Sarah Moss is the darling of many a Book blogger and BookTuber, but I had never found myself interested enough to pick up any of her work. The Tidal Zone however ticks a lot of my boxes, telling the story of a stay-at-home Dad, and his eldest daughter Miriam who suddenly collapses in the school playground when her heart stops beating.
I love stories about families, especially families who defy the norm. Adam is a homemaker, he makes cakes and puts on laundry and does a little academic work on the side, while his wife Emma is a high flying doctor and brings in the majority of their income. Miriam and Rose, fifteen and nine respectively, are interesting and intelligent without being unbelievable and, although the story is ultimately about parents being scared of losing their child, the conversations the family has and the stories they tell each other push the narrative to explore a much wider scope of human life.
Moss's writing is crisp and simple without being sparse, favouring two perfectly written lines to big clumsy chunks of flowery description. She writes like someone who has been doing it for years and has no need to dress up her prose in a flowery hat and heart shaped sunglasses. She just lets it do it's thing and it works.
Of course no book is perfect and there were some aspects that I feel lessened my experience of it. The narrative is interspersed throughout with short chapters on the history of Coventry's cathedral, which was destroyed in the second world war and since has existed in a strange duality, with the ruins sitting beside the replacement that was built after. These chapters were interesting and added an extra dimension to the story, but I just wasn't that interested. Every time we got to one of these chapters I would read through it quickly and inattentively, because I was far more invested in the family's story.
My only other qualm was that the book had some political aspects that felt as if they were pushed too hard. Miriam is a very opinionated fifteen year old with a lot of feelings surrounding gender, generational differences and social values and, while I actually agree with everything Miriam says throughout the novel, it felt at times that she stopped being a character and instead became a mouthpiece for liberal views. Again, my issue wasn't that I disagreed with anything, purely that some of the elegance was lost in big chunks of text in which Miriam or another character simply monologues about a problem, as opposed to those issues being explored in a more nuanced way.
Nevertheless, this feels like an accomplished piece of work, nothing is too ostentatious or melodramatic, no character is some magical seed of wisdom. They are all flawed and human and struggle coping with the new stresses that have suddenly entered their lives. Moss explores the mundane of everyday life and suffuses it with this palimpsestic quality as we see Adam's inner thoughts and the way he sees and responds to the world around him. I love especially that the dialogue often takes a dual form, both what Adam says and what he doesn't say. He gives the socially acceptable responses yet his brain carries him on and we see the anger and irritation at a world that just doesn't know how to react to a stay-at-home Dad with a dying daughter. Like Coventry Cathedral Adam exists as two people, and has a distinct dichotomy within himself as he tries to keep his family together.
I would definitely recommend The Tidal Zone for anyone who wants a quiet but engaging and powerful read about family and society. I plan to try out at least one more of Moss' books this year. Let me know if you've read this, and what you thought of it!
Isabelle
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