British novelist Moss, author of Summerwater, returns with a pandemic novel that runs through the course of one day during Britain's lockdown. Single mother Kate, who has Covid, is required to quarantine but decides to go for a secret hike through the local moor. But when she falls and injures her leg, and no one knows where she is, Kate find herself in danger.
Her style is concise. The Fell, like its two predecessors, is elegantly brief ... The novel slips gracefully between Kate’s perspective on the fell, her teenage son Matt’s increasing anxiety as he waits for her at home, their neighbour Alice, and Rob, a member of the mountain rescue team. The greater tension here comes from the question of Kate’s survival—Moss can create drama from the effort to eat a fig roll—but all four characters reveal their own night thoughts as they worry in their various ways about Kate ... The astonishing thing is that Moss can write so compassionately about human frailty while her own work is as close to perfect as a novelist’s can be.
... absorbing ... The extended passage of stream-of-consciousness internal monologue...is subtly, ingeniously done ... there's a relentless, intoxicating flow to much of the writing, with ideas constantly spawning new ideas in a process of perpetual intellectual motion. That said, the writing still feels precision-tooled, the words carefully-chosen and the details equally carefully thought-through ... If and when the dust finally settles on the covid era, a handful of the many books it has inspired will eventually solidify into a sort of pandemic canon. It's perhaps not the kind of accolade that authors dream of, but this humane, thoughtful reflection on the experience of the last 18 months surely merits a place on any such list.
Even the prose has been forcibly domesticated. Though the characters think in long, associative, run-on sentences, there is little of the wild, supple unpredictability for which stream of consciousness was invented. It’s more like anxious small talk, in which the chatterer, though theoretically freed from the civilizing influence of other people, compulsively censors and corrects herself ... Moss is concerned, here and elsewhere, with our responsibilities to one another, and with our interconnectedness—across geographical distance and historical time, across species and national borders. Yet my imagination fails me when I try to envision what The Fell, published last year in Britain, might signify to U.S. readers. I can think of no book I’ve read since moving to New York from England that has made me feel so foreign ... Each character at some point fears that Kate, missing on the Peaks, will die or come to serious harm, and yet for all of them—Kate herself included—the threat of social sanction, that 'the whole village will know' she broke the rules, feels more frightening. In that sense, viewed as a study in repression and displacement, Moss’s defiantly uneventful novel becomes a psychological thriller.
