Hall Helm

'Incandescently good.' Sarah Perry
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-38357-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

'Vital, fierce and free.' Financial Times 'Incandescently good.' Sarah Perry 'Pulsing with life and lyricism.' Spectator 'Fiercely exuberant.' Observer 'Delightfully playful.' Andrew Miller 'A truly astonishing thing.' George Monbiot A wondrous, elemental novel from 'a writer of show-stopping genius' (Guardian). Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind - a subject of folklore and wonder - who has blasted the sublime landscape of the Eden Valley since the very dawn of time. This is Helm's life story, formed from the chronicles of those the wind enchanted: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate it, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish it, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture it - and the farmer's daughter who fell in love. But now Dr Selima Sutar, surrounded by measuring instruments, alone in her observation hut, fears the end is nigh. Vital and audacious, Helm is the elemental tale of a unique life force - and of a relationship: between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other. 'Sarah Hall's writing has conquered the body and the soul and now it conquers the wind itself.' DAISY JOHNSON 'I can think of no other British writer whose talent so consistently thrills, surprises and staggers.' BENJAMIN MYERS 'I'm awed . I wouldn't think a novel could be at once so taut and so multifarious, expanding one's sense of what fiction can do.' SARAH MOSS 'Helm is as vital, fierce and free as the phenomenon it describes.' FINANCIAL TIMES 'A spectacular epic tapestry. Nobody could tell the story of our inextricable relationship with wild nature as beautifully as Sarah Hall.' LEE SCHOFIELD '[Hall]sweeps from the cinematic to the specific, her prose pulsing with life and lyricism. Helmpushes both the boundaries of the novel and our relationship with nature.' SPECTATOR 'A big, celebratory book, in places delightfully playful, in others as tight and breathless as a thriller.' ANDREW MILLER

Hailed as a 'writer of show-stopping genius' and a two-time Man Booker Prize nominee, Sarah Hall is the award-winning author of six novels and three short-story collections. Notably, she is the only author to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice -first in 2013 with 'Mrs Fox' and again in 2020 with 'The Grotesques'.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hall, Sarah

Leseproben

I

Helm doesn’t know when Helm was born.

Or brewed.

Conjured or conceived.

First formed above the highest mountain. First blown into the valley.

Long before humankind – that brief, busy interlude.

Time happens all at once for Helm, more or less, relative to longevity. A blink of the eye, universally. (Warning: Helm loves clichés, typical for English weather.) Something of a disorder, some would say.

Of what fantastical, phenomenal and calculable things Helm is made! Maleficence and data and lore. Atmospheric principles and folktales, spirit and substance, opposites and inversions. So many identities and personalities; it makes Helm’s heads spin.

In the beginning, there was no Helm. Boring for the world, obviously. There were aeons before Helm arrived. The necessary arrangements had to be made, on the planet, and in the sky. It would take Ages for Helm to be recognised, let alone named. During which Helm suffered loneliness, inconsequence and ignorance – an original and terrible fugue state. Or Helm didn’t care; Helm was just on standby.

But in the beginning nothing else had a name either, or a pronoun, or a preference. There was no godly language. There was no creative designer or clerical administrator. No titler of the things. It was all serious planetary business. A tremendous collision making Earth and its moon. Sun shrinking and getting hotter; everything bilious, oxygenless, not great for living. Earth was hot and cold, hot and cold, et cetera, for billennia. Fevers and chills, blah blah.

Huge continental arguments occurred, with fire and grinding, geological upheaval, smashing, subsidence, seas and lost seas; it was very dynamic. In amongst this, a little island was produced, with a forced-up, folded-together, eroded-down spine – a ridge of cross-bedded, water-laid, glacier-carved stones. The Pennine mountains were formed, across which forests and grassland, aurochs and wolves, Neanderthals, Normans, glampers and ramblers could come and go. Note: the biggest fell, its gradient and shape – geological cuvette, to be accurate – is most important in this scenario.

Or. Fossils are the devil’s trick; some benign deity sneezed to make the world.

Or. Artisanal aliens left their play-dough behind. Or. Balancing act – elephants and turtles.

Or. Any other creation theory – hollow Earth, flat Earth, mud collection, hanging cord, corpse reuse, dreamtime, biosphere as gemstone in the ring of a galactic giant, please insert alternative here.

Helm doesn’t care which story is true. So long as there is Helm.

Also, Earth’s atmosphere had to stop fucking around and calm down. Stratospheric forecastable order obtained – that is a climate. One was needed with a narrow temperature range; in Helm’s case, inglorious British maritime. In brief – Atlantic thermal capacities, a Gulf Stream, six stable air masses, including (something of a future issue) polar. Wet and dry fronts, prevailing winds, moisture and vapour, meeting, as luck would have it, exactly at the top of that big mountain on the little island.

Cue, a wind-appropriate domain.

Cue, at some point, Helm.

Cue, afterwards, lots of identity politics, superstitions, bonkers rituals and boffin theories about Helm. All of which please Helm. Helm is nothing if not solipsistic, narcissistic even. Fear, devotion, inquisition, obsession, admiration – all attention is good attention.

A poetic birth moment would be nice. Perhaps, curled inside the turbulent virginal atmosphere, Helm dreams of being a storm, has a prophetic vision of destruction, feels a natural calling. The foetal beat of air beats all around Helm like a beating heart (must elegantly variate). Or the sky, a bit bloated, lets one off. Helm loves a fart joke.

The top of the mountain, also as yet unnamed, is the perfect spot from which to observe evolution. It’s all kicking off below. Lavic displays and dramatic columns of ash. The rearrangement of rivers and lakes. Meltwater. Spores. Vegetation. Creatures crawling out of gunk, their legs extending, their toe-webs rescinding, amoebic eyes getting harder. Fast-forward to: creatures becoming other creatures, eggs, bugs, pedes and pods. Lovely greenery sprouting. Mixed oak woods, pine and birch, upland rowan. For a while there are big, lugging animals, impervious to the sky and its inhabitants as they hunt and graze. Everything is without self-consciousness, and adapts and adapts, and just is.

Meanwhile, Helm practises Helm’s skills. Studying the topography. Reading the mood of the incoming sky. Orientating on the mountain. Helm gets ready inside the big dome of cloud (let’s call it the Helm cloud), waiting for an instinctive, brave, enabled feeling. Ready, steady, blow! Tries a first flight from the escarpment, a learner breeze across the valley, and realises – wow! – Helm has abilities. Helm has or is a second cloud too, on the other side of the valley, an exciting rotoring one (the Bar). Tricky to explain/visualise; additional info to follow, stay tuned. For now, imagine a skater launching off a quarter pipe two thousand feet high, then somersaulting. Again. And again. And again.

It’s a crazy coming of age. Helm enjoys the feeling, of agency, of urgency, so plays with Helmself to arouse the feeling: desire for great, wreaking, havoc-making release, surging from a sky orifice, down the mountain and – yes, yes, oh yes, there’s Helm … Flooding the valley with noise and velocity, making an impressive mess – smash-up of trees, shrubbery, and unballasted creatures. Or, it’s uncontrollably random.

Still no witnesses, though, which is a shame. Also, the Helm-show is transitory. Only when Helm manifests does Helm really exist, and afterwards Helm isn’t anymore. The dumb, lumbering beasts don’t care: they fold their ridiculous necks, shelter behind each other’s armoured rumps, and the airborne ones fly away, alighting in the dense canopy, drawing creepy, bloodless lids over their eyes. Helm’s a little envious – these beasts are a bit duh, but at least they’re always embodied, able to kill and eat and rut each other until they die.

So begins the inevitable existential dilemma of who/what/why am I? Heavy, especially for one so aerial.

Between manifesting, Helm sees stuff happen, or not happen. Sometimes a tree falls. Sometimes lightning hits the mountainside and splits or burns a tree. Big animal eats a tree, poops. Small animal eats the poop. Helm’s valley, though it is being grazed by herds, hunted across by packs and stooped upon from above, seems a bit – dull. More aeons.

Comet, ash cloud, mass extinction, redo.

Helm waits around for the skies to clear. The remaining animals have a changing phase, becoming slightly different, then very different: swimmers, flyers, crawlers, runners, hoppers. This is bloody and chaotic, and reasonably interesting. But still, it’s like, hello? The birds – nearest similar entity – don’t hang out with Helm; every time Helm wants to play they leave. Sometimes hawks rise above Helm’s whirling bar cloud – opportunists. River life is inaccessible, a closed world, the flicker of silver fin, a plopping frog. Helm can’t see into the growling squawking forest to know what’s occurring in there. The aurochs are quite nice, right below Helm on the mountainside, their coats riffling in the wind, their horns jewelled with ice in winter: dark, pretty eyes with long curling lashes. They turn towards the wind, acknowledging, but not really comprehending.

Then – boom!

It is when humans evolve that things become interesting. Because humans become interested in Helm.

Helm sees smoke rising on the other side of the forest, without lightning or lava’s arson. Helm rises too, goes as high as possible, gets a little giddy (there are upper limits to Helm’s domain). Far away, across the tops of the trees, is a group of dark-bodied, long-haired up-monkeys. They are scavenging along the shore of a big, shimmering bay. They are picking molluscs from between rocks, sucking the shells clean. Humans, organised and habitual – they go to the same places, nuzzle their favourite others, hold grudges if one finds a bigger crustacean and doesn’t share. More promisingly, they act in accordance with the weather, retreating in the rain, sheltering under leaf umbrellas, sheltering the orange embers they use to start fires. They look up at the sky, have feelings related to its condition.

Smoke rises oftener, closer to Helm’s mountain. They are burning away forest, making inroads. Helm catches glimpses of the humans. Flickering flames. Deer being dragged. Bears dragging them. Skin tents. Badly fitting pelts. Bums, and two types of frontage (in-y, out-y). Have they seen Helm?

They make flint factories nearby. They bind flints to sticks, make tools, spears, toothpicks. They swap...