Mass graves again. I realised I was holding my breath and tried to exhale.

‘You wouldn’t get mass graves with all these isolated farms,’ said Jim. ‘And there are a few where whole families have been found in the beds or around the house.’

My hand shook. ‘Can we stop talking about epidemics, please? I’m going to the loo.’

I put my trowel down and stood up. Everything went black and I stood there, trying to remember how to breathe. It’s like driving, breathing. The more you think about how to do it, the harder it gets. I stepped blindly over the fallen walls and looked down at my pink tent and thought about the books inside it. I could hear the running river and the wind over the tall grass outside the hall, where centuries of people throwing things out made the soil rich and the wild plants strong.

I’ve basically been reading through Sarah Moss’s oeuvre in reverse order. The first books of hers I read were Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children. Although I admired them a lot, my enthusiasm was tempered by their emotional reticence. Still, I was interested enough to read on, which meant going through Moss’s back catalog, which I have found very rewarding. With Cold Earth (2009), her first novel, I have now completed that project–and in a way it feels like coming full circle, because her most recent novel, Ghost Wall, engages with some of the same themes, particularly ways in which the stories we tell about the past haunt or infect the way we think about the present.

Cold Earth literalizes that haunting in a way that Ghost Wall doesn’t quite: in the newer novel, the spirits animated by artifacts of the past are those of contemporary people acting on what they think they’ve learned, while in Cold Earth Moss teases and frightens her characters and her readers with the possibility that the dead still move among us. Imagination? Delusion? Projection? Perhaps–but to at least one member of the team digging in their remote archaeological site on the coast of Greenland, it is a near certainty that their work has disturbed something more than relics and bones.

The discomfort that spreads from her conviction that they are not alone is exacerbated by the team’s growing unease about current events: during their rare check-ins online, they follow reports of a spreading contagion. “The virus,” one of them reports early on: “they think it’s mutated and it seems to be spreading.” “It’s spread,” they learn a little later; “Several thousand people in the Washington area, another cluster in Charleston and a scattering of outbreaks up the East Coast.” Then it’s in the UK — and then the websites stop loading, and they can’t get the satellite phone to work. Is it just technical problems, or has the crisis debilitated the human agencies still needed to keep servers  up and running? How worried should they be, and should they be upset or relieved that, in their isolation, they are probably safe from infection? Then when the plane that was supposed to collect them doesn’t arrive, their remote location ceases to be a refuge and what had been largely a matter of psychological endurance becomes a struggle to survive the encroaching winter and the depletion of their resources.

Cold Earth is intense and suspenseful, but it is not a thriller or a horror novel, or (except indirectly) a dystopian one. Moss focuses above all on her characters–the novel is told by several of them in turn, in the form of letters they write to people back home–as they puzzle over their finds and try to interpret how their predecessors in that location lived and died. Each of them has brought a personal history to Greeenland: each of them, in a way, is like an archaeological site of a different kind, and there is something at once comforting and devastating in the way Moss, by setting them down among the ruins of a past community, evokes the inevitable and unpredictable continuity of death. Most of us probably imagine that “history” is something that happens to other people, but by the end of Cold Earth all of its characters have been forced to see they too will eventually be the ones in the ground. The chilling question the novel provokes is whether there will be anybody left to dig them up and wonder about their lives.

I stood up and slammed my hand into the mattress next to his head. He screamed. I shook his cot.

‘Moth, for fuck’s sake go to sleep right now. If you don’t go to sleep this minute, I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to take a knife and kill myself. Is that what you want? Mummy will be dead and then you’ll be happy.’

My hands on the cot rail are shaking. I must not attack him. Must not touch him or I will put my hands round his neck and kill him. I cannot leave because I would never come back and I cannot stay because I am about to pick him up and ram his head into the wall until he stops making that intolerable noise.

‘Anna, what the hell are you doing?’

Giles grabbed my shoulder. I stopped myself before my fist connected with his arm.

‘I want three fucking minutes to myself. I want to pee. I want to have a drink of water. I want to brush my hair. I used to give lectures and write my book.’

It is apt, if unfortunate, that I’ve had trouble making my way through Sarah Moss’s Night Waking because I haven’t been sleeping well; by the time I’m done with reading I have to do, and do attentively, for deadlines, I have little energy left to concentrate on anything but a bit of Buffy. I’ll blame that same mental fatigue for my tendency to focus on the novel’s contemporary story without working as hard as the novel deserves to integrate it thematically with the interleaved historical material or to give due diligence to the epigraphs from various sources about child development.

I didn’t read Night Waking so badly that I couldn’t tell its parts are clearly all related, that they knit together into a pattern about the complexity of mother-child relationships and about motherhood as an intensely fraught role, both personally and socially. I just can’t articulate what that pattern is. Or maybe their collective point is not that intricate after all: maybe it is that, though we keep trying, it is impossible to “properly” understand or diagnose or theorize or perfect parenting: that really we all just muddle through in whatever way our historical and other circumstances dictate, and that there will always be someone there to judge us for doing it wrong even as there will always be at least a faint hope that, whether because of or in spite of us, things will turn out okay. 

Alternatively, maybe my reading was unbalanced because Moss wrote Anna’s voice so well that she overpowered the other more overtly intellectual aspects of the novel. I loved Anna–and by that I don’t mean that I liked her necessarily, though I mostly did. In many ways, actually, she is just the kind of unlikable heroine that many critics celebrate today: she is fierce, angry, bleakly witty, dangerously honest about her hatred of the daily demands and inanities of her small children. She is a good mother (my epigraph notwithstanding), by which I mean she loves her children in the profound, helpless way that has also  been my own experience of parental love; she is vigilant and responsive and self-critical. But she is also bored, resentful, and near despair at the chasm between the life she once lived–self-directed, intellectually challenging, contemplative–and her current mind-numbing isolation and exhaustion.

Night Waking takes place on the fictitious Hebridean island of Colsay. Anna, her husband Giles, and their children Raph (Raphael) and Moth (Timothy) have moved there from Oxford so Giles can do research on puffins and also so that they can oversee renovations to a family cottage they plan to (and eventually do) rent out. In theory, and sometimes in reality, Anna is finishing a book about the paradoxical relationship between the Romantic idealization of childhood and the contemporaneous trend towards putting children in a range of ‘care’ or oversight facilities: “boarding schools, orphanages, hospitals and prisons.” She sometimes discusses her research, and Moss even includes bits of the book, with Anna’s reflections on and revisions to it–she captures the academic tone and the self-consciousness of the academic writing process perfectly.

At first most of the tension of the novel comes directly from Anna’s personal situation, but when Anna and the children uncover a baby’s skeleton while digging in the garden, further layers accumulate. Anna becomes preoccupied with finding out the baby’s identity and thus gets drawn away from her book and into research on Colsay. We learn about the island with her, from her sources, and also from the 19th-century letters that make up yet another facet of the novel. The letters–which Anna eventually reads and incorporates into her work–are from May Moberly, younger sister of Alethea Moberly, the protagonist of Moss’s later novels Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children. (I somehow hadn’t realized that May’s story came first. On her website, Moss says “I knew quite a lot of May’s story when I finished writing Night Waking, although most of it wasn’t part of that book.”) May, a trained nurse, has been sent to Colsay, part of what turns out to be an unwelcome intervention into the island’s high rate of infant mortality.

All of these elements, and also Anna’s involvement with the family who come to Colsay to vacation in the cottage, are individually interesting and collectively resonant. What came through to me most clearly, though, was Anna herself: her struggles with guilt and boredom and sleeplessness–with the sometimes overwhelming conflict between love and desperation–while more extreme than my own, were completely, unhappily, familiar. As Night Waking ends, Anna’s life is changing for the better. If I’d read the novel fifteen years ago, I would have rejoiced in that cautious optimism, eagerly embracing the promise that balance can eventually return, as well as the message that it is both right and possible to reconcile being a parent with being (by) yourself. But now that my own children’s night wakings are long over and they are nearly independent, I am amazed and a bit frightened by how disorienting it is to face the very thing Anna and I both sometimes yearned for: their absence. Who knew–certainly Anna can’t imagine–that a room of one’s own just might, eventually, feel so empty.

You just discovered your children are mortal, how could you not want another baby, a back-up baby, an insurance against childlessness. You want a third chance, the magic occasion to get it all right. But you can’t get it right, darling. With every birth, a new death comes into being. With every love, a loss. There is no back up, no alternative, no chance to change whatever plot we are living.

My daughter Maddie was around 2 years old when we got a call from the daycare saying she’d broken out in hives after eating eggs for lunch. Before long we were at the allergist’s office holding her hands to keep her from scratching at the welts rising on her arms from the “prick tests” that revealed the bad news: not only is she highly allergic to eggs, but she is also very allergic to peanuts and most tree nuts. Other parents who have gone through this testing will understand how the world, and your parenting, changes afterwards: food–not just a necessity but also the center of so much of our family and social lives–becomes something difficult; shopping and outings and birthday parties and travel are all fraught. The consequences of one unsafe morsel could be unbearable–or not, as the one sure thing about allergies, you soon discover, is that they are unpredictable and not well understood. You know your child has to live in a world that is not risk-free; you know you all have to figure out how she can move safely through it without worrying too much, or asking too much of others. But how much is too much? When it’s your child, it can be awfully hard to settle that question, but you have to, and so you rebuild using new rules–always read labels; never assume; no epi-pen, no food.

Sarah Moss’s The Tidal Zone tells the story of a family whose experience is a limiting case for this kind of stress. One day, without warning (or maybe not), 16-year-old Miriam collapses and nearly dies, for no apparent reason. After a couple of weeks in the hospital, and many tests, the doctors conclude that it was probably (though not certainly) exercise-induced anaphylaxis–rare, inexplicable, and likely to reoccur, though how likely, or how soon, or with what severity, they really can’t say. “You do understand,” the doctor says to Miriam when she’s being discharged, “that because we don’t know what caused your anaphylaxis, we don’t know how you can avoid it.” 

The novel is narrated by Miriam’s father Adam, a stay-at-home dad and part-time academic. He is wry, sarcastic, irritable, self-aware, loving, and desperately trying to navigate the newly uncertain terrain of his life, especially his relationship with his daughter, with at least a little grace. His interior monologues brilliantly capture his struggle to keep his overwhelming fear for Miriam’s safety from becoming debilitating for either of them. “I don’t want the new normal,” he thinks when they first bring Miriam home and his wife Emma, herself a doctor, urges him to relax:

I want the old one back, or if I can’t have that I want Mim on the monitors for the rest of her life or at least the rest of mine and she is not going away in three years she can live here with us where I can listen to her breathing and she can attend one of the five excellent universities within an hour’s journey, to which I will happily drive her, outside whose lecture theatres I will happily wait.

“You need to practice letting go,” Adam’s father tells him; “this is understandable but it won’t help either of you in the long run.” Adam knows this perfectly well, but it’s one thing to know something and another thing to feel its truth and act on it; the novel is about Adam’s learning to let go, not of his fear for Miriam, but in spite of it.

Adam tries to help himself (unforgivably, he sometimes thinks) by focusing on those whose traumas dwarf theirs: other families in the ward whose children will not come home again no matter how careful their parents promise to be; families destroyed in Auschwitz or in Yugoslavia; children bullied to death or drowned or without Miriam’s access to life-saving treatments. A historian by training, he works on putting things in perspective. “This would have been normal,” he remarks to Emma; “Everyone would have been used to it. You know. Adverse outcomes in pædiatric medicine.” The euphemism does not do its job: “It means dead people,” Miriam (wonderfully smart, combative, and brave) ruthlessly explains to her little sister Rose. “All I mean,” Adam persists,

is that the way things are for us now is the normal one, globally and historically. It’s everyone else who’s anomalous. Everyone who doesn’t think it could happen to them.

Emma cannot understand why this comforts him at all, but it does, “a little.” Miriam’s near-death experience initially made him feel disconnected from everyone around him, because their surface normalcy seemed unable to accommodate the drastic collapse of his family’s normal life. The comforting realization, for him, is how shallow that surface layer is for everyone–that they all have in common the enormous, unbearable fragility of everything they take for granted, just as he took for granted that his daughters’ bodies worked, and would keep working, ceaselessly to keep them alive.

What helps Adam most, though, is his work on a book about the restoration of Coventry Cathedral. The implicit parallels between its destruction and rebuilding and the destruction and reconstruction of Adam’s family are beautifully handled: the connections are never made explicit, never become heavy-handed, but simply grow in resonance as Moss interleaves Adam’s account of the work on the cathedral with his family story. By the end of The Tidal Zone I longed to see what Sir Basil Spence had built, encompassing both ruin and resurrection; the great tapestry designed by Graham Sutherland; and especially the windows of angels — “Leaping, leaning, jumping. Rising, writhing.” The new cathedral, Adam reflects, does not gloss over loss or pain, but that does not impede its message of hope:

It is not all right.

It is not all right, but there is beauty. We have ways of saying that it is not all right, that there is death and suffering and evil, and they are the same ways we have had for hundreds of years. Buildings. Glass. Weaving.

Words.

Against these rare soaring moments, and in contrast also to the tension and pathos of Adam’s anxiety for Miriam, Moss sets Adam’s wry commentary on being a stay-at-home dad and some terrific low-key satire of academic life. “Like all universities,” he says about the one where he teaches, “it is always building,” paving over the green spaces for car parks then digging up the car parks for new buildings so that “a swarm of angry drivers is permanently circling campus.” “I imagine there is some market research,” he goes on,

behind universities’ manifest view that what every bright eighteen-year-old craves is more overpriced coffee brought to them as they sit on more red leather sofas under more sepia images of Paris and New York. . . . You’d think that what The Youth of Today wants most of all is to recline in a soft red place and suck on the breasts of franchised multinational corporations, but only until you met the students. It is plain that the high-ups do not meet the students.

Add “posh places to use top-of-the-line exercise machines” to the list of what the “high-ups” assume The Youth of Today want and I think most North American academics would nod even more vigorously in rueful agreement. And we can all sympathize with Adam’s disappointment that the meeting for which he drags himself to campus does not, after all, serve coffee and biscuits. (Only meetings involving the “high-ups” get those, in my experience.)

I found The Tidal Zone gripping, moving, funny, and smart. It is written in a higher emotional register and with a faster pace than Moss’s Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children, which I reviewed for Numero Cinq; these historical novels are also very smart but were almost too refined and cerebral for my taste. I’ve kept thinking about them since I wrote that review, though, which doesn’t always happen with books I review, and The Tidal Zone confirms Moss’s place on my list of writers whose new work I will always seek out (and in fact I’ll be reviewing her latest, Ghost Wall, for its fall release date, which is one reason I took The Tidal Zone off the shelf now). She has two earlier novels I haven’t read yet, and also a memoir; I look forward to reading them as well.