Hall’s breath proves just as powerful and unpredictable as Helm’s ... Helm is as fascinating as it is challenging. The momentary irritation of being yanked from one unfinished story is tempered by the magnetic allure of falling into another one just as engaging ... Hall captures the turbulent, unwieldy forces of meteorological chaos and human desire that we can’t control, can barely even track.
Mischievous ... This inventive, ambitious, often witty storm system of a novel spans centuries ... Hall is both playful and serious, bringing everyday warmth and droll humor to substantial ideas. In Helm, she commands an impressive range of idioms ... Hall salts her solemn banquet with the comedy that’s inextricable from mortal life — or from English life, anyway.
Each strand of Helm has...concentration; the characters and voices could stand alone, but they flow together into something deep and rich ... Hall’s work on place, and especially this corner of England, has always been virtuosic, a tough and supple poetry anchored in decades of attention to Cumbrian land and plants and skies ... Above all it is the wind itself that holds this vastly ambitious, serious – but also often playful and ironic – book together. Some might find Helm’s voice initially a little arch, a little unplaced relative to the human voices, but it grows on you.
A sweeping exploration of the mutual history between human beings and the environment ... Hall proceeds to weave together a dozen or so temporally disparate narratives whose characters have nothing in common beyond their often spiritual interactions with Helm ... Particularly owing to each narrative having a unique literary style, the novel reads like a series of short stories snipped up and patchworked together. There is no overall plot connecting them.
A dizzying, earthy and often dystopian world where the elements rule and nature is blood red ... An extraordinary novel ... Pushes both the boundaries of the novel and our relationship with nature.
[A] multi-stranded, intuitive work, full of exploration and retreat, linguistic flourish and improvisation ... Hall assembles her unconventional narrative with exquisite patterning: the form is organic and delightful, rule-breaking, with narratives finishing and beginning at various stages throughout. It is an experimental novel that doesn’t announce itself as such — Helm is as vital, fierce and free as the phenomenon it describes.
Compared to the dynamism of the writing, do the subtle origins of human motivation and desire get short shrift? ... By continually drawing attention to its own remarkable energies, it dominates every aspect of the novel. This is fine, in so far as it allows Sarah Hall to give a visceral sense of what Helm looks and feels like, but it has the effect of making such things as motivation and characterization seem excessively simple, when not blowing them away entirely.
A panoramic narrative imbued with magic, lore, meteorology, and human history ... Literary chapters rich with evocative vocabulary and dialect enchant with the chronicles of Helm.
Virtuosic ... Most poignant are the chapters from the perspective of Janni, a mid-20th-century girl who undergoes electroconvulsive therapy, and whose tender, almost romantic bond with Helm is moving and well drawn. Readers will be swept away by Hall’s ambitious and formally daring narrative.
