The skills that Sarah Hall demonstrates in her highly anticipated fifth novel are significant and profound; they nourish her larger creative and intellectual vision, rather than existing simply as admirable accomplishments. So it is that the descriptions of altered or threatened landscapes for which she is celebrated – and which feature most prominently in her first novel, Haweswater – are precisely observed but distinctly non-hyperbolic; they convey beauty but resist the picturesque, instead posing questions about it. Arguments about how the land is mediated by its human inhabitants are discreetly introduced. At Christmas time, characters “go hollying, taking with them a hemp sack, like old-timers”, a moment of ironised nostalgia immediately followed by a description that is more straightforward but nonetheless appeals to an idealised sense of the countryside in winter: “It is cold, cold enough to snow – the eaves of soil between the tree roots are whitening. The trees ring glassily with birdcalls. In the bare upper branches, the black rooks look almost like spawn.”
In an entirely different season comes an episode of river-swimming that sounds like something from a brochure – “The slate bottom electrifies the water, renders it exotically blue, like something from a rainforest or a lagoon. Further up are waterfalls, in deep, shadowed gulleys, the miasma of their spray jewelled by sunlight. Everything smells of minerals: green and reedy” – but is then undercut when the swimmers are pictured as “lidoists”.
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