At the beginning of Sarah Moss’s latest novel, The Tidal Zone, something doesn’t happen. The opening chapter, which is cast in the archetypal lilting language of a fairytale, tells the story of a girl. She is conceived, and born, and to her parents, “like all babies, she was a revelation”. The paragraphs trace the path of her infancy: we watch her learn to smile, speak, take staggering steps through spring’s first flowers. “The music of heart and lungs began, and continued,” we’re told, “and no one listened any more.”
But out of earshot, a false note sounds. Naturally, since this is a fairytale, three warnings are delivered; naturally, the first two go unheeded. The girl’s breath catches when she is five, playing in the school playground, then again on a family holiday as she emerges from the sea. The third and final time she is 15, poised on the threshold of adulthood, that liminal territory in which so many fairytales are set. Her teacher finds her unconscious on the sports field. “Suddenly, your heart began,” says the storyteller. “Suddenly in the darkness of your mother’s womb there was a crackle and a flash and the current began to run. Suddenly you began to breathe. Suddenly, you will stop.” We’re braced for tragedy, but abruptly the book shifts register; shrugging off the fabulous and planting its feet firmly in the here-and-now. The teacher calls an ambulance, performs CPR, makes way for the paramedics. The girl – her name is Miriam – is saved.
It’s oddly disconcerting to read a story that begins not with a crisis, but with a crisis averted. Our expectations, set by centuries of literary tradition that Moss (who gained her doctorate in English Literature long before she started writing novels) knowingly invokes, lead us to anticipate events, rather than their absence. But for Moss, The Tidal Zone’s ducking of catastrophe is the whole point. In 21st-century Britain, more often than not the worst doesn’t happen, and it is this privileged reality (geographically unusual; historically practically unique) that interests her. The opening chapter’s anticlimax is a jumping-off point from which to consider the disjunction between life in the UK and in swaths of the wider world – and what happens when those conditioned to view humanitarian disasters as things that happen on the news are forced to confront their own vulnerability.
The novel was born, Moss explains, on the day when a boy at her son’s school collapsed, and a children’s hospital in Syria was bombed. “The boy was OK,” she says. “It was close, but they got there in time. But that same hour, more than 30 Syrian children died. We live in a country where, if a child’s life is at risk, an air ambulance is scrambled without question, yet there are places right now where if helicopters are scrambled in relation to children, it’s to kill them, not save them. How do you live with that in a way that doesn’t say, ‘Oh well, Syrian children must be a different species’?” So the book was a way of trying to answer that question? “Well,” she sighs, “it’s unanswerable, isn’t it? But I wanted to model a way of holding those narratives in your head at the same time. Not saying, ‘Our children at the expense of Syrian children,’ but also not saying it’s wrong to care about your own children while Syrian children are dying. It’s hard to do both at once. I’m interested in doing hard things.”
Moss is murmuring discreetly across a table in the British Library cafe, which turns out to be the perfect setting since her life has been steeped in academia. Born in Glasgow in 1975, she lived in the city for just two years before the family moved to Manchester where her father, an economist, took a job at the university. She is an academic by training, though her career got off to a sticky start. “I refused to read,” she says now, with the half-wry, half-anticipatory grin of someone offering up a family anecdote. “I held out until I was six. I’d got into this very embattled position at school and home, insisting I couldn’t do it, until I went to my grandparents’ for half-term and my grandmother said, ‘Right, love, shall we sort out this reading thing?’ It allowed me a dignified climbdown. By the end of the week I was fluent.” And then? “Switch flicked. I’ve spent the rest of my life reading.”
The habit led to a place at Oxford, where she stayed for a decade, working her way through a master’s, a DPhil and a research fellowship, specialising in the Romantic era and the literature of the far north. Her first novel, Cold Earth (2009), arose from her research; in her second, Night Waking (2011), her narrator, Anna, is a Romantic scholar, too.
After Oxford, Moss spent five years at the University of Kent before decamping with her husband and two young sons to teach at the University of Iceland for a year, an experience so stupefying and saturating that it shocked her into non-fiction. Her memoir of the year, Names for the Sea, is superb, though she can’t imagine writing anything like it again; it was simply that, in the face of such outlandishness, fiction felt redundant. She returned to a senior lecturer post at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall campus; the blue-and-green landscape, along with Victorian Manchester’s sooty streets, provided the backdrop for her pair of historical novels, Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children. These days, she’s associate professor of creative writing at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, where The Tidal Zone is set.
This mapping of her fiction on to her personal geography wasn’t conscious, Moss says, rather, “that’s what’s there. Writing about place means most when it’s closeup – which inevitably means you write about where you live. It’s something I’ve been doing consciously since moving to Warwickshire, forcing myself into a meticulous relationship with the place. People use Coventry as a byword for urban ugliness, but actually that’s a much more interesting challenge for a writer than somewhere like Cornwall. The Midlands is a more densely textured place to write about.”
Still, it’s the north and the archipelago scattered in an arc from the Isles of Scilly up to Iceland that move her. Childhood weekends were spent in Yorkshire or the Lake District, holidays on Orkney. Seeing the Cotswolds for the first time, “I thought they were made of fibreglass; I couldn’t believe you were expected to take them seriously.” She didn’t think of herself as northern, precisely, until she went to Oxford and discovered that that’s how everyone else thought of her, but the siren song has always been there, and the compass drag remains powerful. For now, though, she’s staying put. “We’ve stopped moving until the children grow up. When the eldest reached secondary school the emphasis shifted from family to friends, and stability became much more important. Parenthood is this endless balancing of your needs against your children’s, and it seems this is the point when the scales tip.”
It is parenthood that is Moss’s essential subject. Cold Earth was highly praised, but it was with Night Waking that she came to prominence, winning a place on the list of the inaugural Fiction Uncovered promotion and in the hearts of mothers of young children across the land, who passed the book between them with the same surreptitious reverence they had accorded copies of Judy Blume’s Forever a decade or two earlier. In Night Waking, Oxford research fellow Anna has moved with her husband, Giles, and their two sons to an isolated Scottish island. In theory, domestic duties are supposed to be divvied up; in practice, Giles spends his days studying the local puffin population while Anna deals with the children. Her weary descriptions of the stultifying grind of nappies and laundry and reciting Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo for the 12th time at four in the morning – and the price it exacts on your marriage, your body, your work, your sense of self – are blackly funny, and give voice to an often unsung aspect of (mostly) female experience. Was she anxious about being pigeonholed as a women’s writer off the back of it?
“After I’d written it, yes; at the time I was just writing what I needed to. But,” she goes on, “it’s crazy that we view motherhood as a minority interest. Everybody has a mother, yet there were very few books that told family life from the mother’s point of view; the 19th-century novels I grew up on tell the daughters’ stories. The obvious explanation is that motherhood and writing aren’t highly compatible. But I wanted to resist the idea that it’s a choice.”
The Tidal Zone is a companion piece of sorts to Night Waking. Tantrums and sleepless nights have been superseded by teenagehood’s slow prising-apart: time alone, once desirable, is now alarming; and the parents, Adam and Emma, find themselves contemplating their impending obsolescence with dismay. Gender is reversed here, too: Adam, not Emma, was the one left holding the babies, and it’s with a jolt that we realise, a chapter or so in, that the narrator trying to fit work into school hours and contemplating the mess left over from breakfast is male. This highlighting of our prejudices was deliberate, Moss says, though as it happens, she was drawing on her own experience. “My husband was the primary carer for our youngest. He was made redundant so I ended my maternity leave early, but fundamentally he’s just better at being home with small kids than me. He doesn’t get those whirring voices of frustration when it’s been 45 minutes since you wanted to leave the house and you’re still persuading someone to put their shoes on.” Writing in the male voice had the further benefit of allowing her to “be rigorously honest. Anna wasn’t autobiographical, but there was obviously a large crossover with me, so I found myself constantly policing that boundary. Once you’ve switched gender you don’t have to do that.”
If The Tidal Zone relishes its lack of conformity, both in terms of gender and its unconventional opening, the ending is deliberately traditional: not glib, or trite, but generous and satisfying; true to itself and what has come before. “Sometimes life stops in the wrong place,” Moss says, “and the book is about the acknowledgment of that. But endings – as opposed to ends – are one of the great consolations of fiction. For a writer, it’s both a gift to bestow and an obligation: you can’t just abandon your reader in a howling wasteland; you have to give them a way of surviving the truth you’ve told. It may not be a nice way or an ideal way, but a way there has to be.”
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