Twenty Questions with Sarah Moss

‘I fear that the discourse of identity politics will continue to separate readers and writers’

Writers and thinkers take on twenty questions from the TLS, revealing the books they most admire, nagging regrets and the occasional hidden talent

 

The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss review – a portrait of parental anxiety

With the NHS a central theme, this story about the effect of a child’s illness on her family is a novel for our times

Penelope Lively

Saturday 9 July 2016

Sarah Moss is an impressively flexible writer. Her five novels have ranged over both time and space – historical writing in the last two, the Hebrides and Greenland before that, family life in the present-day English Midlands in The Tidal Zone. And where previously there has been a feminist slant to her writing, with its exploration of the possibilities for talented women in the past, here the narrator is a man, though that is not to say that the discussion about the position of women is sidelined.

Book of the day

Review

Spent Light by Lara Pawson review – the dark side of everyday things

Domestic objects lead to intimate memories and troubled histories in this glorious, genre-bending book

Sarah Moss

Saturado 27 January 2024

Spent Light is subtitled “A Book”. It’s not a memoir, but not really autofiction either; life writing, maybe, but the lives in question are not human. Pawson’s writing is prompted by objects usually considered inanimate but made and traded by people in systems that do harm. The book is among them, a physical object, in case you hadn’t noticed. (The book is interested in things you may not have noticed, or may have chosen not to notice.)

Summerwater by Sarah Moss review / A dark holiday in Scotland

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Summerwater by Sarah Moss review – a dark holiday in Scotland

Everyone is hiding something and the rain won’t stop in the Ghost Wall writer’s nightmarish tale of a day spent holidaying by a loch

Melissa Harrinson

Wed 26 August 2020

 

L

ike a dim shape shifting in the depths of a loch, there is something very dark at work just out of sight in Sarah Moss’s seventh novel. Its title is a reference to “The Ballad of Semerwater” by the poet William Watson, itself based on a legend in which the waters of a lake rise up and drown a village, sparing only the household who have offered a stranger from a distant land food and drink.

 

Top 10 modern Victorian novels

Narrative tricks minted in the 19th century are still working in contemporary fiction by authors from Margaret Atwood to Sarah Waters

Paraic O’Donnell
Wed 7 Nov 2018 10.00 GMT

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n historical fiction, as in all things, fashions come and go. As we near the end of Hilary Mantel’s glorious Tudor revival, the ancient world is again getting a look in, with writers such as Madeline Miller and Pat Barker refashioning the Homeric epics to glittering effect. But these trends mask more durable patterns, at least from a crudely chronological point of view.

For one thing, the 19th century – the Regency and Victorian eras, in other words – remains vastly overrepresented. In an informal 2013 survey by the Historical Novel Society, it accounted for almost 30% of that year’s titles, second only to the 20th in popularity, and with almost as large a share as all other eras put together. What accounts for this enduring fascination? Proximity plays a part, naturally, and the richness of the documentary record probably doesn’t hurt either. Empires need prodigious bureaucracies, and if there’s one thing the Victorians were spectacularly good at, it was writing things down.

For my part – well, I won’t lie. Some of it comes down to aesthetics. In The House on Vesper Sands, I wanted to dramatise wickedness and secrecy. For that you need darkness, snow and plenty of orphans. More high-mindedly, I wanted to rehabilitate the Victorian sensation novel, in which – long before the modernists thought of it – the author’s own trickery is playfully advertised. In other words – and each of the books I’ve chosen reflects this in one way or another – the Victorians didn’t just perfect the English novel. They made it self-aware.

1. Possession by AS Byatt (1990)

While literary critics have occasionally embraced historical fiction, academic literary theorists have taken a harder line. They take a dim view of representing things generally, but especially of representing the past. This novel isn’t just aware of all this; it gleefully writes it into the plot. Its intricate parallel narratives involve a pair of fusty academics who discover both a secret affair between two Victorian poets and a hesitant passion of their own. The resulting novel (or rather, “romance”, both in the literary sense and the usual one) manages to be both extravagantly learned and utterly charming.

2. Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss (2014)

Since this novel’s appearance in 2014, Moss’s star has rightfully risen. Bodies of Light deserves consideration alongside her finest work, and exhibits her peculiar gift for slipping among disparate settings (from Greenland to the Outer Hebrides) while maintaining unusual strands of continuity. Here again she is preoccupied with motherhood and the fragility of the self, and while her Victorian foray begins with the unearthing of infant bones, she is always digging into the human soul, including – or so it can often seem – the reader’s own.

3. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002)

This justly celebrated reinvention of the Dickensian novel is not so much a reboot as a kick in the arse. Unlike Dickens, Faber has no time for the sanctified waif or the virtuous simpleton. As in Bleak House, we are introduced first to the city itself, with a warning that we must start at the very bottom. In Faber’s London, the fog hides nothing and the veils are all drawn back. Here a prostitute squats unceremoniously over her bowl to scour herself, while outside the blood runs among the cobbles “like a winding crimson weed”.

Lesbian love story primer ... Elaine Cassidy (left) and Sally Hawkins
 in the 2005 TV adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith.
Photograph: BBC/Sally Head Productions

4. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)

A landmark of lesbian fiction, this suffered the unusual fate of becoming famous for the wrong reasons. The novel’s central love story should never be whitewashed, but it spawned a cottage industry of softcore Victoriana that overshadowed its author’s virtuosity. With its loveable rogues and dastardly schemes, Fingersmith has all the elements of the worst kind of knockabout pastiche, yet what Waters fashions from them is almost miraculous. From intricate plotting to exquisitely subtle observation, she is that rare prodigy: an author who is good at everything. Like her heroine, Sue, we see as a small child does “what I had never seen before – how the world was made up”.

Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in the title roles of the film version of Oscar and Lucinda.

5. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988)

The unlikely love story that begins when Lucinda Leplastrier encounters Oscar Hopkins on a ship bound for Australia has become one of the most cherished of recent times. Yet it is a love story, Carey has confessed, that he ended up writing almost by mistake. Instead, the novel’s glittering and unforgettable central motif, a glass church floating on a river, had struck Carey as crystallising (if you will) Pascal’s notion of religious belief as a grand gamble. Oscar is an inveterate gambler, of course, but if he accepts Lucinda’s bet out of compulsion, agreeing to transport her fragile edifice into the remote outback, his persistence in this harebrained undertaking has given us one of literature’s most monumental acts of love.

6. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)

Atwood has always given us big ideas, but she hasn’t always shown as much interest in people. Alias Grace is as much a novel of ideas as any she has written, but is centred for once on a transfixing study of character. Grace Marks was a real (and notorious) historical character, an Irish maid convicted in 1843 of a brutal double murder. While brilliantly dramatising the Victorian urge to medicalise femininity, this novel dignifies its central character even as it wrings from the question of her guilt a merciless degree of suspense.

Michael Caine and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige. Photograph: Stephen Vaughan/AP

7. The Prestige by Christopher Priest (1995)

Christopher Nolan’s darkly glamorous film version made this the best known of Priest’s books. While it did justice to the novel’s duelling Victorian stage magicians, it jettisoned its contemporary framing and, in doing so, much of its psychological subtlety. In Priest’s original telling, the historical rivals are discovered by a down-on-his-luck writer named Andrew Westley. As the magicians stalk one another, each maddened by the mystery of the other’s “prestige” (or trick), Westley is haunted by a phantom twin, and it is the reader who must discover the true nature of the illusion.

8. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (2013)

Set in the New Zealand of the 1860s, this novel transports us not to the midst of Victoria’s reign but to the very periphery of her possessions, a disparity that Catton’s immense novel ingeniously exploits. Taking on the guise of a genteel pastiche, its customs seem familiar at first, but we soon find ourselves in unmapped territory. The intricate plot (involving a vanished prospector, a missing fortune and an ailing prostitute) is absorbing but becomes almost incidental, with Catton’s fiendish use of omniscient perspective purporting to show us everything while keeping us artfully in the dark.

9. Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge (1998)

Shortlisted for the Booker prize five times, it was not until after her death in 2010 that Bainbridge was finally honoured with a specially created award. Although it was chosen from among her novels by a popular vote, Master Georgie is one of Bainbridge’s most challenging and austere works. Indeed, she herself remarked that most people needed to read it three times before they understood it. She may have been right. With its carefully modulated perspectives and slyly observed details, this refracted Bildungsroman follows a young surgeon’s almost helpless progress towards the muck and depravity of the Crimean war, and it reveals new and brilliant facets no matter how often you come back to it.

10. The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds (2009)

Set in Epping Forest in 1840, The Quickening Maze examines the unlikely circumstances that brought the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson into brief conjunction. Clare’s alcoholism and declining artistic fortunes have brought him to High Beach Asylum, while the young and untested Tennyson, a guest of the asylum-keeper, is so self-absorbed that he scarcely notices the amorous attentions of his host’s young daughter. Animating such looming and disparate figures could have made for heavy going, but Foulds gives them human scale and careful shading, illuminating all he touches with his swift and shimmering prose.

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The 10 best books of 2019 / Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips review / Missing girls at the edge of the world

The 10 

best books of  2019

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips review – missing girls at the edge of the world

In this impressive but problematic debut, Russia’s far east provides an exotic backdrop for a novel of American concerns and ideas

Sarah Moss
Thu 15 August 2019

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ulia Phillips’s debut seems at first to be the story of missing girls, the one we all know. Sweet little white girls, left to wander the city in summer while their mother works, are lured into a car and stolen away by a strange man. Posters go up all over town. Good mothers keep their daughters indoors. Husbands and boyfriends track their partners’ movements, worry. Members of the public join the search, and as the narrative swirls through the city, skipping from one household to another and following different women with each new chapter, the reader is also alert for clues, because how else are you supposed to read the story of missing girls?

I was so absorbed I forgot to take notes for most of the first half, not so much because of the tension of the search as because each new domestic world was deftly conjured and fresh. We are in Petropavlovsk, on Russia’s far eastern Kamchatka peninsula, where it’s a very long way to any other city; details of daily life will be exotic to most anglophone readers, and the inhabitants, both indigenous and Russian, are shaped by their relationships to Soviet Russia.

We pause with students from Even reindeer-herding families from the northern tundra; with the wives and children of men far away for various kinds of work, frustrated and bored by ice and darkness; with the strict, slick women who are succeeding in Putin’s Russia but are subject, in the end, to the same structural inequalities as their less prosperous sisters. Phillips is as attuned to ethnic tensions and class hierarchies as she is to weather and landscape, and all in all it’s a pretty satisfying experience for the reader who enjoys narrative gratification along with vicarious travel, fine prose and thoughtful politics.

But there are difficulties with setting a novel in a nation, community and language foreign to the writer and to almost all Anglophone readers. The concerns of this book are timely but also culturally specific – the narratives of gender, violence and trauma are distinctively those of liberal America. Disappearing Earth speaks from and to #MeToo, from and to women silenced and abused by US rightwing politics. The novel’s refreshing concern for missing indigenous girls as well as the central characters recalls the recent Canadian recognition of the national failure to protect First Nations women and girls from abduction, rape and murder. This is a novel as much about the way infrastructure fails women as about the quest for the lost girls, but I wondered increasingly if Phillips was writing about the wrong infrastructure and the wrong girls.

 

Landscapes are beautifully rendered; the city, shore, forests and villages are distinctive and memorable

If, as she says in an interview in the Paris Review, “I felt like what I brought to the story and the place were very much American concerns and American ideas,” why set the novel in Kamchatka? “It was like this enormous setting for a locked-room mystery,” she remarks, and there lies the problem: Petropavlovsk, the miles of “wilderness” and the herders’ villages appear here as the exotic backdrop for the projection of America’s urgent stories, a setting for tales from somewhere else. Landscapes are beautifully rendered; the city, shore, forests and villages are distinctive and memorable. Like a good tourist, Phillips takes every opportunity to explore her environment, with mountain rescue teams, tourist guides and an ecology research unit as well as the reindeer herders and the urban dog-walkers and flâneuses. She can certainly write: characters, dialogue, pacing, the fine balancing of what is shown and what goes unsaid are all done with aplomb.

But there’s no essential contradiction between exoticism and good writing, and in my view this novel is both: there’s no space for cultural difference here, no intuition that the lived experiences of women in Kamchatka might require a different vocabulary from those of North America, that readers of a novel set there might reasonably hope to glimpse a different reality. There’s always a conflict, of course, between “othering” and appropriation, between believing that differences of culture, history and language render groups of people incomprehensible to each other and insisting that the whole world is made in the image of one’s own assumptions. No individual book will resolve that contradiction, but one set so firmly at the centre of the dilemma needs at least to recognise the problem.

• Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall is published by Granta. Disapppearing Earth is published by Scribner (£12.99). 

THE GUARDIAN