Though at least there were dances in the war, weren’t there, and concerts, and sex, lots of sex, at least people were allowed to see each other." 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. Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for giving me a chance to read The Fell by Sarah Moss, I have given my honest review. A one-sitting read that's both thriller and stream of consciousness meditation on how Covid has changed our world . . . ambitious and immersive * Red * The four characters of the book are: Kate – a single Mum, Matt her son, Alice her widowed neighbour recovering from cancer and so clinically vulnerable and Rob a divorced volunteer mountain rescuer with a teenage daughter he sees at weekends. Kate has been exposed to a COVID case so she and Matt are isolating, but when the claustrophobia of it gets too much Kate decides to walk up into the deserted moors (spotted by Alice who does not report her despite the attentions of her one child – a now married daughter with two children). When she does not return as darkness closes in, Matt alerts the authorities, while up on the moor Kate is in serious difficulties after a fall and Rob and his colleagues scramble to find her (Rob fearing she has deliberately gone to the moor to commit suicide).

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.” 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. Alice is their next door neighbour, an older woman who has recently finished chemotherapy and is clinically vulnerable and isolating. Rob is a mountain rescue volunteer. Translating her fury at the impact on individuals into fiction was, however, a different matter. For a time she was, like many of us, “overwhelmed by the various kinds of fear and anxiety”, uncertain that our experiences could be represented in art and culture. A keen theatre-goer, she resisted watching live performances digitally “because they just made me desperately sad. I mean, 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 nothing.”

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. One way of coping with this knowledge is to wax apocalyptic. Another is to find fair and just ways to live together – while we’re going through it, and after. Kate removes herself from the daily hum of pandemic life, and can see more clearly. Achieving this kind of perspective is precisely what fiction sets out to do, and what Moss does with great sensitivity. “There will be holes in the children’s education, a generation that’s forgotten or never learnt how to go to a party, people of all ages who won’t forget to be afraid to leave the house, to be afraid of other people, afraid to touch or dance or sing, to travel, to try on clothes – whisht, she thinks again, hush now. Walk.”

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.” 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. I'm at that stage of life where I'm sorting out what's important and want to organize my 'stuff' and set loose any extra baggage. So, the following sentences resonated with me: A masterfully tense, deeply empathetic novel about lives stilled and reexamined, and the uncertainty and danger of the world that surrounds them. I was completely riveted by the central questions of its narrative, and by its tender, insightful exploration of the times we are living through.”

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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 * 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. 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”. Despite Sarah Moss writing competently a lot of the book is characters musing on how the pandemic impacts them, what they can't do, worries nothing will ever be the same and reflecting on the overwhelming urge to do things they now can't. The raven flies down the valley. It’s hours yet, till sunrise. Sheep rest where their seed, breed and generation have worn hollows in the peat, lay their dreaming heads where past sheep have lain theirs. The lovely hares sleep where the long grass folds over them. No burrows, no burial. The Saukin Stone dries in the wind. Though the stone’s feet are planted deep in the rivulets, in the bodies of trees a thousand years dead, its face takes the weather, gazes eyeless over heather and bog. Roots reach deep, bide their time. Spring will come.