You should be ashamed of yourself, I’ll not have my daughter a little whore, and only when I had covered myself and turned back to face him did he take off his Iron Age leather belt.

Here, for example, is what happens when the father comes across Silvie bathing naked in a stream: The abuse is both psychological (“I did not know what my father thought I might want to do,” Silvie reflects, “but he devoted considerable attention to making sure I couldn’t do it”: an artful, even funny, observation that on a moment’s reflection isn’t funny at all) and physical. Her father, Silvie concludes, “wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night.” What he has instead is a job as a bus-driver that supports his amateur archaeology and survivalist escapades, and a wife and daughter whom he terrorizes. Silvie’s own name is short for Sulevia, a local goddess of springs and pools, or, as Silvie, quoting her father, half-reluctantly, half-defensively puts it, “A proper British native name.” As that “proper” suggests, her father’s idea of authenticity is moralizing at best, overtly racist at worst: describing the Picts’ resistance to the Romans (“the Romans are the end of what he likes”), he says “there weren’t dark faces in these parts for nigh on two millennia after that, were there?” (he’s already rejected Indian food as “Paki muck”).

In making this distinction, the professor ineffectually pushes back against Silvie’s father’s desire to imagine a purely British origin story. Britons, her father calls them Celts, the professor demurs, citing the current preferred terminology. That story is told by seventeen-year-old Silvie, who, together with her parents and an anthropology professor and three of his students, spends two weeks in the summer of 1991 reenacting the lives of the Iron Age inhabitants of Northumberland. (I wanted to say “naturally,” but the point of the book is to critique naturalness, not as a meaningless concept but as one much open to abuse.) They’re expressed in deceptively simple prose and arise seamlessly from a compelling story. But its ideas aren’t stern, dogmatic, or bloodless. Like all of Moss’s work - she has written four novels and a memoir of a year spent in Iceland - Ghost Wall is really smart. Moreover, they inflict their pain disproportionately - most of the victims are women. These fantasies are pernicious because they confuse sacrifice with victimization. Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall indicts fantasies of authenticity and tradition.

The ghost wall sarah moss