Books
Sarah Hall
Helm
In “Later, His Ghost”, a story in her 2017 collection, Madame Zero, Sarah Hall imagines a world transformed by constant high winds. A symptom of broader environmental and social breakdown, these winds make life for the few survivors a constant battle, flattening buildings and trees, destroying crops, hurling debris.
The story is, in many ways, a distillation of many of the preoccupations of Hall’s fiction over the past two decades. From its post-apocalyptic – or at least post-collapse – setting to the intimately observed physical landscape, it destabilises the assumption of human ascendancy over the natural world in profound and powerful ways. Not the least of these is the sense that the wind in the story is more than a natural phenomenon. It is an “expert” at destroying things, weaselling its way into buildings, prying them apart, stripping away objects. It is a natural force, but with presence and agency.
Hall’s new novel goes a step further, imbuing the wind from which it takes its title with thoughts and intentions as well as agency. The wind at its centre is the Helm Wind, a ferocious north-easterly that blasts down through the Eden Valley in Hall’s native Cumbria and is often heralded by the formation of a distinctive cloud bank above the peaks. The only wind in Britain with a name, and powerful enough to knock the unwary off their feet, it has long been regarded with a mixture of reverence and fear, and associated with both purification and diseases of body and spirit.
Hall treats Helm as a trickster that takes pleasure in mischief and delights in playing havoc with human plans. Helm is “nothing if not solipsistic, narcissistic even. Fear, devotion, inquisition, obsession, admiration – all attention is good attention”. Yet while Helm is a character, its shifting, eddying, untrustworthy presence is also a device, a thread around which Hall weaves a multitude of other characters and stories.
These stories are spread across millennia, moving from the Neolithic, where a girl, NaNay, is granted a vision of a stone that will complete the stone circle she and her people have been building on the plateau above the valley, to the present day, where Selima, a scientist studying the growing presence of airborne nanoplastics and their effect on the weather, is working in an isolated weather station high on the Great Dun Fell. In between swirl a host of other characters: a medieval “wizard priest” who wears a metal skullcap to cover a head injury and hauls a cross up the mountain to still the malign spirits he believes dwell above the valley; a woman in the 17th century whose husband attempts to destroy the standing stones constructed by NaNay’s people; a Victorian scientist who wants to understand the Helm Wind’s mechanics; an unruly preadolescent girl in the mid 20th century who is diagnosed with schizophrenia because she believes she can speak to Helm; a policeman invalided out of the force as a result of trauma who now works as a pilot, and more.
Hall is writing in a growing tradition of fiction that decentres human primacy in favour of an environmental perspective, notable examples of which include Jon McGregor’s remarkable Reservoir 13 and Annie Proulx’s Barkskins. In most of these novels, the characters are connected to each other by intersections of fate, objects and ideas bouncing through time. Hall largely eschews the intricate clockwork of this brand of storytelling, so when these connections appear they are fragmentary and inconclusive. Instead Helm binds its time-blown characters to Helm itself, capturing the many ways the wind enters their lives, glancing off them or befuddling them.
In the hands of a lesser writer this might be frustratingly diffuse, but Hall is no ordinary writer. As the novel leaps and twists between its stories, it crackles with energy. Hall’s prose has an astonishing power: grounded in the geological and the earthly, it is leavened by a delight in the playfulness of the demotic. These registers overlay and illuminate each other, especially in the lists of objects and names that crop up through the text. Hall also has an extraordinary sense of the power of language to make the world anew: at one moment she is describing “teal-blue sky like a fisher-bird; cloudless”, the next “one eye … moving globally in the pulp on the side of his face” after a man is attacked by a bear. Perhaps improbably, the book is frequently very funny as well. Helm is delightfully self-absorbed, and Selima in particular has a dark and acerbic sense of humour, deadpanning about the “positivity gridlock” of an inane conversation with a group of young Christians or the benefits to her research funding of “airborne polymers being suddenly all the rage”.
In its final pages Helm moves out again, leaving behind human frames of reference for those of Helm, now faltering as a result of human-induced environmental change. “So many possibilities for endings … Polar collapse. Maritime collapse. Gulf Stream collapse. Total meteorological collapse … superstorms, gas emissions, ceaseless rain, solar heat plumes, new melted seas. Intolerable temperatures. Earth’s fevers and chills. The climate totally fucking around again.” As Helm time and human time collapse into each other, one is left with a sense of the scale of the loss, of the emptying out of the world that is captured with such extraordinary depth and power in this whirling, prismatic wonder of a novel.
Faber, 368pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 29, 2025 as "Helm".
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