Field trip with father

Sarah Moss’s concise, claustrophobic sixth novel concerns the perils of family life. The narrator Silvie is a frustrated 17-year-old on holiday in the Northumbrian countryside with her father Bill, a bus driver with an insatiable interest in prehistoric Britain, and her mother Alison, who works as a cashier in a supermarket. They have joined an ‘experiential archeology’ field trip — ‘to have a flavour of Iron Age life’ — run by Professor Slade for a group of his university students.

But Silvie dislikes the scratchy tunic that she’s forced to wear and the small wooden hut she must sleep in because her father insists on authenticity. (The others, meanwhile, are in waterproof nylon tents; the professor puts on tennis socks with his moccasins to prevent blisters.) Bill refuses to add garlic to their foraged meals: ‘Hungry folk want plain food, he said, the corollary being that if you didn’t want “plain food” you weren’t hungry and so shouldn’t be eating in the first place.’

Moss’s canvas is characteristically small-scale. The action takes place within a perimeter of moorland controlled by Bill over a couple of days in the early 1990s — Silvie is terrified to go beyond it; Alison doesn’t deviate from cooking and cleaning at the campsite. At several moments, Silvie fantasises about when she is a grown up and can get away (‘I will go out and buy myself pants in emerald and turquoise and scarlet’).

Moss is very good at building empathy for Silvie through visceral, close-grained descriptions of nature. In one devastating scene, her father and the professor come across Silvie alone, washing topless in a stream. Bill drags her out of the water, calls her ‘a little whore’ and whips her with his leather belt. Throughout, Silvie focuses on ‘the tree between my hands… the impalpable pulse of sap under my palms’, and the pile of dead rabbits, whose eyes are ‘still bright’, that her father has abandoned on the floor.