Sarah Hall (1) (1974–)

This is a dizzyingly literary collection of dark, sometimes dystopian, female-focused short stories. I really liked most of them and really did not like the first and last stories in the book, both of which were told from the perspective of a husband whose wife starts acting oddly (one turns into a fox, the other becomes uncharacteristically hedonistic -- one of these transformations is explained and the other isn't, but both the husband and wife in each are equally frustrating). The other show more stories have wildly different subjects but all cling to a similar sense of impending dread and unexplained disconnection: the case notes of a social worker as she helps a child recently rescued from an unusual commune; a British woman on an unnerving hike with her new boyfriend and his childhood best friend in South Africa; a new mother who runs into a former lover walking home from her "me time" at the neighborhood pool; and (one of my favorites) a young man who has learned to survive in a world where the wind won't stop blowing and almost everyone else has died (but who just wants to have a nice Christmas). Even though I didn't like every story, they were all compelling, unique, and hard to put down. Worth a check-out for a well-rounded contemporary short story fix. show less

Set in the mid-1930s, Haweswater is the story of a village tragically affected by construction of the Haweswater Reservoir. According to the Wikipedia article:
The controversial construction of the Haweswater dam started in 1929, after Parliament passed an Act giving the Manchester Corporation permission to build the reservoir to supply water for the urban conurbations of north-west England. At the time, there was public outcry about the decision, as the valley of Mardale was populated by the show more farming villages of Measand and Mardale Green and the construction of the reservoir would mean that these villages would be flooded and lost and the population would have to be moved.

Sarah Hall shows the searing emotional impact through the lives of the Lightburn family. Sam and Ella Lightburn breed sheep, and have lived in the valley all their lives. Their daughter Janet has just reached adulthood and played an active role in lambing and other farm labor all her life. Her much-younger brother , Isaac, is known for his love of the water and wildlife. Into their lives comes Jack Liggett, a representative of Manchester City Waterworks, who breaks the news of pending construction to the stunned villagers. Janet is a very strong woman and not about to sit idly by while her homeland is destroyed. But she hadn't bargained on the feelings that Jack would stir up within her. And he hadn't expected to become so immersed in the life of the village, nor in its beauty. Their romance unfolds even as villagers begin to move away, and crews of engineers begin construction on the dam.

Hall's prose is magnificent and filled with rich description. I felt immersed in the countryside:
In July and August the farmers in the valley sweltered under the dry sun as they worked, rolling and collecting hay, and transporting it in carts to barns and out-sheds, tying the bales down under tarpaulin for storage. Chaff and pollen-dust filled the warm air and floated around on the summer currents, and the smell of dry scorching grass was heavy and sweet in their nostrils. It was a good time of year. ... Around dawn the air was fresh and soft, the temperature rose during the day with the sun's ascension and passage between the fells. The men took off their shirts and their backs reddened, skin peeled and finally became tanned. Their forearms were burned a deep brown, masking the veins which had previously been seen easily, bluely, under their pale, northern-English skin. (p. 124)

And yet in the midst of such beauty, this is a classic literary tragedy, in the manner of Hamlet or other more famous works. The prologue makes it clear the villagers were powerless against Manchester City Waterworks. But the impact was more extensive, and deeper, than I had ever imagined. And Hall plays out the tragedy with drama and suspense. Each character plays a vital role as both a character and a symbol. I'm amazed this was a debut novel. Haweswater won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize Best First Book Award in 2003, and is most deserving of such an honor. show less

Burntcoat is the story of Edith Harkness and her reconciliation with Death as she prepares for her end from the relapse of a frightful disease, part of a global pandemic. She reminisces about her life, most of her memories concentrate on her childhood with her mother and her last romance, her pandemic love affair with Halit, the owner of a nearby restaurant. She also spends some time on how her career flourished. She won a huge commission at the start of her career, one that was met with the show more same anger and awe as Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial.

She had an unusual childhood. Her mother had some brain damage from an aneurism and had to relearn the basic skills. Her father left and though he sued for custody when he lost, he did not try to stay in her life. Her mother was not demonstrative, but she came through with surprising strength, in particular when she confronted Edith’s early, bad boyfriend.

The book starts with the lockdown for this great pandemic. It is worse than COVID, much more deadly. It takes longer for them to find a vaccine and the world is disrupted even more with food shortages and violence. Edith and Halit both get it, which we know from the beginning as she has relapsed.

Burntcoat is beautifully written for the most part. Sarah Hall knows how to craft a sentence. It also is very graphic. I’ve read plenty of erotica and this is the first time I felt uncomfortable with it. It felt like Sarah Hall was trying to write about sex differently, but in her effort to avoid euphemism, it became so much about the mechanics and the fluids.

The greatest flaw, though, was in Hall’s choice to make the disease not be COVID. With COVID there were hate crimes and violence, so why the need to make a new, even worse pandemic? It felt like a cop-out, an abdication of her responsibility. I know she’s the writer. It’s her choice, but it was a bad choice. There were unforgivable choices made during COVID, we didn’t need to supersize the disease to get incompetent government, food shortages, and hate crimes.

So, I think this book is great writing skill wasted on cringe sex and a cop-out virus. Edith is interesting, I cared about her, but her mother Naomi was for me, the heart of the book.

I received an ARC of Burntcoat from the publisher through Shelf Awareness.

Burntcoat at Custom House Books | Harper Collins
Sarah Hall author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/14/9780062657107/ show less

Possibly the discovery of my reading year (already in mid-January) – magnificent writing. Halfway through the novel I started to slow down – simply did not want it to end, but secretly also wondered how it would end. Sarah could have simply continued writing about Rachel and her men (both hairy and furry) in one endless series – I would have continued reading it, cherishing it, ruminating on it, until the end of sojourn on planet earth. And yet the ending of this novel resulted in some show more of the most frantic and emotionally spell-bound reading I ever did. I didn’t want it to end, I wanted the pack of wolves to survive, I wanted to know more about Rachel’s trip to Idaho.

So what makes it all so addictive? I suspect the story touches on many themes in my own life. There is also the intergenerational perspective which gives it depth. And then there is the wolf and the public outcry around it (last year over a 100,000 sheep in NL have died as a result of a disease called blue tongue, but the less than two hundred sheep killed by wolves are the one thing people can’t stop talking about). The wolf stands for the wild, for something called nature, in a shape we don’t know anymore. All control freaks kick into action the moment the wolf does not behave like a domesticated dog. It spreads fear. Whereas when I met one in the wild, last year, on the heather fields of my youth, I was just intrigued by this big dog walking so casually across the forest track I was hiking on. Such slick movements. Such command, so sly. Magical. The same applies to Hall’s deft treatment of the wider ramifications of the theme of re-introducing wilderness – borders, identity, fear of the uncontrolled, assertion of power and control (over women, over one’s vices and addictions, over one’s nation, over one’s traumas, over one’s life).

So what is the story? Rachel, a single woman in her late thirties, happily works for a reclusive wilderness centre that monitors the movement of two packs of wolves across Idaho and Canada. Life is simple, spartan and fun with changing crews of volunteers, a hostile environment (hunters and farmers killing and snaring wolves) and a small but committed community of conservationists. Rachel is head hunted for a bold conservationist experiment by an old fashioned Lord in Cumbria, Rachel’s place of birth. The flight and first stay in ten years in Cumbria is paid for by the Lord. Rachel meets her mom for the first time in ages and manages to avoid her estranged half-brother. The job interview confirms her fears – the Lord is do good’er, who wants to create an expansive keep for a couple of wolves, re-introducing the species after an absence of 600 years. It is not half as interesting as the wolf project she is involved in, in Idaho – it is something between a zoo and wilderness. Rachel returns to Idaho, but helps out the Lord by arranging the ferrying of a couple of wolves from a rehab clinic in Rumania. But then her mom dies. Her half-brother’s wife arranges for Rachel’s absence from the funeral (while she is snowed in, in her camp in Idaho). And Rachel gets pregnant as a result of a one-night stand with a local colleague. She sort of doesn’t know how to handle the new situation and decides to return to Cumbria, taking up the Lord’s generous package to become his project manager.

The novel then takes us through all the steps for a successful integration and reproduction of a couple of wolves and their four pups on the Lord’s estate in the lake district. Rachel settles in on a cottage on the estate, she mends her relationship with both her half-brother (who turns out to be a drug addict) and her sister in law, she forms her own team of dedicated conservationists (hiring a South African zen ranger, recruiting the Lord’s daughter as dedicated volunteer), she even manages to start a long lasting affair with the local vet (who turned widow two years before her return to Cumbria). She deftly handles the local protests against the project, and manages both her own and the wolves pregnancies. Her baby son Charles proves pivotal in the recovery process of her half brother. All things settle and stabilize into a pleasant rhythm and then… Disaster strikes – the wolves escape from an open gate.

In a dramatic finale, Hall describes the hunt for the six wolves on the run and the media circus which emerges around it. Only then Rachel perceives that this is actually part of the Lord’s plan – the wolves were meant to escape and flee to the Scottish Highlands in an enforced process of rewilding. Scotland has turned independent and the wolves become an emblem of the new nation – a way to distinguish itself from Great Britain. Rather than catching the pack, the Lord in his helicopter hopes to run them across the border and arrange for a radical environmental policy of the new nation.

Sarah Hall’s writing has a lot in common with Barbara Kingsolver’s, but where Kingsolver is conscribed by American niceties, writing in a polished, politically correct manner, Hall’s writing is much more raw and profound, by being both sexually explicit and by engaging with doubt and trauma in a much more profound, in the face, manner. In movie terms Kingsolver is Disney, and Hall is art movie. Gosh, let’s hope she writes a lot more. show less