![]() Her time with the students, especially Molly, pushes Silvie to begin looking at her family life in a new way. But Silvie’s father is also, as becomes clear, a controlling abuser who is in part using his understanding of a “more authentic” past to justify keeping his wife and daughter in subservient roles. She knows far more about the natural world, foraging, and ancient history than the privileged university students, and she adeptly picks up crafts they practice like basket-weaving. Silvie’s father, a bus driver, is fascinated (and/or obsessed) with this past, and has shared that fascination with Silvie. Teenaged Silvie and her family are participating in an Iron Age re-enactment done by an “experimental archaeology” university class, with a professor and three students. It’s not something we have left in a more primitive past. This scene makes the opening line of the novel’s main first-person narrative, set just after the fall of the Berlin wall, ring ominously: “Darkness was a long time coming.” One thing Ghost Wall suggests is that darkness is always there, part of the fabric of ordinary human life. ![]() The men turn her to face the crowd, they display her to her neighbours and her family, to the people who held her hands as she learnt to walk, taught her to dip her bread in the pot and wipe her lips, to weave a basket and gut a fish. ![]() In a brief prologue to this short novel, Sarah Moss describes the sacrifice of an Iron Age girl. ![]()
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