Review: Ghost Wall

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I know every book is such a subjective taste, with the ‘liking’ or the ‘not liking’ part of it a lot more nuanced, but I guess I and Maggie O'Farrell so much disparate that I can steer very clear of her recommendations, for one of the praise for the book being the following:

“I love this book. Ghost Wall requires you to put your life on hold while you finish it. It draws you into its unusual world and, with quiet power and menace, keeps you there until the very last page. Silvie's story isn't one you will ever forget.”
―Maggie O’Farrell, author of I Am, I Am, I Am and The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox.

I struggled to get through the book and I have two very compelling reasons for the same.
1. There seems to be nothing but domestic abuse being portrayed in all possible ways, while pepping it with some lines from a Smithsonian Magazine, about the bog people. While I think a frank discussion about ‘domestic abuse’ is absolutely important and needs to be discussed with more rigour, not so in a book that was advertised as something else in its blurb, that too sidelining everything else.

2. The writing. I understand that part of the choppy writing is intended as it was the voice of a teenage girl, from the 1970s, living in the wilderness. Still, I felt, the narrative would have benefited hugely had the author made use of direct quotations than using things like ‘I said’, or ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ etc, which always came in the middle of a sentence and made the text very dense. Often it was a chore and struggle to understand who said what. It was usually made clear by some sentences uttered later but I felt that this entire ordeal was unnecessary. Some authors make you work and struggle to get the imagination, or the canvas right, but that wasn't the case here.

One takeaway from this book was the interesting facts about the bog people. I didn’t know about this before but all this weird rituals intrigued me into looking the stuff up and you can find some interesting articles about this on the Smithsonian Magazine.

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