Silvie’s mother Alison has to persuade her husband to allow them to wear their own underwear, brush their teeth, and even use tampons: “Women managed well enough, he said, back in the day, without spending money on all that, ends up on the beach in the end, right mucky.” In pursuit of this absurd nativist claim, Bill has dragged his wife and daughter along on the strange excursion, doggedly determined that their every activity – from communal sleeping on bunks, to wearing uncomfortable tunics, to hunting and gathering every morsel of food – be authentic to the time period. By day, Bill is a bus driver, but his hobby – more accurately an obsession – is the study of early British history and the recapturing of the experience of an “original Britishness.” Her father, Silvie describes, “wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night.” Ghost Wall’s seventeen-year-old protagonist, Silvie, is spending her summer holiday with her parents in the northern English county of Northumberland where her father Bill is taking part in an Iron Age re-enactment led by an archaeology professor and three of his students. Sarah Moss’s sixth novel, Ghost Wall, is a parable for our broken times, an eerie reminder that our darkest historical moments tend to repeat themselves in the presence of fear, irrationality, and a paranoid insistence on preserving a false idea of a more perfect past.
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