Lost in the fog: The Fell, by Sarah Moss, reviewed

Novelists are leery about letting the buzzwords of recent history into their books. The immediate past threatens to upstage the imagined world with its reality, and at the same time diminish it with the cardboard tang of everyday life. Sarah Moss, by contrast, has never been embarrassed to lend her prose the texture of contemporary conversation. As a celebrated author of novels in which catastrophe shatters middle-class English lives, she was always a likely candidate to be quick off the mark with a lockdown novel.

In her latest, it’s November 2020, as night falls in the Peak District. Kate, a single mum, is half way through a 14-day period of mandatory isolation when she decides to slip out for an illegal walk in the hills. Her son remains behind; her widowed neighbour, Alice, sees her going up the path. The book opens with Rob, a volunteer for Mountain Rescue, getting word that a woman’s gone out on the fell and hasn’t come back.

What follows is a book that engages head on with the obvious difficulties of writing a lockdown narrative. Over the course of a single night, we move between isolated perspectives as tragedy looms like the descending northern fog. It seems like one of those distanced dramas staged on Zoom: a four-hander, whose long passages of free-indirect discourse feel like monologue or soliloquy. Integrating word choice with subject and genre was once called the problem of ‘decorum’, and a certain verbal restraint holds here as well. The novel’s opening pages make reference to kitchen extensions, student debt, ambulance response times, planning permission, A&E, self-isolation and social distancing. But no one comes right out and calls it Covid.

Kate wakes up face down in sheep droppings, unable to move.