex-husband, a meeting about which she is now ambivalent, as she is about much of her life.
There is something to be said for a novel that recognizes both the public health necessity of a quarantine during a pandemic and the emotional necessity of escaping confinement that is imposed by outside forces. The characters whine about their circumstances a bit too much, but doesn’t everyone? They at least do so in amusingly droll prose. While The Fell might not appeal to readers who require a more substantive plot than “woman goes missing and people worry about her,” this short novel is worth reading for Sarah Moss’ observational take on the depressing nature of life in the midst of a pandemic.
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