Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

Stand against that tree, he said, a rowan not much taller than me, the trunk against which I leant my forehead no wider than my face, and as his arm rose and swung and rose again, as the belt sang through the sunny air, I thought hard about the tree between my hands, about the cells in its leaves photosynthesizing the afternoon sun, about the berries ripening hour by hour, the impalpable pulse of sap under my palms, the reach of roots below my feet and deep into the earth. It went on longer than usual, as if the open air invigorated him, as if he liked the setting. I thought about the leather of his belt, the animal from whose skin it was made, about the sensations that skin had known before the fear and pain of the end. Itching, scratching, wind and rain and sun. About the flaying, the tanning. Pick up those rabbits, he said when he had finished, and don't let me ever catch you stripping again, lying around naked liked that, waiting for one of those lads, I'd say, and don't you imagine I won't do this as often as it takes, as long as you're living under my roof you'll behave yourself or else, do you understand.

Silvie, her father, and her mother are participating in an archeological experiment: they are living as ancient Britons did in rural Northumberland. They wear uncomfortable tunics, sleep in a communal hot, and eat only what they can hunt or forage. There are others taking part, grad students in archeology and their professor. Silvie's father is a bus driver, but he knows as much or more about the ancient Britons than any of them; he has inveigled his way into the experiment, somehow, and relishes it more than any. For him, it is a return to a simpler way of living that has been lost, supplanted by modern trash, modern mores. He rules his wife and daughter strictly and violently; Iron Age women who did not do as the should--foraging, washing, or simply heeding their male leaders--would not live long. While none of the other participants are watching, he beats Silvie cruelly, as he does at home.

Silvie, as many victims of abuse do, rationalizes her father's behavior. She, too, is knowledgeable about plants, can make fires and find her way in a forest; her father has after all taught her such self-sufficiency. But she soon comes to identify with bog people, the mummified corpses of Iron Age Britons sacrificed for unclear purposes to the bog's propitiatory powers They are often young women, who are unearthed with their eyes still blindfolded and their hands still tied, even after two thousand years. Their image moves from the symbolic to the literal: toward the end of the novella, Silvie's father and the professor persuade her to let them tie her up and perform a sacrifice. It's just pretend, they say, an exercise, to explore what the ancient Britons might have been experiencing, but as Silvie has seen, such games can quickly become serious.

Here's one truth I see at the heart of Ghost Wall: those RETVRN-type trads you see all over the internet conceal an atavistic need for violence and control. Those who fetishize the past often do so not out of a desire for simplicity, but a yearning for what they consider lost structures of hierarchical control. Silvie's father is violent and cruel, and longs for a social context that will excuse, even justify, his violence. Against the forces of atavism is Mollie, a student on whom Silvie nurses a painful crush. (Silvie's dad's assumption that, when he discovers her bathing naked in a creek, she is waiting for one of the male students betrays a blinkered sense of possibility that reveals the rigidity of his mind.) Mollie sneaks out at night to see boys in town, eat ice cream, or just take a shower. It's Mollie that presses Silvie to recognize that her father is mistreating her, Mollie who is the image of the modern world, which, for all its faults, has at least embraced the idea that physical abuse is morally outrageous.

Ghost Wall asks: when we say things used to be better, what do we really mean? What are we refusing when we refuse to live in the modern world? Few of us, perhaps, go back as far as the Celts and the Picts, but attitudes like Silvie's dad's are not uncommon. Ghost Wall is even sympathetic to such thinking--without it, it's impossible to imagine Silvie's empathy with the luckless victims of the bog--but it shows the dangerous rottenness of those who only dream of turning back the clock.