Sarah Moss’ Night Waking is a mournful tale of motherhood and family life that is likely to put you off having children forever. While its brutal honesty on the downsides of child bearing is a welcome change from the usual moonshine and roses version of the thing, pacing issues and a lack of narrative spark make this a less intriguing read than Moss’ recent (and excellent) novella, Ghost Wall.
Anna, an Oxford academic who specialises in Victorian child institutions, is married to Giles, an Oxford academic intrigued by the mating habits of porgs puffins. It is Giles’ work that leads him and Anna to take up residence in the dilapidated family home on Colsay, a remote, deserted Hebridean island with a declining puffin population. Though living with her husband, and with two hugely demanding young sons below school-going age, Anna has never felt more isolated. Her youngest child is an insomniac and screams his way through the night (though with insufficient volume to convince Giles that he should get up to help). Her eldest child is obsessed with death, preferably brought on by climate change. Anna is responsible for all the cooking, cleaning, childcare and shopping (the nearest shop is a perilous boat ride away) and is reduced to running away to caves or the island’s deserted village in order to finish a book that is overdue at the publishers. Thus, Anna is already questioning both her sanity and the wisdom of her decision to have children when she discovers the skeleton of a baby in her garden. The grisly find leads Anna to investigate the history of the island, and to question what combination of circumstances is required to make a mother kill her own child.
Night Waking presents the topics of motherhood and its infanticidal possibilities with an admirable lack of squeamishness that I hope will play some role, somewhere, in easing the burden of women who regret having children. The idea is viewed with so little tolerance and so little compassion by today’s society that women who admit to such feelings are publicly vilified as monsters devoid of compassion or any sense of duty. And yet what is felt by Anna when forcing herself out of bed at four and five and six o’clock to tend to a screaming child while her husband snores is something that is shared by many women. So is her desperation to have a moment to herself; to read, to write, to send an email, to make breakfast unmolested or to have a lock on the bathroom door. So are her thoughts of the freedom that would result if her children were to simply disappear. But often, the Annas of the world cannot talk. It is a wonderful thing that in this book, they can.
While Night Waking is to be recommended for reasons described above, a page turner it is not (oh dear, these puffins are really making me go overboard with the Star Wars references). One often has the sense that Moss is trying to juggle too many narratives at once – Anna, the tourists in the cottage, the Victorian nurse, the 1940s boarding school – and consequently, we aren’t fully invested in any of them and the book ends up dragging. Night Waking also lacks anything like a spark inducing us to keep reading, as though the author’s heart is not entirely in it. Perhaps this is to be expected, however: Anna’s heart is not entirely in it either.
It’s not a bad novel, however. There are beautiful descriptions of the island of Colsay, and horrendous ones of the conditions endured by its people when it was still inhabited. Anna’s interactions with her children are both adorable and endlessly frustrating, and Moss is proficient at capturing the endless nightmare of insomnia and how difficult it is to see the sun come up when you haven’t slept a wink. As mentioned above, however, it is in the novel’s treatment of motherhood that its true value is to be found.
LADYGILRAEN 