Fault Lines: Viral Disquiet in Sarah Moss’s Fiction

Abstract

Sarah Moss’s latest novel, The Fell, is a pandemic novel which explores the social fractures that the COVID 19 lockdown blatantly exposed. Its oppressive atmosphere of rising anxiety in the self-isolating context of the epidemic, however, has pervaded Moss’s fiction from the beginning of her career. Her first novel, Cold Earth (2009), published a few months before the swine flu pandemic, imagined a group of archaeologists cut off from the world in Greenland as a consequence of the global spread of a virus. Her 2020 novel, Summerwater, similarly pictures a group of tourists isolated by the rain in Scotland while her 2018 novel, Ghost Wall, describes an experiential archaeological summer camp going wrong. Moss uses extreme quarantine-like circumstances to question individual responses and group behaviours. Thus, the various confining circumstances of her novels unfold as political fault lines questioning single motherhood, domestic abuse, xenophobia, scapegoating, class and gender divides. The paper will explore such rifts through attention to Moss’s diverse writing procedures from the first-person polyphony of her first novel to the disjointed use of free indirect speech, characteristic of pandemic writing, in her latest novel, using affect theory to account for her viral signature brand of writing.

Keywords

• Sarah Moss
• affect theory
• pandemics
• polyphony
• climate change