![]() The novel is powered not by the local tensions it depicts but by the existential conflict underpinning them. ![]() The cast of characters proves usefully broad of the book’s dozen perspectives, each rendered in a colloquial free-indirect style. Pissing it down'), Moss touches on-or, more accurately, brushes past-the Brexit vote, Anglo-Scottish relations, climate change, the concept of rape culture, overpopulation, adolescent depression, and, if not exactly warfare between the generations and the sexes, then at least mutual incomprehension and froideur. In tracing her characters’ finicky, circular, weather-obsessed thoughts ('Ostentatious rain. Summerwater, though smaller in scale than most of her previous works, exhibits many of her strengths and preoccupations. Moss does this so naturally and comprehensively that at times her simple, pellucid prose and perfectly judged free indirect speech feel almost like documentary or nonfiction – there is an artfulness to her writing so accomplished as to conceal itself. A great part of a novelist’s skill lies in the breadth of their sympathies and their ability to enter into the lives of people unlike themselves. ![]() Summerwater feels very much like a pandemic novel, despite the fact that it must have been completed months before Covid-19. Moss’s ability to conjure up the fleeting and sometimes agonised tenderness of family life is unmatched, and here, as in The Tidal Zone in particular, she sketches so lightly the all-but-invisible conflicts and compromises that can make cohabitation both a joy and a living hell. The novel begins at dawn and ends in the dark, and from the first page you know something terrible is going to happen, but you don’t know on whose neck the axe will fall. Summerwater is pretty close to a great rain novel. Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head is a great fog novel. Endings don’t matter to me quite as much as they do to many. One senses Moss stumbling toward an ending rather than running confidently downhill toward one. As always in Moss’s work, too, there is an ominous quality, slow uncanny beats from an extra subwoofer or two, mighty but muffled. As a character puts it in Ghost Wall, 'ancient knowledge runs somehow in our blood'. There are riddles of existence she’s shaking down. As always in Moss’s work, there is a strong sense of the natural world. But there’s little doubt, reading Moss, that you’re in the hands of a sophisticated and gifted writer. a bit less tightly wound than Ghost Wall, and it has an expedient ending. Reading her, one recalls John Barth’s comment that the best literature is 'both of stunning literary quality and democratic of access'. She never condescends, and her fluid prose is suggestive of larger and darker human themes. She catches the details of ordinary existence in a manner that’s reminiscent of the director Mike Leigh: the peeling roof tiles, the cheap plastic teakettles, the beans on toast. She writes beautifully about English middle-class life, about souls in tumult, about people whose lives have not turned out the way they’d hoped. As titles go, it’s mildly pretentious.Yet Moss, except in flashes, is anything but a pretentious writer.
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