In making this distinction, the professor ineffectually pushes back against Silvie’s father’s desire to imagine a purely British origin story. Britons, her father calls them Celts, the professor demurs, citing the current preferred terminology. That story is told by seventeen-year-old Silvie, who, together with her parents and an anthropology professor and three of his students, spends two weeks in the summer of 1991 reenacting the lives of the Iron Age inhabitants of Northumberland. (I wanted to say “naturally,” but the point of the book is to critique naturalness, not as a meaningless concept but as one much open to abuse.) They’re expressed in deceptively simple prose and arise seamlessly from a compelling story. But its ideas aren’t stern, dogmatic, or bloodless. Like all of Moss’s work - she has written four novels and a memoir of a year spent in Iceland - Ghost Wall is really smart. Moreover, they inflict their pain disproportionately - most of the victims are women. These fantasies are pernicious because they confuse sacrifice with victimization. Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall indicts fantasies of authenticity and tradition.
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