Ghost Wall
SARAH MOSS
(GRANTA, 160 pp, £12.99)
Tablet bookshop price £11.69 • tel 020 7799 4064
This is a timely, tiny explosive package of a book – and I use that image advisedly. How do we make sense of violence, the awful damage we inflict on one another? Have we always had victims and perpetrators, bullies and apologists? Why do we build walls?
“Prehistoric lives always fascinated me,” says Sarah Moss, describing “finding a flint ... thinking about the hands that made it”. She spent childhood holidays in Orkney. I’m right with her when she talks about scrambling into ancient sites; my house overlooks Skara Brae, and there was a hand-tool – left-handed, so my fingers fit exactly – on the windowsill when we moved in. The farmer found it in the field. I understand when she says “Foundation myths feel very relevant at the moment … xenophobia and nativism have become normal in the past couple of years.” Her working title was Pharmatos – the human incarnation of evil expelled from Greek communities at moments of crisis – the sin eater – the sacrificial lamb. “Many families have one, so do communities, and so, as we see at the moment, do nation states.” But Ghost Wall, with its echoes of other walls – Hadrian’s, Berlin’s, Donald Trump’s – and its evocation of the lost stories of the dispossessed, will do just fine.