Cold Earth by Sarah Moss

I I I I I don’t know why I picked up a second contemporary literary fiction novel after reading Matrix, as I find there is often a coldness to this time of writing…

Yet I did…

There can be a coldness to this type of writing, yes, I stand by it, but that is by no means universal or inherent…

Not every piece of mainstream literary fiction lacks humanity, but most of them have a tone to them, somewhere … sometimes slight and sometimes aggressive, sometimes off putting but sometimes executed in such a way that it’s deeply charismatic and lifts the entire experience – that locates “The Writer” as separate from the rest of society, as an observer, a truth teller, a sage, telling or retelling a narrative that hasn’t happened to them and they see it as, perhaps, an example of the folly of normal people, of which they, “The Writer”, are distinct: wiser, smarter, cleverer, better…

Maybe I just see that because I’m a failed/failing writer who has no real existence outside of texts and this this this this diarising to myself…

I am distinct and different from other people, in that I have been diagnosed with a personality disorder innit. I’m not aloof, I’m the opposite of aloof. Apart because… beneath… worse, lesser, nothing… Yeah

Rock bottom self esteem yet yet yet not a flood of self hatred and self contempt like there used to be…

Ya. Ya. Ya. Ya…

What what what—

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Anyway, Cold Earth is not one of those cold literary fiction novels.

It is deeply emotive, very serious, very human and – most interestingly for me as this isn’t a genre I dip into very often at all – very eerie, very spooky, teeeeeaaaassssing as it does on the edges – the bounds, the borders, the sides – of supernatural horror…

I think actually, reading this immediately after Matrix by Lauren Groff – which is a perfectly fine and serviceable literary fiction novel – emphasises to me just how incredibly well put together, characterful, tense and evocative this 2009 novel from Sarah Moss is…

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Cold Earth is set on an isolated corner of Greenland where a group of junior-ish academics have gathered to excavate the site of an ancient village, hoping to gain more knowledge of the reason why Norse Greenlanders abandoned their settlements on this land mass…

Most of the people in the group are historians and archaeologists, tho one – loosely the main character – is a literature scholar, attending more because she is friends with the guy leading the dig, rather than due to any professional qualifications in (slash knowledge of) this area of history or the world…

The Norse Greenlanders lived on Greenland for a few hundred years, but at some point they all departed. Did they all die of a plague? Were they murdered to extinction? Did they all move back to the fjords of Iceland and Scandinavia or did they move on Westward to Vinland and deeper into the North American continent until they left their Viking traditions behind and became something and someone else?

These questions, then, are those the dig is trying to answer. Or, when the leader is being more realistic, the dig is seeking data and examples and evidence that can contribute towards an eventual slight improvement in the understanding of these questions…

While they are in Iceland, though, this group of six people have very limited access to the outside world – there are no other humans living within hiking distance, they are dropped off by sea plane, they bring enough food with them to sustain themselves across the planned brief Summer scheduled to be onsite, and they have a satellite phone and a satellite-phone enabled laptop, but the data plan is crazy expensive and the power pack is solar powered, so online time is limited. Oh, and back in the outside world there are the beginnings of a potential global pandemic…

Each of the six characters gets a single chapter (though half of them only take up around ten pages in total) from which they are the narrator (with a tiny bit of alternative perspective overlap, but not much), with each section being evoked as a piece of writing the in-text character would be writing – a letter to post from the airport on the way back, a diary, field notes, a message in a bottle type “note to the people who might find me” when things take their inevitable turn in the latter third of the novel and the sea plane booked to collect them and the artifacts and human remains they’ve collected from the ground seems less and less likely to appear…

Nina, the English academic who specialises in Victorian English literature, is the opening narrator and the one whose section is by far the longest, filling up well over a third of the start of the book.

Her notes bounce between notes of the incredibly vivid dreams she is having on the dig (dreams that potentially predict the finds found in the dig – but is she writing after the digging? Is she a #hashtagunreliablenarrator???), the dull days spent digging and talking about the shit meals they eat, and remembering a very miserable-sounding relationship she’s in and either genuinely deeply content within (a relationship that seems likely to be unsatisfying for most people) or this is meant to be another sign of her unreliability…

Anyway, Nina becomes convinced that there are presences – ghosts, possibly, or possibly something more fleshy than mere spirit – lingering and lurking around their camp and the graves they are investigating…

Is there something or someone there?

Nina is slowly unravelling, yes, but how unravelled is she?

This question becomes more and more important as the rest of the team also slowly start to notice and hear things that they don’t expect…

Whose footprint is that? Was that pile of stones there yesterday? Why is there an abandoned boat on the nearby beach…?

Yes, it’s spooky and atmospheric. Yes, I raced through the whole 300 pages in a single day. Yes, it’s chilling (and not just because of the cold temperatures!) and yes, I’d have to say that it’s a fantastic example of how mainstream literary fiction can be effective and evocative and feel like something you haven’t read before, even when it very clearly is similar to many things you’ve read before…

A great novel, possibly even an excellent one.

Add it to that list with that Doris Lessing novel and that Ursula Le Guin one of very excellent stories set in places very very cold…

Recommended, I reckon!