Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border – a Writer’s Commentary

Bedtime Story

With my tendency towards insomnia I get to hear a lot of fragments of broadcast-radio in the early hours. Recently I heard an episode and a half of Sarah Hall’s novel The Wolf Border.  I was very intrigued with the fragment of story so I checked out the novel and the writer.

Great cover. Imagine the author name
and the wolf silhouette on  the hill
picked out in gold and the title set against
green. planting.Sumptuous.. 

The following day my high-octane reader-friend Gillian told me she had just read a superb novel – original and absorbing. The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall. (I had been complaining that there is so little originality on modern fiction.)

So I ordered the novel on-line and it arrived yesterday. And now I have spent a delicious day and a half reading and enjoying it.

Very finely and closely written, The Wolf Border is about Rachel, a world authority on wolves - currently working with wolves in Idaho - who is drawn back to her home territory of Cumbria in Britain to work for an enigmatic millionaire earl. He engages Rachel to head a project aiming to re-introduce wolves on his wild land in the Lake District.

So far, so ecologically trendy.

The Story

But the story is so much more than that. More ambitious. More significant. The action takes place over a two year period – in which time the prose floods us with closely observed details of the landscape, seasons, smells, sounds and skies of Cumbria.

But this is no rendering of a country idyll. The action is set against the political background of Scotland’s ‘Yes’ vote for Independence and of the subtle operation of power in British politics. At the heart of the novel are the wolves and the complex arguments for their positive role in the hierarchy of predators.

The collection of people Sarah Hall brings into the story is varied and authentic, adding depth and ambiguity of the characterisation. More than this, the narrative unfolds steadily, arousing the reader’s curiosity, compelling her to read on and on through this long novel. (433 pages.).It is cleverly written and very hard to put down.

One central strand of the story as it develops is the way in which we witness the evolution of Rachel’s emotional identity, as, among other elements - the birth of her son filters through the routines and habits of the pair of wolves as they settle in the prepared land and go through the rituals and processes of attachment involved in their own breeding process.

The Writing

In the hands of a less gifted writer all this barrage of information would be almost unreadable -didactic and very heavy going.

One key to Sarah Hall’s skill in avoiding this problem is that she tells the whole story through Rachel’s eyes, using the third person voice but completely from Rachel’s point of view. We are very close in. We are sharing Rachel’s experience. This immediacy is enhanced by the fact that story is written almost completely in the present tense - very hard to pull off in such a long novel. Sarah Hall manages it.

This is because the originality, delicacy and immediacy of the prose clarifies the complex subject matter, making it easy to read, raising questions in the reader’s mind and sweeping her forward through the action.

The overt transparency is enhanced by her decision not to use punctuation marks for speech. This has been done before but it works very well indeed in this novel.

And she avoids the strong structural element of chapters and titles. The novel is split into substantial parts and these parts are very simply separated by white space. This adds to the flow and the unity of the whole novel.

The Wolf Border shouldn’t be an easy read, but it is.

The Book

Like many of us writers and readers as much as a third my reading is on Kindle, which is functional, useful and fast. 

But there is no denying the extra dimension of literary and reading pleasure in reading a tactile, well designed book such as this. My own interest in book design has been enhanced lately since – in my modern role of artisan writer, - I have been designing and producing my own books.

Faber & Faber are to be congratulated on the design qualities of The Wolf Border which reflect the assiduous care of Sarah Hall in writing the book. The cover is brilliantly designed, a kind of metaphor for the novel’s themes and style. It has a simple clear typeface and is printed on substantial paper and has gorgeous green endpapers.

A wonderfully original novel The Wolf Border certainly earns a permanent place on my book shelves. Highly recommended to those who love good books. original stories and excellent writing.

Two Great Joys of Independent Publishing

I have been reading and revising my Room To Write novels, trying to work out some kind of strategy for presenting them to my readers in a way that will appeal to them.

One of the great joys of Independent Publishing is energy of making one’s own decisions and taking responsibility for one’s own work. So last night with my Independent Publisher hat on, I sat down and thought of what my novels had in common. I even went back to pre-RoomToWrite days when I was writing for what they now call a Big Publisher.

Another of the joys of Independent Publishing is the opportunity to think and re-think your novels in terms of how they will be seen by readers who might be attrected to them

In my writing career I have been proud (maybe too proud) of the fact that each of my novels is a different creation and; that my work has never fallen too easily into tight genre-corsets (if you’ll excuse the term). I think this was a bit frustrating for my Big Publisher,  although they still rolled my novela out in elegant saga covers,

The fact is, of course - I can hear you saying it - not falling easily into a tight fiction genre can be counter-productive. 

This is said to be even more so in the contemporary Independent Publishing scene. One message regarding this in the swathe of articles, posts and advice is expressed in the almost religious mantra that only distinctive genre designated novels with fittingly dramatic covers will sell on Kindle and Online.

Anyway, although I would always say that each novel is a unique creation I challenged myself to sit down and decide just what my novels have – and always have had – in common. What are the similarities rather then the differences?

What – as an Independent Publisher -  should I focus on?

I came to the conclusion that what they had in common was me with my own family history with its storytelling tradition, my background knowledge of history and sociology. Add to that my deep interest in what makes unique individuals tick whatever the context of their lives.

So I have decided that my novels reflect all of this and are essentially historical novels – a field of fiction rather than a genre. It is true that my stories are inhabited by extra-ordinary 'ordinary' women and men of the rather than Kings, Queens and Chancellors. Add to that the stories focus more or less on the industrial and war-torn Twentieth Century history now, of course – also part of my background.

The one exception to this is my very latest novel The Pathfinder which is set between the country now known as Wales and the North East of England in the second century AD. But this novel was inspired by the journey made by my own family at the turn of the twentieth century from North Wales to County Durham. I have to say that the research and writing of this novel was quite an emotional journey for me.

I asked myself what should I call my category?

I came up with the idea of Extraordinarily Ordinary People in History. So with this in mind, with my Independent Publisher’s hat on I have put together my last six Room to Write novels as a kind of set which will come under the title of  Extraordinarily Ordinary People in History I have revised and redesigned these six  novels keeping in mind that - although each one is unique -  the novels are similar in that they have been written and dreamed up by me, with my own peculiar interests and pre-occupations.    

So, to show you what I have been up to I have put these new editions, in their new clothes, on the sidebar here at LifeTwiceTasted. I hope you like the my newly coined novels with their extraordinatry people and perhaps will be tempted to enjoy their stories.

Now, watch out here on LifeTwiceTasted for an inside track on each of the novels its inspiration and evolution and its extra-ordinary ordinary people.