Ghost Wall, by Sara Moss

A 17-year-old girl named Sylvie narrates Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss (2019). Her father is obsessed with the Iron Age of northern England some 2000 years in the past. This is the area north of Hadrian’s wall, which separated supposedly uncivilized inhabitants from the supposedly civilized invading Romans. The girl’s father rules over his wife and daughter with a tyrannical, abusive hand. His wife has been reduced to an almost faceless mass of subjugation while his daughter chafes against his domineering presence in looks for a way to escape. His wife often shows bruises, and if she violates his rules he whips her violently. The novel takes place during a two-week long vacation for the family, which the father has decided they will spend accompanying an experimental archaeology class from a local college on a retreat where they will try to live like prehistoric men and women might have lived 2000 years ago. They dig roots, hunt for edible vegetables, wear rough tunics, and otherwise try to live as ancient people. The point for the experimental archaeology class is to learn about ancient ways of life. The point for the father is to exercise his obsessions and to find further reason to dominate his daughter.

Ghost Wall reminds me of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, James Dickey's Deliverance, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, all of which show supposedly civilized humans sink to a state of savagery. Moss frames this narrative in terms of patriarchy. It is no surprise that the father is obsessed with a historical period during which women were the chattel of men, subject to physical abuse and injury, and sometimes death. The men in this novel act out what they believe to have been ancient rituals and practices while the women stand off to the side, either looking on in astonishment and disgust or following the orders the men give them. The narrator's language reflects the brutal treatment she receives from her father, and also her upbringing in northern England.

In the final scenes the father and the professor leading the students decide to enact a human sacrifice, and they select Sylvie as the sacrificial victim. They don’t mean, at least at first, to harm her, but midway through the ceremony the father has already cut her with a knife. One of the students—the only woman in the group alerts local constables.  They arrive in time to stop the ceremony and arrest the father. They should also have arrested the professor who encouraged his students to take part and who did not try to stop the father’s numerous instances of abusive behavior.

This is a powerful and beautifully written novel. About halfway through, during a scene where the father and professor discuss human sacrifice and the burial of bodies in peat bogs, you begin to suspect what could happen. The novel’s opening scene, which describes the ritualistic killing of a young woman two thousand years in the past, suggested this possibility. Tension grows from the anticipation and dread the reader feels.

One might say that the father’s obsessive behavior and his abuse of his wife and daughter are simply examples of an extreme form of male behavior. But in this case, perhaps, the extreme becomes a way of defining the norm. It's also clear that the father's treatment of his wife and daughter stems from a disgust with female sexuality.

The ghost wall is a symbol that through the title envelops the entire novel.  A ghost wall is both an echo of the past, and a persistence of the past.  It’s a dividing line between past and present but because it’s ghostly (without form or matter) it’s no divider at all.  It links past and present. Through it the past is continuous with the present, and practices of the past persist into the present.  Hence the male characters become so involved in building the ghost wall, with its animal skulls reminiscent of the human skulls that might have sat atop it two millennia in the past.  Its ghostly nature signifies that male dominance over females in the prehistoric Iron Age persists in the present.  Sylvie who unhappily plays the pretended sacrificial victim in the ceremony is at the end almost an actual victim.  But she was a victim from the start.