TeaHe named the wind only in the British Isles, Helm is a strong northerly 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 remove 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 upon whom Helm has wreaked chaos throughout the ages. Those figures include a Neolithic tribal woman and seer called Nane who are building a stone circle; an astrologer and exorcist known as the “sorcerer priest”; A Victorian meteorologist who travels across the Pennines by train and later by car in Helm’s “attack”; And a climatologist is measuring microplastics in the atmosphere from her observation hut at the falls. Separated by centuries, their stories are nevertheless woven together, each of them tied to the seasons.
Helm is a book of vast scope, lyrical prose, and sharp shifts in style and tone, making it a difficult task for a storyteller. Luckily, actor Lewis Brealey – who has already read two of Hall’s books: The Wolf Border and Burncoat – proves more than capable of teasing its playful and poetic moments and reveling in glimpses of vulgarity.
The helm is a slippery, shape-shifting phenomenon that can be difficult for Hall notes to imagine and explain, though that doesn’t stop him from trying. “Imagine a skater taking off from a quarter pipe two-thousand feet high, then doing a somersault. Again. And again. And again.”
Available through Faber, 13h 3m
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