Sarah Moss knows icy alien worlds. Her previous book, The Frozen Ship, explored centuries of polar writing, while an earlier work, Scott’s Last Biscuit, revisited ill-fated Arctic expeditions. But in this, her debut novel, she carves her own story in the ice.
In the eerie midnight sun of a Greenlandic summer, six archaeologists have three weeks to excavate a mysteriously deserted Norse settlement. But cracks soon open up under the project with news of a deadly plague sweeping the planet. As their internet connection falters and their sense of isolation increases, concern for their loved ones replaces professional commitment. Their perspective from the Arctic, Jim says, is “like having an extra-terrestrial view”. And he’s right; they soon become alienated from the world and each other.
Nina, a pedantic literary critic, the only non-archaeologist, joined the group because “I thought I’d probably like remembering it later on”. But her dreams are invaded by strange “memories” of the Norse croft - scenes of pillage and murder - and her screams soon turn the camp into a waking nightmare, robbing everyone of sleep. In a sensory twilight, the tension mounts, as does their capacity to be spooked. Jim finds his Christian faith being tested by the appearance of tumbling stones that don’t seem to belong to the landscape: “Nothing you’d notice anywhere busier. But they don’t feel good. I lay there in the cold and dark and tried to pray.”
For others, trust in empirical science gives way to superstition and panic. The silence makes the tough guy Ben uncharacteristically jumpy while the impressionable Catriona paints watercolours and “gives the pebbles shadows they didn’t have”. Soon they’re not sure if the bristling hairs on their necks are from fear or from the cold. When the scheduled pick-up aircraft doesn’t arrive they defy the order of Yianni, the team leader, not to leave their mark on the Norse farmhouse and use it as shelter. After all, archaeologists “want everyone to leave a story” and, expecting that they’ll die, that’s what they decide to do.
The novel comprises six final letters to loved ones who may now be dead. This presents a puzzle: who (if anyone) is dead now and how might they have died? The story is the reader’s archaeological dig. The epistolary form cleverly enables us to read the past as nail-biting present but the letters/notebooks can provide only the bare bones of unexplained events: cairns mysteriously appearing in the night, hands on the outside of tents, human howls from a dark hill. Were they dealing with ghosts or were they losing their minds? We scour the pages for details. And in the wilderness between the words and our imagination Moss leaves space for us to feel terrified too.
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The polyphonic tone of the book is one of its great strengths; we get to know the characters better than they know each other. But with no friendship between them and no way of communicating with anyone, each wonders how long he or she can last on memories alone. “E-mail works well enough to semaphore your survival,” Nina says, “but love is not a virtual commodity.” Only Ruth manages to hold her nerve. Mourning her boyfriend who died in a car crash, the cold is her friend, an icepack to numb painful thoughts of his burnt body. Proof perhaps, as Jim suggests, that, “If love survives death, the worst is not terrible”.
It is a test of the writer’s ability to conjure this strange atmosphere where the landscape is a physical strain on the characters’ social life as well as a metaphorical measure of their feelings. Moss’s organic language - laconic and economical - deliberately underplays the emotions in the book, making it hard to warm to the archaeologists or to the place. It leaves you feeling cold but still deeply engaged with a sense of what trying to survive must feel like. “Histrionics only pass the time,” Ruth says, “and then there is the awful time when you have to sit up and wash your face.”
Moss’s stark writing delivers stinging splashes of cold water. Every element of the novel is distilled for purity of purpose. Holding it, the white cover and the blue edges imitate an artefact carved from ice. Inside Moss has left one last letter; perhaps not the missing piece, but an important one, and the answers are there if you are prepared to scrape and sift.
Cold Earth by Sarah Moss; Granta, £10.99; 224pp; Buy this book