Obsessive love of ancient societies can lead to human sacrifice. It’s an idea that has been explored to great effect by William Golding and Donna Tartt, but Sarah Moss’ folk horror novella Ghost Wall offers a perspective on the issue that resonates much more in a world that has seen far-right extremism come back into fashion. In this work about a group of people participating in an experiential archeology project, Moss uses a strikingly lucid stream of consciousness narrative to demonstrate how the love of ancient history can become a dangerous refuge for people with antiquated ideas about power, survival, and who is deserving of either.
Silvie (short for Sulevia) is the adolescent daughter of a battered, submissive mother and an abusive father. Silvie’s Dad, a bus driver, is obsessed with the Iron Age, and naming his child Sulevia after an ancient British goddess is by far his least horrendous way of showing it. From early childhood, Silvie is taught to be the perfect Iron Age maiden: she can live off the land, skin dead animals without flinching and tell which plants are poisonous and which are not. She is dragged around Northern England and shown examples of the pestilence of the modern world (this includes everything from run-down buildings to black people) and is constantly told that everything was so much better ‘back then’. Silvie’s father’s obsession is so extreme that he arranges for his family to participate in an experiential archeology project run by a group of university students and their professor. Silvie and her mother end up being unwilling participants in this stunt that requires participants to dress, live, eat, hunt, forage and clean themselves in the manner of the Iron Age. It is the Iron Age practice of appeasing the gods through ritual human sacrifice at the edge of bogs (the so-called ‘bog bodies’) that provides the novel with its premise. Yes, this is going where you think it is.
Through the characters of Silvie and her mother, Moss portrays the psychology of the abused in a very complex way. Both could easily have ended up brainwashed by the father’s ‘everything was better back then’ mentality. However, both are beaten so regularly, and view the abuse as such a normal part of life, that the abuse, rather than the Iron Age, becomes the prism through which they see reality. As a consequence, Silvie and her mother often obey the father for the sake of peace, and react badly to women who do not recognise the power of toxic masculinity. This alienates and isolates them from potential support structures, which has tragic consequences at the novella’s hair-raising conclusion.
It is Silvie’s abusive, history-obsessed father that imbues Ghost Wall with such striking originality. The character reflects a very real, very frightening far-right tendency to use history as a means of hearkening back to ‘the good old days’ when mankind only had to rely on primitive instinct and considered wife-beating, discrimination and murder to be perfectly natural and unimportant parts of life. Silvie’s dad gets an undeniable kick out of behavior that in the modern world is unacceptable. He beats his wife for failing to make food quickly enough over a fire with Iron Age utensils and foraged roots. He beats his daughter for bathing topless in a stream, ostensibly because she is disgracing the family name and acting like a whore. But while he is the dictator of what he sees to be as women’s virtue, he still does not consider the women in his life to be submissive enough. Why won’t they understand what he expects of them? Why do they have difficulty acting like it’s 2AD? He longs nostalgically for a simpler time when the Western world considered abuse in the name of virtue to be private business and his aggressive behavior to be normal. This is most evident in the enjoyment of pain and humiliation that he displays at the novel’s climax. The character is a chilling reminder of how right-wing reprobates like the incel movement turn to ancient culture, and what they think it says, to justify their views and behavior. It is this, more than anything else, that makes this novella so contemporary and so important in 2019. It’s an old story, told through the lense of a new world.
Moss’ mastery of stream of consciousness narrative and evident dislike of inverted commas bangs the door to Silvie’s mind wide open, and enables us to experience the depth of her emotional trauma and her mounting terror in a truly disturbing way. The prose style somehow manages to be modernist, as well as crystal clear in communicating the exceptional research that Moss has done. The author provides engrossing insight into Iron Age life, and how lucky we all are to be alive today. She makes exemplary literary use of the historical mystery of the bog people, filling in gaps where needed, but remaining sufficiently elusive to induce the reader to conduct their own research, just to see if this sort of thing really used to happen.
Ghost Wall is a tiny book can be read at one sitting. Like the best horror, however, it doesn’t cease to haunt you once you finish.
LADYGILRAEN 