Sarah Hall’s elemental fiction

Portrait by Gary Calton

There are, as a meteorologist tells his audience of the Helm wind, the subject of Sarah Hall’s seventh novel, “too many eddying effects” to model it effectively. The reader – or at least the critic – might feel the same way about Hall’s writing. A distinguished short story writer as well as a novelist, Hall has a flair for detail, her off-kilter characters prone to sudden, mysterious transformations. But she is equally committed to the wide angle, panoramic view that takes in centuries of human and natural history, communities lost and found, endeavours celebrated and forgotten.

And she has an interest in rooting imaginary wonders in the prosaic, bathetic everyday; Edith, the sculptor at the heart of Hall’s last novel, Burntcoat, created monumental and often monstrous works, but Hall was just as fascinated by the minutiae of her studio and by her bodily desires and frailties. Edith’s familiar in Helm might be NaNay, the Neolithic girl, then woman, then tribal elder who is determined to find the “magstone” – a giant red rock and gateway to another world that comes to her in a vision.

NaNay is only one of the characters in thrall to the north-easterly wind that blows down over Cumbria’s Cross Fell, to sometimes devastating effect. Here, too, is academic researcher Selima Sutar, dispatched to a high-up, isolated and precarious field station to observe the extent to which the wind’s course and behaviour is being altered by the proliferation of microplastics in the atmosphere; Michael Lang, a sinister, violent medieval mystic who never removes his metal skull cap, defence against the assassin he believes is his destiny; Beatrice Senhouse, locked in her room in 1788 for the crime of wanting to prevent her husband from unleashing gunpowder on the ancient stone circle comprising Long Meg and her daughters.

They are joined by others throughout the centuries, including a frisky couple in a hot air balloon, a retired police officer gliding above wild weather, a teenage girl whose unruly conduct sees her consigned to a psychiatric hospital (not in Victorian times, but in living memory), engineers and navvies from the Industrial Revolution, and a busload of new age Christians. Each recurring narrative is another eddy from the novel’s central force; the Helm wind itself, whose capricious, humorous, chatty voice punctuates their stories.

The genderless Helm is by turns amused and irritated by the humans at surface level, especially by their tendency to blame their troubles and shortcomings on the vagaries of the weather. (“Brussels sprouts fired from their stalks like bullets from a Gatling. The tails of cows lopped off by slammed gates. Vendettas delivered on the back of the wind. Yarns. Rituals. Old folklore. Do they really believe it?”). But the wind is also aware of the lessening of its power, the arrival of “a feeling of hopelessness, of fin-de-siècle melancholy, Information Age malaise, overload, elegy maybe”. Selima, painstakingly taking measurements, would confirm the facts as well as the feelings.

But if Helm is an elegy – and Hall suggests, in her afterword, that it might be – it is a ferociously exuberant one. The fragments that she is shoring against our ruin, like the trinkets the wind gathers up from those who fall foul of its power, are defiantly filled with life, expressed most strikingly by the novelist’s love of language: the local vocab, the archaic slang, the dizzying changes of pace, tone and register. Helm – also known as auld flaysome, Mister Stone Pockets, knicker muddler – might be feeling “just a bit meh”, but there’s life in the old neep kecker yet, at least in these pages.

Helm by Sarah Hall is published by Faber & Faber (£20). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £18. Delivery charges may apply