Sarah Moss is an impressively flexible writer. Her five novels have ranged over both time and space – historical writing in the last two, the Hebrides and Greenland before that, family life in the present-day English Midlands in The Tidal Zone. And where previously there has been a feminist slant to her writing, with its exploration of the possibilities for talented women in the past, here the narrator is a man, though that is not to say that the discussion about the position of women is sidelined.
Adam Goldschmidt is a stay-at-home husband, principal carer of 15-year-old Miriam and her younger sister Rose. Their mother, Emma, is a frenetically overworked doctor. Adam himself is a fringe academic; that is to say, he is an expert on the Arts and Crafts Movement, currently interested in the postwar new construction of Coventry cathedral, doing occasional university work, but essentially the responsible parent. He shops, cooks, does laundry, sees to birthday parties, dental appointments, new shoes. And he is not complaining; indeed, he is exemplary, it seems – he bakes cakes and is painstaking about making sure the family has a healthy diet.
The theme of the novel, for me, was the provisional nature of life, and above all of parental life. One moment, all is well; the next, it is so far from well that normality is out of sight. The onslaught here is cardiac arrest. Miriam’s heart stops, one afternoon on the school playing fields. She is revived, but why did it happen? And will it happen again?
Miriam has been affected by idiopathic exercise-induced anaphylaxis; in other words, her heart stopped for reasons it was not possible to establish, and there is every reason to suppose that it may happen again, at any time. The condition may be genetic. Is Rose, too, affected, and is there a connection with Adam’s mother, who died young, suddenly, while swimming? Both parents now have to learn how to live with the torment of this uncertainty; Miriam must carry an EpiPen with her always, and live her teenage years, and thereafter, under the shadow of this threat.
The Tidal Zone may be something of a pioneer as a novel in which the NHS is a central theme. Miriam is now under NHS care – her condition diagnosed in hospital, her treatment prescribed; Emma is overworked and exhausted because of the demands and deficiencies of the NHS. A novel for our times, indeed.
And Miriam is a child of our times: extremely bright, sassy, ferociously critical of practically everything, in language that can seem rather too sophisticated. She refuses to accompany Adam to a service at the cathedral because “It’ll take more than coloured glass and old music to make me sign up to homophobia, misogyny and the grandfather of all patriarchal institutions.”
Two subsidiary narratives are wound into the story of Miriam’s time in the high dependency unit at the hospital, and at home later on. Adam’s father comes to visit, and tells her about his own youth in America as a hippy, in that time of communes and free-living, free-thinking people with names such as Rainbow and Eagle. And there is an account of the conception and design of Coventry cathedral by Basil Spence after the destruction of the old cathedral in the blitz. This last is Adam’s own field of study, and serves in a sense to distance the intimate family disaster drama – to place it within time and space, with his father’s story doing something of the same.
This is an intensely contemporary novel, with swingeing criticisms of this country today from Adam, who is supported by Miriam’s precociously world-weary opinions. It is an excellent read, inviting empathy from any parent, satisfactorily grounded in all the technicalities of Miriam’s condition. Moss’s first novel, Cold Earth, remains my own firm favourite, a brilliant suspense narrative with a hint of the supernatural, but The Tidal Zone is an interesting new departure.
• Penelope Lively’s Ammonites and Leaping Fish is published by Penguin. To order The Tidal Zone for £10.65 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
