Helm | Sarah Hall

 

 

Non-human protagonists are having quite a moment in fiction: Laline’s Paull’s The Bees and Pod, and Polly Clark’s Tiger are just two recent examples of narratives in which animals take centre-stage. But in Helm, Sarah Hall goes a step further in articulating the more-than-human world by giving voice and agency to Britain’s only named wind, the Helm of the title – to dazzling effect. Spanning the Neolithic to the Anthropocene, the wind blows through the landscapes of a panoply of human lives to evoke the tragic trajectory of humankind’s decreasing bond with the natural world. Yet despite the urgency of her subject-matter, Hall remains a deft and often humorous storyteller, and the novel is as much a love-letter to the natural world as an obituary of it.