As titles go, it’s mildly pretentious...Yet Moss, except in flashes, is anything but a pretentious writer. She writes beautifully about English middle-class life, about souls in tumult, about people whose lives have not turned out the way they’d hoped ... She catches the details of ordinary existence in a manner that’s reminiscent of the director Mike Leigh: the peeling roof tiles, the cheap plastic teakettles, the beans on toast. She never condescends, and her fluid prose is suggestive of larger and darker human themes ... Reading her, one recalls John Barth’s comment that the best literature is 'both of stunning literary quality and democratic of access' ... a bit less tightly wound than Ghost Wall, and it has an expedient ending. But there’s little doubt, reading Moss, that you’re in the hands of a sophisticated and gifted writer ... As always in Moss’s work, there is a strong sense of the natural world. There are riddles of existence she’s shaking down. As a character puts it in Ghost Wall, 'ancient knowledge runs somehow in our blood' ... As always in Moss’s work, too, there is an ominous quality, slow uncanny beats from an extra subwoofer or two, mighty but muffled ... One senses Moss stumbling toward an ending rather than running confidently downhill toward one. This is comment more than complaint. Endings don’t matter to me quite as much as they do to many ... Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head is a great fog novel. Summerwater is pretty close to a great rain novel.
The novel begins at dawn and ends in the dark, and from the first page you know something terrible is going to happen, but you don’t know on whose neck the axe will fall ... Moss’s ability to conjure up the fleeting and sometimes agonised tenderness of family life is unmatched, and here, as in The Tidal Zone in particular, she sketches so lightly the all-but-invisible conflicts and compromises that can make cohabitation both a joy and a living hell ... Summerwater feels very much like a pandemic novel, despite the fact that it must have been completed months before Covid-19 ... A great part of a novelist’s skill lies in the breadth of their sympathies and their ability to enter into the lives of people unlike themselves. Moss does this so naturally and comprehensively that at times her simple, pellucid prose and perfectly judged free indirect speech feel almost like documentary or nonfiction – there is an artfulness to her writing so accomplished as to conceal itself.
Sarah Moss has an uncanny ability to prickle the reader’s skin ... The book’s action takes place over the course of a rainy weekend, and Moss introduces us to a variety of characters, who, through internal monologues and their interactions with the other holiday-makers, take turns driving the action ... Moss intersperses chapters detailing her characters’ lives with others in which the land — its geology and other features — speaks to the nature of deep time, the way in which human habitation is a blip on a timeline that stretches back billions of years. But as the day’s events progress, nature takes on human characteristics: 'The sky had turned a yellowish shade of grey, the colour of bandages, or thickened skin on old white feet.' The novel’s explosive conclusion feels like witnessing swamp gas bubbling to the surface and catching fire.
The natural world, however, is a dominant force in this absorbing novel, the extreme elements reflecting the mood of the holiday makers, a disparate group of ages and nationalities, huddled at the windows of their log cabins, wondering whether or not they might not have had more fun on a coach trip to Lanzarote ... Spread across a single day, Summerwater is concerned with observation and contemplation ... Each chapter is a perfect, self-contained gem ... Moss’s insight into her characters’ inner lives is among the many strengths of Summerwater. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, the holiday makers simply stare at each other, indulging their own sense of superiority ... For more than a decade, Sarah Moss has been crafting quiet, complex novels that make an indelible impression on the reader. This is one of her best, and most accessible, and should bring her work to a wider audience.
Summerwater, though smaller in scale than most of her previous works, exhibits many of her strengths and preoccupations. In tracing her characters’ finicky, circular, weather-obsessed thoughts ('Ostentatious rain. Pissing it down'), Moss touches on—or, more accurately, brushes past—the Brexit vote, Anglo-Scottish relations, climate change, the concept of rape culture, overpopulation, adolescent depression, and, if not exactly warfare between the generations and the sexes, then at least mutual incomprehension and froideur. The cast of characters proves usefully broad; of the book’s dozen perspectives, each rendered in a colloquial free-indirect style ... The novel is powered not by the local tensions it depicts but by the existential conflict underpinning them. When we write about the behavior of a society, Moss seems to say, we are also talking about the workings of the individual mind; collective myths—nostalgia for a pre-industrial past and an unmixed populace, the dream of a sovereign future, some settled story about our present moment—are simply drives and fears writ large ... It’s hard to miss that the novel follows Ghost Wall in turning from the brashness of daily life toward a more remote or enclosed realm, in closer touch with human atavism—and also, perhaps, with what really matters to this brilliant, confounding writer.
... engagingly told by Moss in her characteristically streamlined and suspenseful prose ... Within the walls of each cabin, Moss subtly renders the delicate intricacies and troubled dynamics of family life ... The final paragraph of Summerwater is one of the most chilling in recent memory, pointing to the devastating consequences of bigotry and hatred, and to the undeniable mastery of Moss’s storytelling.
... to identify the book's themes as domestic or interpersonal would be to miss what makes Moss's work so distinctive: the lovely countermelodies of earth, animal, and sky that contextualize human dramas, the way her work has that special 'seriousness accorded to the ground under our feet only by toddlers and botanists,' as one character thinks while watching her young daughter study rocks ... This correspondence is most apparent in the pattering, sensual way she writes about water, as something in us and outside of us, flowing through us, and making us up, a reminder that we are not as separate from the natural world as we sometimes think ... These little correspondences between human and animal are often funny ... Moss builds elliptical, mounting dread throughout the novel to prepare us for the catastrophe that comes at the end. But in the way she swoops and zooms through time and space, Moss also teaches us to ask, as she puts it in one of her interludes: In the midst of uncertainty and frailty, should the history of the ground under our feet 'comfort us, in geological time?'
Building up a sense of dread in a novel is a subtle art, and Sarah Moss is an absolute master of it ... the hints are so ambiguous and understated – and so apparently peripheral to the myriad concerns of the various characters – that they create more of a background hum of unease ... Summerwater has been described as a portrait of 'the many conflicting voices of Britain in microcosm' and it certainly feels like an accurate reflection of our confused, scared, angsty present. Perhaps Moss’s point, though, is that we’re all so busy worrying about the things we can’t influence we’ve lost sight of the things we can.
Several dysfunctional families have simultaneously miserable holidays in inadequate accommodation. The scene is a complex of sagging wooden cabins beside a loch — a place that was once the stuff of middle-class attainment and is now a thrifty if depressing alternative to an aspirational Euro break ... Chapter by chapter, Moss takes us into the consciousness of this temporary community. The story is told through 12 monologues, covering the summer solstice from a damp and fractious dawn to something dreadful in the middle of the night ... There’s no connection in Summerwater . Actually as well as metaphorically: the absence of a phone signal is a constant theme ... What Summerwater does have plenty of is foreboding as Moss heaps up the pointers to something terrible with the cruel skill of a horror technician. By the midpoint, reading feels as stressful and claustrophobic as any wet-weather getaway, and just as impossible to get out of before the appalling end ... Moss only seems to be growing more brilliant.
Adroitly, Moss takes you into [the character's] thought patterns, emotional and physical responses, social backgrounds, past and present circumstances. From 5am, when one of them goes out for her early-morning run, to late-night disturbance when music pounds out from a cabin where a party is in raucous swing, briefly juxtaposed lives are caught in vignettes sharp with telling detail and acute observation ... Comedy often ripples across the surface. But gradually it becomes apparent that these holidaymakers have more in common than their location. Vulnerability is a shared theme ... Fissures in relationships and fault lines in personalities — agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder — become evident ... When disaster finally flares out, it feels slightly abrupt. The ending is sombre, but the scenes leading up to it in this latest display of Moss’s imaginative versatility shine with intelligence.
The chapters jump among their points of view, taking the form of close third-person internal monologues ... Mixed among these chapters are quick, ominous meditations on the surrounding environment—glimpses of the animals threatened by the downpour, or of the ancient bark canoes and skin coracles corroding on the lake bottom. The juxtapositions are simple but effective: intertwined with the pedestrian concerns that occupy the characters’ minds are the elemental dramas of death and survival ... In Summerwater the aura of menace comes not only from the biblical weather but the mounting anger against a cottage of foreigners who blast their music all night. The chapters build a superb sense of foreboding that is ultimately deflated in the oblique, mostly incoherent final scene. Ms. Moss is masterly with loomings and premonitions, but she loses her nerve when the confrontations arrive.
... slender yet weighty ... Every other chapter extracts a stream-of-consciousness core sample from the rich vein of a character’s internal monologue ... nothing sets up a potential catastrophe better than the combination of outsiders and wilderness, and on this point Moss does not disappoint. Like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, it happens 'gradually, and then suddenly.'
In its nuanced, immersive portraits of these families, Summerwater is more than just a quarantine novel. Narrated in the close third person, each of the book’s twelve main chapters takes us inside a different character’s mind, memories, observations, and daydreams jostling together in passages of free indirect speech, attentive to how national and global issues play out in the minutiae of the characters’ daily lives. The cumulative effect is an astute and polyphonic portrait of contemporary Britain ... From one chapter to the next, Moss deftly switches tenor and psychology ... a chorus of interiority, locating us inside each character’s mind. That Moss gives us these streams of consciousness while keeping the pacing of the plot under such firm control intensifies the novel’s already palpable claustrophobia ... Examining domestic discontent and associated gendered presumptions has long been Moss’s forte, and she’s especially attuned to the unfair demands made on women ... Moss has proved herself to be one of the most discerning chroniclers of contemporary British life.
... humorous and poetic ... Summerwater also illustrates how people’s personal concerns are linked to the natural world through Moss’s vivid evocation of the loch, showing how common occurrences in nature can echo emotional truths. Moss carefully weaves her themes throughout her novel, connecting the characters and beautifully tying up the story with a shocking denouement that leaves the reader pondering the unexpected turns of life.
There is not much action but a building sense of menace that is hard to pinpoint in Sarah Moss’ new novel, Summerwater. At first blush, this slim book is a series of character studies, and it is successful just as that. However, Moss drops hints here and there that something will go awry at the Scottish holiday park where her characters are vacationing ... The narrative is restrained and controlled, and the story is enigmatic, dark and elegant. The summer residents are as inhospitable as those in the legend that inspired Watson’s poem; they nurse hurts and prejudices as they navigate the murky depths of family, love, self and community. Thoughtful, introspective and powerful, Summerwater. is another great outing from Sarah Moss.
... slender yet weighty ... Every other chapter extracts a stream-of-consciousness core sample from the rich vein of a character’s internal monologue ... nothing sets up a potential catastrophe better than the combination of outsiders and wilderness, and on this point Moss does not disappoint. Like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, it happens 'gradually, and then suddenly.'
Though her characters are trapped in their heads as well as in their cabins, Moss has fun letting them loose on the page. Where her previous novels have been solemnly invested in their driven, cerebral, mostly female leads, here she’s more prepared to tease ... Polyphonic novels stand or fall according to their skill at doing different voices. In a set of close third-person narratives that are light on dialogue, ‘voice’ really means thought, and there’s a lot of thinking, and overthinking, in Summerwater. Even when the characters are doing stuff (running, putting on wellies, making a cup of tea) the action is mostly inner action ... State-of-the-nation novels tend to be long and Summerwater is slim. But it’s attentive to the way we live now and to our divisions ... there’s range and vitality to the voices, and they’re complemented by lyric fragments from the woodland fringe of the park, with its bats, deer, foxes, peregrines and moths.
Unlike in her previous novel, the narrative is polyphonic, skipping between close-third-person views of the different characters, and includes shorter, stranger descriptions of the countryside nestling between the chapters ... Moss can be very funny, and moments of humour creep in here, particularly when it is the women whom we see up close ... The result is baggier, more amorphous and slightly less dazzling than some of Moss’s previous work – particularly Ghost Wall – but it nonetheless displays her agility and range. Her ability to switch so smoothly between such different characters is remarkable, while some scenes are especially memorable for their poignancy and pathos, including the chapter in which a boy is battered by the elements when out on the loch in a canoe, and the episode of a woman with early-stage dementia.
Rather than being a respite from the troubles of their lives, the isolation and seemingly never-ending rain only serve to give the characters little else to do but to ruminate on their lives, and obsess over the occupants of one cabin who dare to break the quiet solitude with loud music and revelry every night. The foreboding atmosphere and myriad frustrations among the dissatisfied characters come to a head in the final pages. Readers who enjoy stream-of-consciousness narratives and careful characterization will find much to appreciate here, but those seeking a more cohesive story and engaging action should look elsewhere.
Families and the tensions between the individuals within them lie at the heart of Moss’s writing. There is also a powerful connection to often-uncongenial landscapes, early human settlements and the ghosts—imagined or real—contained there. This plays into Moss’s wider theme of national identity, which she has called 'an invented tradition that depends on myths of origin.' ... While fluent and absorbing, the effect of the multiple perspectives can sometimes be slightly diluting ... The younger children are the key to the book: sensitive Jack, who narrates the final dramatic scene; Izzie, whose nighttime imaginary terrors are about to be realised; and Lola, who carries the heavy disappointments of someone twice her age, and is as cunning as a feral animal in human form. In Moss’s assured yet brutal landscape, it is the wild, not the meek, who shall inherit the earth.
Moss’s taut latest turns a rain-drenched park in the Scottish Highlands into a site of tension and unease for a group of vacationing strangers ... a series of lyrical interludes describing the park’s elements of nature and eons of evolution provide delightfully ironic contrasts to the small human dramas. Readers unafraid of a bit of rain will relish this
