Hayley reviews~ Summerwater by Sarah Moss
Stuck inside with your family, bored nearly senseless, unable to leave the house apart from to maybe go for a run, most outside activities are potentially riddled with danger. Sound familiar?
Told across the course of one day, Moss’s seventh novel follows the points of view of twelve different people who are all holed up with their families in cabins as an endless rain descends on a Scottish campsite. One family in particular begins to draw attention to themselves, disrupting the somewhat harmonious if not banally monotonous holidays of the others. The tension slowly builds throughout the day as the evening descends and grievances rise to a head.
Summerwater was written by Moss as a distraction from another project and although the book was published in August 2020 and written before the pandemic started, there are many interesting parallels between the characters’ experiences and our own through the lockdowns.
Being stuck indoors forces a lot of the characters to confront anxieties that were easier to avoid when they had distractions. Almost every person faces their own internal crisis, from the effects of ageing, to be able to protect their children, to simply feeling utterly misunderstood by their parents. Justine opens the novel, worried about how family holidays will look in the future, stating “there won’t be a plane this summer, or next” as she contemplates the effects of Brexit and her family’s finances. Many of these anxieties will be familiar to us, and reading this novel during a pandemic gives their concerns a new element. Many characters worry about climate change and what the world their children will grow up in will look like. They often question whether it was a wise or an environmentally conscious idea to even have children at all.
A sense of a threat is present throughout the novel, whether that be from looming health anxieties or just their parents finding out that they snuck out. With no internet and nothing to distract themselves with, much of their anxiety becomes focussed on an Eastern European family who has been playing music really loudly for the past few nights. Unlike the rest of the residents, they seem unwilling to submit to being bored and gradually become a point for the other campers to project their frustrations onto.
Moss’s books often deal with uncomfortable topics, from Night Waking, where a family who rents a house on a Hebridean island finds a skeleton in the garden, to Ghost Wall, where a camping trip in Northumbria escalates into horror. There were a few times whilst reading Summerwater where I was reminded of the short story ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson, a tense tale where unity within the community is of the utmost importance.
What I enjoyed most about this book is how Moss writes family dynamics. All of the characters felt like people I had met before and so many of their concerns, particularly those about their family, felt so real and familiar to me. I would really recommend this book as an antidote to any boredom you might be facing.
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