Review / Helm by Sarah Hall

Helm

by Sarah Hall

In Hall’s new novel, weather and climate are not just potent settings but the main event. The central character in Helm is the Helm, Britain’s only named wind.

This wind, which is local to Cumbria, occurs when air sweeping down Cross Fell, above the Eden valley, creates both a crest and a low bar of cloud. “Tricky to explain/visualise”, admits Helm. “For now, imagine a skater launching off a quarter pipe two thousand feet high, then somersaulting. Again. And again and again.” As the book begins, Helm witnesses its own arrival. An ice age, sun flares, ash cloud; and, relatively insignificant in the context of such deep time, the evolution of humanity. Because there are many people in the novel, too, which is structured by braiding their stories with Helm’s.

Hall’s ambition may be bounded by one valley, but it reaches through thousands of years. Her subjects range from a neolithic tribe to a medieval exorcist; from an isolated 18th-century wife to a quixotic Victorian meteorologist; from a wind-touched, lonely mid-20th-century child to a present-day academic counting plastic particles in the air. From stone tools to the Industrial Revolution to the advent of AI, each era has its own existential encounters with Helm: as deity or devil, as a psychological or a scientific mystery.

A project of this scope, which requires a range of research and imagination that could have produced several historical novels, not to mention an entire other volume of meteorological expertise, holds so much in suspension around its whirling, windy core that it could easily blow apart. But, despite the occasional threat or lull, Helm doesn’t. Partly, I would argue, this is because of Hall’s development as a consummate short story writer. Her novels are never less than hugely accomplished, but the narrative demands of the longer form, especially in more conventional earlier work, can sometimes dissipate the blaze of which she is capable. Hall is freed by the constraints of the short story – like the female sculptor in her last novel, Burntcoat, she burns away everything extraneous – and her work only gains in concentrated, suggestive power. Each strand of Helm has this concentration; the characters and voices could stand alone, but they flow together into something deep and rich, held together by the Eden valley, and its Helm. Aida Edemariam