Helm by Sarah Hall review: 'aims high'
Rooted in Cumbria’s Eden Valley but bringing together multiple narratives spanning thousands of years, this is an accomplished book that could well win prizes, writes Stuart Kelly
I don’t know if there is a technical name for this kind of fiction – some might even chafe at the use of the word novel to describe a work of interlinked short pieces – so I’ll call it “topographical mosaic”. It is a genre which bubbles away quietly. Perhaps the most significant example is Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton, a book spanning three centuries of life in a fictitious Berkshire village. Recently both Andrew Michael Hurley’s Barrowbeck and the prize-winning Cuddy by Benjamin Myers have worked the same seam; Daniel Mason’s North Woods and Ben Shattuck’s A History of Sound provide a transatlantic variant. You would be correct in thinking it is a rather male form, and also that the English version has a marked preference for the north. Sarah Hall might go against the gender grain, but it is very much a book of Cumbria, as was Hall’s debut, Haweswater, and as was the later The Wolf Border. It seems – I may be wrong – that a degree of – not pride, perhaps, but maybe attachment is what makes books such as these work.
Helm is the name of a particular wind associated with the area between Dilston (De’il’s Toun) and Dufton on the Pennine Way, in the Eden Valley, and Hall mines the significance of the name. This act of ventriloquism is a bravura frame, with the zephyr being cocky, poetic, profound, tantrum-childish, innocent-childish, wise, curious and aloof. Hall controls this with both aplomb and a degree of gleefulness: such showmanship can come across as mimsy or precious. There are hints of both Ted Hughes’ Crow and the intrusive, caring narrator of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood as the voice swirls.
There are also little prose poems and art-naif pictures – like a version of the Beaufort Scale attuned to Helm – as well as museum catalogue artefact descriptions for objects which appear in the narratives. Although Perec cautioned that a novel needs scaffolding but you have to remember to dismantle it when you complete the building, these obvious “binding” strategies seem appropriate given that subject is, almost by definition, ungraspable.
The narrative jumps rather than unfolds chronologically. There is a neolithic section, with NaNay, initially a young woman, who has a vision of how their earthwork should develop. Normally I find recreations of the deep past fairly irksome, but Hall keeps this believable: even the names – we also have Irla, Reen, Dal – seem convincing, in a way that Jean M Auel’s Ayla, Jondalar and Rydag never did. (Although there is still an element of the girl-boss in NaNay).
But this is a world of sickness, infant mortality, violence and scepticism; Eden in name only. The second and third narratives have male central characters; a Dark Ages priest called Michael Lang and a Victorian gentleman meteorologist, Thomas Bodger. Lang wants to exorcise Helm, Bodger wants to map and stain the wind.
The fourth major narrative takes place in the present day with a recently-separated modern climate scientist, Dr Selima Sutar, conducting lonely research into microplastics and harried by extremists called Endtrepreneurs. Again, it might seem slightly binary in terms of the characters’ relations to the space, but one can always justify this with the past not having the values of the present. Lang is slightly too much like Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose, and Bodger – well, the name says it all. Hugh Grant could do the affable eccentric well enough.
There are other narratives: of particular note is Janni, whose story has a level of stark, red-brick realism, despite her capacity to commune with the ethereal spirit. Part of the point, I presume, of fictions like this is the chance of showcasing a range of styles. I cannot imagine that Janni’s story would be as effective as a subplot to any of the other parts.
Where the novel aims high and succeeds is stylistically. This is not just a matter of dialect – although Hall is unobtrusive in using “bazodee”, “crutters”, “glisky”, “ritters” and sucklike – but one of idiolect. The different eras had judiciously selected vocabularies, with pared language like “meat sickness” and “stainberry” giving way to theological and scientific lexicons. The frequent lists allow for more exotic and recondite words, but Hall also will coin adverbs (”badgerly” I liked particularly) and use slightly askance adjectives (“the plush insides of a carcass”). A sentence like “The hawthorns drop their blossoms, the catkins spindle then fall, the ferns unfurl their tight curled ovaries” is a masterclass of phonic effects, assonances, shifting pace and subtle choice. Most importantly, unlike some prose to which the word poetic is erroneously conferred, Hall doesn’t overdo it. Some metaphors are all the more effective for the considerable restraint and frisson, as in “her tongue is a slug in salt”.
It is almost a throwaway line, but one character recollects another saying “The real Cumbria… is round the edges”. Maybe it’s not northern-ness but a sense of the peripheral that ignites these works. This is an accomplished, careful book; and whether it wins prizes will depend on whether judges think it sufficiently more than the sum of its estimable parts.
Helm, by Sarah Hall, Faber & Faber, £20. Sarah Hall is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 24 August.
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