In Fell, by Jenn Ashworth, Annette Clifford returns to her long-abandoned childhood home, which is overshadowed by two deep-rooted sycamores that threaten the building's foundations. A similar presence are her dead parents, Nettie and Jack, who narrate the story, their tendrils reaching from the past to the present.
The house is putrid with memory, with Annette’s loneliness as a neglected girl growing up alongside Nettie’s blooming cancer. Their lodger cures her father’s sight with a touch of his hands. He traffics in hope, and this sustains her parents through the grim humiliations of her mother’s sickness, until the end.
Despite the ethereal narrators, the book’s triumph is in the corporeal, the ache of the mundane, the beauty of small things. The characters have a poetry of the ordinary – a brokenness reminiscent of Alan Bennett that makes them flesh and blood.
Ultimately, even when the two ancient sycamores are unearthed, saplings will spring up for years to come. “Time moves on and everything changes,” Ashworth tells us, but some things – guilt, regret, repentance – linger on.
