The only named wind in the British Isles, Helm is a strong northeasterly gale that blows down the slopes of Cross Fell in the Pennines and is known for its unusual cloud formations. Helm has been known to dislodge roofs, haystacks, trees and riders from their horses.
Twenty years in the writing, Sarah Hall’s Helm is an ambitious novel that tells stories from the perspective of the wind, and from the people on whom, through the ages, Helm has wreaked chaos. Those figures include a Neolithic tribeswoman and seer called NaNay who is building a stone circle; an astrologer and exorcist known as a “wizard priest”; a Victorian meteorologist who travels across the Pennines by train and later by carriage into Helm’s “onslaught”; and a climatologist measuring microplastics in the atmosphere from her observation hut in the fells. Separated by centuries, their stories are nonetheless woven together, each of them bonded by weather.
Helm is a book of vast scope, lyrical prose and sharp shifts in style and tone, all of which makes it a tricky job for a narrator. Fortunately, the actor Louise Brealey – who has already read two of Hall’s books: The Wolf Border and Burntcoat – proves more than able, teasing out its playful and poetic moments and revelling in the flashes of coarseness.
Helm is a slippery, shapeshifting phenomenon that Hall notes can be hard to visualise and explain, though that doesn’t stop her from trying. “Imagine a skater launching off a quarter pipe two-thousand feet high, then somersaulting. Again. And again. And again.”
• Available via Faber, 13hr 3min
Further listening
Whistler
Ann Patchett, Bloomsbury, 10hr 43min
A fiftysomething English teacher notices an older man following her around New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and eventually recognises him as her former stepfather, Eddie. As they reconnect, old memories come to the surface. Read by the author.
London Falling
Patrick Radden Keefe, Picador, 12hr 59min
Blending true crime and social history, the Empire of Pain author unravels the knotty story of a troubled teenager’s death by falling from a building into the River Thames.
