The Fell

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At dusk on a November evening in 2020 a woman slips out of her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of two weeks of isolation, but she just can't take it any more - the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. And anyway, the moor will be deserted at this time. Nobody need ever know. She doesn’t even want to remember singing in pubs, how can that ever happen again, the singing or the pubs let alone both. The Fell reflects the lives we have been living for the last 18 months in a way no other writer has dared to do. There is wit, there is compassion, there is a tension that builds like a pressure cooker. This slim, intense masterpiece is one of my best books of the year -- Rachel Joyce Again and again, and always with steely precision, Moss has mined both the circumstances and the consequences of isolation . . . one of the very best British novelists writing today about contemporary life - if anyone can justify writing a pandemic novel, she's the woman for the job * Daily Telegraph *

The story is told through a stream of consciousness narrative from the perspectives of four people- Kate, Matt, Alice and Rob. Kate’s thoughts flit between her financial worries compounded by fear of being fined on account of her breaking quarantine laws , her son Matt and the life choices she is made to reflect upon through a dazed and delirious conversation with a raven she meets on her expedition. Matt concerned for Kate’s physical and emotional well-being is made to mull over his own behaviors and feelings, realizing how much is at stake for him for his mother to return home safe and sound. On one hand we see him as a difficult self absorbed teenager while on the the other we see the mature way in which tries to remain hopeful busying himself with household chores while responsibly interacting with his next door neighbor Alice keeping with quarantine regulations . Alice is an elderly widow and cancer survivor struggling to adjust to the isolation brought on by the pandemic and recent widowhood , but tries to remain hopeful and keep up Matt’s spirits while making plans to lead a fuller life once the pandemic ends. Rob, the mountain rescue volunteer whose team along is tasked with finding Kate, ponders over whether Kate’s action were deliberate and whether she was driven to drastic behavior motivated by personal reasons while also questioning his own motivations for volunteering for such risky endeavors in his downtime often at the cost of his personal relationships. I've been left sorely disappointed by the early crop of Covid novels, including Sarah Hall's Burntcoat, and it would be sacrilege to even mention the existence of Gary Shteyngart's painfully unfunny satire Our Country Friends in the same paragraph as earnest, good-faith literary efforts like this one. The pandemic is spawning some fine writing, and this helter-skelter novel by Moss is one of the best yet. The book captures both the paranoia of the times and the kindness of strangers -- Mail on Sunday

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Moss’s characters aren’t just connected by proximity, or even by the process of living through unparalleled crisis, but by an underlying sense of peril, both immediate, domestic and more broadly existential. Their thoughts shifting from mundane commentary or overt distractions to their keen awareness of the instability of everything around them, political divisions, fractured society, and the spectre of climate change. There are moments too of coming together, acts of kindness, shared concerns. It’s a depiction of a reality that will be familiar to many, although there are also a number of absent voices: marginal and seen only in the distance, the homeless and displaced; figures like Kate’s neighbour Samira who puts in a puzzlingly brief appearance. I was reminded at times of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours similarly preoccupied with questions of connection, and how to live, how to deal with the weight of days but – although I find aspects of Cunningham’s vision deeply flawed - The Fell is less richly descriptive, less thoughtful in its stance. Moss’s story’s almost too realistic at times, preserving rather than creatively reinventing the territory it covers. Teenage Matt often seems quite peripheral, a minor function of plot, Alice is probably the most well-realised of the group, but even here there��s a tendency to edge towards cliché. Although the slightly surreal encounter between Kate and a raven, both alone in the November night, is an interesting attempt at disrupting this rather conventional story, it felt more of a gesture than anything else, it didn’t have the eerie, mythic force of the more satisfying elements of earlier books like Cold Earth. But even though this wasn’t the compulsive read I’d hoped for, I still found it engaging enough to hold my attention. Where perhaps it loses out to that novel is in the absence of the natural vignettes that distinguished “Summerwater” – although we do hear have a raven whose imagined dialogue with one of the characters makes it effectively the fifth key character of the novel. Where I think it wins out is in avoiding an over-dramatic and rather manufactured climax. Moss has always been adept at plumbing the psyche’s inkier depths, and as she flits between people, channelling the free indirect style that gave her last novel, Summerwater, such polyphonic momentum, their anxieties heighten a gathering sense of existential doom. Interestingly, though these span everything from the climate emergency to the degradation of language and zombie mink, Covid itself is way down the list, functioning more as an intensifying trigger.

The story moves between the search-and-rescue operation, which begins when one of her neighbours notices that she has gone missing, and Kate herself. In between, we catch glimpses of pandemic life, quarantine, distance and closeness, and the threat of a hefty fine for breaking quarantine. The ending is hopeful. Kate is eventually found, thanks to the kindness and generosity of others, and, on waking up, decides: “Life, then, to be lived, somehow.” People primarily feeling sorry about themselves, or if not overtly that, then minutely describing what causes them inconvenience or self doubt. This first longer fiction I read about COVID-19 disappointed me. Moss is a “compulsive runner”, she says, “and it’s not about fitness or weight or sport or any of that. It’s just about being out in a body, feet on the stones and rain in the hair.” In terms of her fiction, she says, “I think the reason I’m interested in ‘bad’ weather is because that is when you’re most aware of your own embodiment in the world; when your skin is being rained on and your hair is being blown around. You really know you’re alive when you’re most physically present to the world and the elements.” I’m interested in ‘bad’ weather because that is when you’re most aware of your own embodiment in the world Self-isolating, one of those horrible new nonsensical phrases. Social distancing, Medical distance, they should call it, or why not just safe distance, and when did ‘distance‘ become a verb?"

Kate, an unhappy one, who couldn't stay in a place, if see her from the good side, an outdoor person. She is a single mum and really cares about her teenage son. In the beginning, she was just looking irresponsible. You see, with some patience, characters reveal themselves and this was beautiful. At dusk on a November evening in 2020 a woman slips out of her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of two weeks of isolation, but she just can’t take it any more – the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. And anyway, the moor will be deserted at this time. Nobody need ever know.

If there was any doubt whether the pandemic would inspire literature that will endure beyond the crisis, The Fell, a slender but illuminating lightning strike of a book, should put that to rest.” I do not want to watch a live-stream play with no audience. I want to be in the theatre, and if I can't be in the theatre, I'd rather have nothingThis is a book about three families in the pandemic. How life changes forever, how almost everybody struggles to keep their incomes, try to deal with children, worried about prices, and all that. A 4-star book, a little sad and dark for me. The Fell is very much a novel of our time . . . it takes note of the moment, and captures what seemed unimaginable even a year before it was set. But it also offers hope . . . there may be a time when what is described here is, indeed, in the past, and a novel like The Fell will help us to remember * Church Times * The Fell, with its one day in a pandemic focus, felt rather pedestrian and depressing. Kate, a furloughed single mom, is the main character and her quarantine breaking towards the hills behind her English village home goes very awry. Her teenage son Matt is game addicted, a recreational drugs user and in general bored. Then we have a bit better of elderly neighbour who very much fears the virus due to her recovering from cancer. In real life, I would have immediately leapt to sanctimonious judgment about brazen breakers of the Covid rules who thoughtlessly inflict their virality upon the old, infirm, and immunosuppressed, in radical denial of the common good. But I will admit found some measure of empathy for Kate, a vegetarian hippie who doesn't fit the profile of the right-wing anti-masker next door. Unfortunately, Kate's "harmless" stroll on the fell takes an unexpected turn when she ventures further than intended, falls and injures herself as night and bad weather descend. Without her mobile phone, Kate is in real danger, particularly as she has told nobody where she was going. At home, Matt becomes increasingly more concerned about his mother's whereabouts, conferring at a distance with Alice and wrestling with the competing pressures of ensuring his mother's safety, while not exposing her to the risk of a large fine she can ill afford to pay.

The main thing this did well is take into consideration the many different experiences we all had during the pandemic. The way some of us were forced to stay home despite home never having been a safe space. The way some of us resented working all through the pandemic while others were able to have the spring and summer off and then some. The way some of us had it off involuntarily and without government benefits to support, digging a deeper and deeper hole and not giving us so much as a stepping stool to help ourselves out. I can’t say it’s all encompassing, but I was impressed by how much it did cover. The Fell is a short novel that takes place in Northern England, in November 2020, when the pandemic was in a full-blown mode in the UK. It all takes place over one day. Told via four PoVs, we hear the characters' stories and how they're dealing and coping with the pandemic and the rules imposed by the government - staying put, not congregating with others, social distancing and curfews. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. Moss steps into other people's shoes with impressive ease. Her prose is clear, low-key and compelling, its power incremental . . . The Fell is about the hazards that lurk at the edges of life. Feelingly, but without sentimentality, Moss explores what happens when you find yourself teetering on the precipice * Herald * It’s early evening in November 2020, Kate should be self isolating for fourteen days but she’s feeling claustrophobic and the lure of the Peak District Fells is proving hard to resist. Her elderly neighbour Alice sees her leave her property but it takes a while for her teenage son Matt to realise that she’s broken the quarantine rules. The story is told from several perspectives.With Moss’s trademark attention to both the beauty and danger of the natural world, the moors come alive as almost another character. But Kate’s delight at having escaped outdoors is short-lived: with night approaching, she falls and breaks her leg. Moss’s characters aren’t just connected by proximity, or even by the process of living through unparalleled crisis, but by an underlying sense of peril, both immediate, domestic and more broadly existential. Their thoughts shifting from mundane commentary or overt distractions to their keen awareness of the instability of everything around them, political divisions, fractured society, and the spectre of climate change. There are moments too of coming together, acts of kindness, shared concerns. It’s a depiction of a reality that will be familiar to many, although there are also a number of absent voices: marginal and seen only in the distance, the homeless and displaced; figures like Kate’s neighbour Samira who puts in a puzzlingly brief appearance. I was reminded at times of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours similarly preoccupied with questions of connection, and how to live, how to deal with the weight of days but – although I find aspects of Cunningham’s vision deeply flawed - The Fell is less richly descriptive, less thoughtful in its stance. Moss’s story’s almost too realistic at times, preserving rather than creatively reinventing the territory it covers. Teenage Matt often seems quite peripheral, a minor function of plot, Alice is probably the most well-realised of the group, but even here there’s a tendency to edge towards cliché. Although the slightly surreal encounter between Kate and a raven, both alone in the November night, is an interesting attempt at disrupting this rather conventional story, it felt more of a gesture than anything else, it didn’t have the eerie, mythic force of the more satisfying elements of earlier books like Cold Earth. But even though this wasn’t the compulsive read I’d hoped for, I still found it engaging enough to hold my attention. Like Summerwater and the 2018 chef d’oeuvre Ghost Wall, The Fell is a slim book covering a lot of ground. In unfussy prose, Moss seamlessly blends quotidian concerns. “When you’re not dead, life goes on and there are buses to catch and lamb to cook,” she wrote in Cold Earth, with the most pressing issues of our time. Among her recurring preoccupations is class. Kate notes that she would have never thought it could be illegal to walk the hills alone, but “the authorities have never liked to have commoners wandering the land instead of getting and selling”.