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
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On the shore of a loch lies a small group of wooden holiday cabins whose inhabitants are cooped up in the pouring rain, rain that has been falling for days and which is starting to feel unnatural in its persistence – even for Scotland. The novel begins at dawn and ends in the dark, and from the first page you know something terrible is going to happen, but you don’t know on whose neck the axe will fall. Someone young has a heart condition; someone older drives their “shiny boomer-mobile” too fast on wet roads; a strange man lurks in the woods; a boy paddles his kayak too far out on to the cold water. Nobody has any phone signal, and help is very far away.
Everyone is hiding something and everyone is morally compromised, from the retired couple whose solicitude masks deep resentment on both sides to the child who torments a Glaswegian girl with a foreign-sounding name: “You’re supposed to have left, you know, people like you, did you not get the message?”
Moss’s ability to conjure up the fleeting and sometimes agonised tenderness of family life is unmatched, and here, as in The Tidal Zone in particular, she sketches so lightly the all-but-invisible conflicts and compromises that can make cohabitation both a joy and a living hell. There’s the man who won’t do his family the courtesy of peeing sitting down once the kids are in bed because, thinks his wife, “in his head the masculinity police are watching even in the middle of the night”; the mother who, given an hour’s longed-for break from her small children, can’t think of a way to fill it except by cleaning behind the taps; the feminist distracted from both her boyfriend’s dogged pursuit of a simultaneous orgasm and her own mildly problematic sexual fantasies by the thought of a bacon bap. Observing the way we subtly edit ourselves and one another – the limits that puts on us, as well as the strengths it creates – is Moss’s metier.
Behind and around the lives of the holidaymakers and their accurate and not-so-accurate judgments of one another lie two things. The first is the natural world, described in brief vignettes that recall Jon McGregor’s haunting Reservoir 13 and allow for some startling perspective shifts – to the bottom of the lake, the inside of an anthill. The second is the current political landscape, which flickers through the thoughts of many of the characters. It’s the background static none of us can escape from, which also fed into her last book, the Women’s prize-nominated Ghost Wall, even though that was set in a different era. Beside the loch a 16-year-old boy wonders about his future, “if there’s still a planet to live on, if the insane politicians have spared anything”. “How could the English be so stupid,” a retired doctor thinks. “How could they not see the ring of yellow stars on every new road and hospital and upgraded railway and city centre regeneration of the last thirty years?”
Summerwater feels very much like a pandemic novel, despite the fact that it must have been completed months before Covid-19. “There won’t be a plane this summer, or next,” Justine realises; her voice opens the novel, worrying over Brexit and family finances. “She would have liked the kids … to see with their own eyes that the world is wide and ways of doing things mostly just habit.”“How would they know if there’s some mass-extinction event in progress, how’s that supposed to work with no phones?” wonders a bored teenager whose thoughts are punctuated with worrying frequency by the words: “I want to be dead.” Moss is very good at teenagers and older children, allowing them both their overblown resentments and a respect for their fragile personhood.
A great part of a novelist’s skill lies in the breadth of their sympathies and their ability to enter into the lives of people unlike themselves. Moss does this so naturally and comprehensively that at times her simple, pellucid prose and perfectly judged free indirect speech feel almost like documentary or nonfiction – there is an artfulness to her writing so accomplished as to conceal itself. In Summerwater, as in Ghost Wall, Moss’s politics are crystal clear; but it’s the messy complexities and frailties we all harbour about which she has the most to say.
• Summerwater is published by Picador (£14.99).
THE GUARDIAN
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