Even if Sarah Hall did not begin her acknowledgments by saying that it’s taken her 20 years to write Helm it would be evident. Not from a cursory glance at her bibliography, perhaps: in that time Hall has published six other novels and three volumes of extraordinary short stories. But in every other way, and the moment you begin reading.
There’s the subject, for starters. Ever since the first paragraph of her first novel, Haweswater, in which an early 20th-century man drives his horse and cart through the waters of a Cumbrian valley recently drowned by a dam, Hall has been concerned with landscape, with weather, with nature in all its forms, with the ways in which we affect each other. In The Carhullan Army, climate change has already happened. Cumbria is semi-tropical, temperate England a folk memory; a dystopian vision that feels, this baked summer, uncomfortably close to reality. The Wolf Border, published in 2015, was, among many other things, about the ethics and unpredictabilities of rewilding an apex predator, while Hall’s last novel, Burntcoat, written in the first lockdown, was set in and after a pandemic. Her story Later, His Ghost is set in a perpetual windstorm of total climate breakdown; in One in Four, a virologist writes to his wife, apologising for getting things wrong. In this new novel, weather and climate are not just potent settings but the main event. The central character in Helm is the Helm, Britain’s only named wind.
This wind, which is local to Cumbria, occurs when air sweeping down Cross Fell, above the Eden valley, creates both a crest and a low bar of cloud. “Tricky to explain/visualise”, admits Helm. “For now, imagine a skater launching off a quarter pipe two thousand feet high, then somersaulting. Again. And again and again.” As the book begins, Helm witnesses its own arrival. An ice age, sun flares, ash cloud; and, relatively insignificant in the context of such deep time, the evolution of humanity. Because there are many people in the novel, too, which is structured by braiding their stories with Helm’s, but also with lists: the forces of Helm, for instance, which range from “0. Zero Helm (complete calm). Mean wind speed < 1mph. Weathervanes and trees unmoving, grass still, water as mirror, smoke rising vertically from roundhouses/cottages/plague pyres” to “12. Hurricane Helm (Hand of God). Wind speed 73-83mph, phenomenal damage and widescale loss of life, Eden reconfigured biblically, Carlisle-Settle train lifted off the tracks, history made, FIN.”
Other lists include names for Helm and the damage Helm can wreak; or the trinkets Helm collects, often after that damage (Howdah pistol, iron skullcap, Apple iPhone 11 64GB, Tornado F3 series, eject pin). The pictures humans make, trying to understand, locate, corral Helm. Helm finds people amusing, and watches as they succeed each other; Hall’s ambition may be bounded by one valley, but it reaches through thousands of years. Her subjects range from a neolithic tribe to a medieval exorcist; from an isolated 18th-century wife to a quixotic Victorian meteorologist; from a wind-touched, lonely mid-20th-century child to a present-day academic counting plastic particles in the air. From stone tools to the Industrial Revolution to the advent of AI, each era has its own existential encounters with Helm: as deity or devil, as a psychological or a scientific mystery. Both sides are made complacent by Helm’s longevity, size and power, by human smallness and briefness, neither realising, until perhaps too late, that these little beings threaten Helm’s own existence.
A project of this scope, which requires a range of research and imagination that could have produced several historical novels, not to mention an entire other volume of meteorological expertise, holds so much in suspension around its whirling, windy core that it could easily blow apart. But, despite the occasional threat or lull, Helm doesn’t. Partly, I would argue, this is because of Hall’s development as a consummate short story writer. Her novels are never less than hugely accomplished, but the narrative demands of the longer form, especially in more conventional earlier work, can sometimes dissipate the blaze of which she is capable. Hall is freed by the constraints of the short story – like the female sculptor in her last novel, Burntcoat, she burns away everything extraneous – and her work only gains in concentrated, suggestive power. Each strand of Helm has this concentration; the characters and voices could stand alone, but they flow together into something deep and rich, held together by the Eden valley, and its Helm.
And by the writing. Hall’s work on place, and especially this corner of England, has always been virtuosic, a tough and supple poetry anchored in decades of attention to Cumbrian land and plants and skies. In her first novels it sometimes threatened to submerge everything else, but in Helm is so embedded on the page that it’s easy to take for granted, until you pause and back up to really look at the “dirty, clay-slipped sky”, or a gaggle of Victorian children, born into the shantytown that grows up around the railway, collecting on a hillside to eat magic mushrooms and stare at the “silly jinking stars”.
Every era in Helm has its own seeing; the same land, the same wind filtered through time-specific fears and hopes and work, time-specific knowings, from a neolithic world interpreted through animal behaviour to the bathos of 21st-century cycling waterproofs, pub menus, emails. Hall has a thrilling command of vocabulary, with the concurrent deployment of etymologies and the hinterlands they bring; words often work not as single notes, but as chords, big ideas slipping in on the wakes of concrete specificities. So NaNay, a neolithic girl, watches as the wind approaches: “In the centre it was blue-grey, like bull-hide, with the dull pearl-shine of scales at its edges. It was faceless and its body was its only government.” The “spectral gap” is a technical term of modern mathematics and quantum mechanics as well as meteorology. But what heft and metaphorical possibility such a gap has, when a retired policeman in a glider is required to fly into it.
Above all it is the wind itself that holds this vastly ambitious, serious – but also often playful and ironic – book together. Some might find Helm’s voice initially a little arch, a little unplaced relative to the human voices, but it grows on you. Antic, needy, angry, curious, millennia-old Helm, who gives and takes, fascinates and awes, is feared and loved, and loves in return; who absorbs violences, propitiations, yearnings, and who is now beginning to feel “a bit wrong”. There has been so much change, over so many millennia, but this is different. “It’s complicated. Hard to put Helm’s fingers on it.” It isn’t that Helm is old, more that “Whatever is wrong … feels insidious, sneaky, infectious. The surprise disease on the routine tests. Some kind of weird intimate growth you find accidentally and go, Jesus, how long has that been there? A toxic waft when you’re asleep. Lights out.”
The neolithic tribe listens to Helm in its prime, “splintering and shredding the valley, its voice mourning its own violence”. In the mid-20th century Helm searches for a young girl, his friend, who has been locked in an asylum, and, trying to look beyond the valley, “rises, higher, until being is difficult”. At the 21st-century meteorological observation post, 2,000ft up, Helm whips and churns and “calls to awful prayer”. A prayer for itself, perhaps, because whatever Hall’s intentions – an urgent rallying, a tribute, a warning – this novel reads like nothing so much as an elegy.
• Helm by Sarah Hall is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
