Summerwater

November 2, 2020
Moss’s taut latest (after Ghost Wall) turns a rain-drenched park in the Scottish Highlands into a site of tension and unease for a group of vacationing strangers. The book opens with a middle-aged woman going for a run in the early morning, her family still asleep in their rented cabin. As she follows the trail past an illegally pitched tent, she considers the trope of a dangerous man in the woods. From here on out, each chapter introduces a new point of view among the mix of English tourists and Scots who watch and pass judgment upon one another without interacting, and situations such as a teenage boy’s ill-advised kayak trip across a rough loch and a teenage girl’s sneaking out at night keep the reader wondering if this is the kind of book where the worst thing will happen. As the noises of late-night revelry from one cabin draw attention from all others, many of whom describe its dwellers wrongly as “foreign” or “those Romanians,” the suspense builds. Meanwhile, a series of lyrical interludes describing the park’s elements of nature and eons of evolution provide delightfully ironic contrasts to the small human dramas. Readers unafraid of a bit of rain will relish this.

November 15, 2020
A multivoiced narrative set in the Scottish Highlands, this broodingly suspenseful and engagingly intimate novel is a miniature portrait of family life in various forms, of old age and childhood, framed by wild nature, which becomes a character in itself. "The sky is lying on the loch," this meditative novel begins. And summer rain does indeed fall ceaselessly and torrentially on the Scottish lakeside retreat where a handful of vacationing families, each renting a cabin, become erstwhile and wary neighbors. Just a "huddle of chalets," as one bored woman remarks, with "eyes at every window." Most are English, some are Scottish, and one family--of nighttime noisemakers--is Romanian. The Scots resent the English ("they could stay in England with...their nasty little government"), and everyone disapproves of the Romanians ("You're supposed to have left, you know, people like you," one child taunts another). Each protagonist also battles the weather--the mother on her dawn run, the teenager kayaking too far in choppy water, the child on the perilous swing that dangles over the loch, the old man walking--which proves an escape from family tedium but may also harbor a hidden menace. "The sky has turned a yellowish shade of grey," we are told. "Small creatures in their burrows nose the air and stay hungry. There will be deaths by morning." With consummate skill, the author reveals the inner lives of a handful of characters, their meditations by turns intensely moving and laconically humorous (married sex, a middle-aged wife reflects, is "like oiling your bike chain, doesn't have to be fun but it stops things falling apart") while conjuring up both landscape and atmosphere with lyrical delicacy. The novel that began at dawn ends at nightfall with a satisfying though awful denouement that steers clear of melodrama. A psychologically acute depiction of modern Britain through the lens of one rainy summer day.

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December 1, 2020
Moss's latest outing, following Ghost Wall (2019), is set in a remote Scottish vacation town where travelers stay in rustic cabins surrounding a large loch. Moss takes readers inside the psyches of the various tourists: a woman obsessed with running, a retired doctor concerned about his wife's physical and mental frailty, a pair of angsty teen siblings who want to be anywhere but on vacation with their parents, and a young mother exhausted by her responsibilities. Rather than being a respite from the troubles of their lives, the isolation and seemingly never-ending rain only serve to give the characters little else to do but to ruminate on their lives, and obsess over the occupants of one cabin who dare to break the quiet solitude with loud music and revelry every night. The foreboding atmosphere and myriad frustrations among the dissatisfied characters come to a head in the final pages. Readers who enjoy stream-of-consciousness narratives and careful characterization will find much to appreciate here, but those seeking a more cohesive story and engaging action should look elsewhere.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2021

At a rustic Scottish resort where an assortment of families are spending a summer vacation, the incessant rain has kept everyone mostly cooped up inside, and each chapter offers a stream-of-consciousness perspective on events from a different vacationer. We follow everyone from small children to frustrated teenagers to parents and partners as they cook, play, have sex, and venture outside for a jog or a paddle on a kayak. They observe and comment on their own family dynamics and notice others at the resort, sometimes critically. The subject of almost universal derision is a Ukrainian family who keep everyone else awake with their nightly loud parties. Despite the boredom and frustration, coupled with a lack of WiFi, it rarely occurs to anyone to reach out and connect outside their family circle until a tragic event at the end. VERDICT Moss (Ghost Wall) seems to be commenting on the disconnect and isolation of modern life, though the vacationers' travails can make for dreary reading. The campers have a perfect opportunity to form community but fail to do so, while the Ukrainians, whose othering Moss highlights by not providing their viewpoint, seem to be the only campers who embrace enjoyment of life.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

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