Though Kingsnorth describes the bloody Norman invasion rather than the milder yoke of the European Union, the parallels are clear and the message seems to be: Land belongs to the people whose ancestors lie underfoot. It is narrated by a guerrilla fighter named Buccmaster, who rails against old ways of life dying out and the broken bond between a people and its land. The first, The Wake, is a confected Old English-ish–language novel set during the Norman invasion of 1066. Ghost Wall almost reads as a response to two recent novels by Paul Kingsnorth, a naturalist and Euroskeptic whose protagonists bear a close resemblance to Bill. Wealthy and democratic societies demand sacrificial victims too, even if the killing is outsourced. But a persistent theme of this acutely lovely novel is the way in which all societies-whether ancient or modern, rich or poor-depend on scaffoldings of cruelty, from the meat they eat to the clothes they wear. Ghost Wall’s preoccupation with borders and class, authenticity and ancestry could render it a plain Brexit parable: the brutal and uneducated nativist in contrast with enlightened college students. Bill wants to find some version of “original Britishness” the students smugly tell Bill that there have never been native Britons, just immigrants who have been here longer than others. The ideological split between the two groups shows early. So the reenactors hunt and scavenge, wearing moccasins and eating bilberries in the hope that if they “walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago,” then “some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone.” Bill has joined the project on his vacation (dragging his family along) because he reveres the Iron Age and is searching for “his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night.” The other half are members of a working-class family: Silvie, the 17-year-old narrator her long-suffering mother and her abusive and nationalistic father, Bill.

The group is divided by both class and ideology: Half are posh intellectuals from an unnamed university, taking part for course credit. Moss’s tiny, sharp knife of a novel Ghost Wall follows a group of reenactors who call themselves “experimental archeologists” as they re-create Iron Age life in Northumberland, England, some time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the advent of cellphones. When walls are built to keep out foreigners, many of them rest on some idea of blood claim. It didn’t work-the Romans still came, followed by the Anglo-Saxons and then the Normans-but you can see why the Iron Age Britons might have tried it. A ghost wall, according to the novelist Sarah Moss, is a battlement made by ancient Britons, hung with the preserved skulls of their ancestors.

Ghost wall novel