Sarah Moss, 2018
the forty-fifth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Adam Thompson
mild but non-zerospoilers
Not a lot happens in this one, and it is very, very British, but it’s a good one nevertheless. The story here is that a small archaeology class is spending a couple of weeks in the woods near Hadrian’s Wall to play-act at what it was like to live in Iron Age Britain. (Of course, it is not actually the Iron Age, so there is nothing really stopping any of them from slipping away to take a short jog down to the road and pop into the mini-mart for some era-inappropriate snacks.) Accompanying the class is a small working-class family whose patriarch is obsessed with the period. The result is a near-perfect recreation of Gilligan’s Island: you’ve got a couple of bumbling guys, an older married couple, the class hottie, the professor, and a teenage girl—and it’s the Mary Ann figure, 17‑year‑old Silvie (short for “Sulevia”), who serves as the viewpoint character. She is well-drawn, likeable, and sympathetic. The sympathy is necessary because it turns out that she is regularly beaten by her father. This is one of those books that doesn’t set dialogue apart from the text with quotation marks, so you never know whether any given line of Silvie’s will turn out to have been spoken or only thought until you reach the tag, though it soon becomes clear that if it’s a sharp insight it will be something she’s keeping to herself. She quickly won me over with her penetrating analysis of everyone around her, which made it all the more tragic to watch someone so perceptive be so warped by trauma that she cannot perceive how easily she could escape her situation. The way Ghost Wall handles its characters is one of the novel’s biggest strengths in general. Silvie’s father is a bus driver in a class-bound society, treated with contempt and trapped in a life of stressful drudgery, venting his rage at the two people in his life with less power than he has, and the book is very good at letting us understand all this while making it clear that none of it makes his conduct an iota less monstrous. On the flip side, we meet a “posh” character whose marks are poor, whose vanity and drunken promiscuity live down to all sorts of stereotypes, and whose mockery of lower-class speech really wounds Silvie, and the book is equally good at letting us understand all this while making it clear that none of it makes her any less of a goddamn hero.
As for theme, I think one of the most interesting things about Ghost Wall is the way it sheds a new light on reactionary views by taking them to an unusual extreme. Just as the defining trait of the conservative is fear of change—“what I am used to” is what the conservative seeks to “conserve”—the defining trait of the reactionary is the desire to retreat to a mythical past. In the U.S. that still generally means the sitcom version of the 1950s, back before what Trent Lott called “all these problems”, even though that era is starting to pass out of living memory. For the British, I would expect it to mean an idealization of the days of empire. But, no, for this guy it’s way the hell back, before (as he sees it) all these foreigners took over the place: before actual immigrants arrived with their “Paki muck”, before the cultural hegemony of “American filth”, before even the Romans. Silvie notes that he doesn’t even like it when the professor talks about how Great Britain came to be populated, whether it be Celts from Brittany or Anglo-Saxons from Germany: “He wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night.” It’s an observation that I think serves as a good test of the extent to which our politics are rooted not in principles—principles such as “no one is autochthonous, indigeneity is relative, and ultimately every people has immigrated to its ‘homeland’ from somewhere else”—but in the selection of targets. Tell a British xenophobe that the “ancient Britons” he so reveres were actually immigrants themselves, and you’ll likely earn cheers from folks around here who refer to our mutual home, the Bay Area, as “unceded Ohlone land”. Point out to those same people that anthropologists believe the Ohlone arrived in the Bay Area as recently as the 6th century CE, displacing the original Hokan-speaking inhabitants and occupying “unceded Hokan land”, and I suspect you’d find that the cheers would abruptly stop.
Rebecca Stead, 2009
the forty-sixth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by James [no last name given]
This children’s book is a pretty good example of both Pattern 33 and Pattern 38: it ties together realism and fantasy by marrying a sci-fi time loop plot to a “write what you know” slice of life story about going to elementary school in New York City in the late 1970s. That it does a good job on both fronts is reflected in the fact that it won the Newbery Award, joining Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, to which this book repeatedly pays tribute. It would be interesting to create a time loop of my own and send this book back to myself back in elementary school and see whether it had the same impact on me that the L’Engle novel did. Because while this book does many things well, it does them on a sixth-grade level, and I am no longer in sixth grade. I have already seen grown-up versions of this type of story, so my mind was not blown. I appreciated the way the author depicts the protagonist first beginning to grapple with issues of race and class, but those themes are very much inchoate here. And the real-world plot pretty much boils down to the typical tween burbling about how “I had this friend but then my friend didn’t like me anymore so I got a new friend but then my new friend started hanging out with her old friend, etc., etc.” That I cannot get particularly fired up about this sort of thing is one of the reasons that, no matter how much my credentialing program tried to steer us toward teaching middle school, I found it hard to envision. Tenth grade is basic enough.
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