Ali Thurm

I enjoyed Sarah Moss’s best-selling short novel, Ghost Wall, 2018, a chilling story which focused on an iron age enactment weekend, where one character’s obsession with authenticity infects the whole group, and highlights the historical roots of misogyny, domestic abuse and the class system. It’s political but also poetic. As is Ripeness, her ninth novel. It’s also playful and funny. She’s also an academic so expect a story that’s intellectually satisfying and beautifully written as well as pacy.

Ripeness, which I read as a free proof on NetGalley for an unbiased review, is a compelling read. Set in Ireland (where the author now lives), Edith, 73 who has a lover, Gunter and one close friend, Meabh, compares her present day life in rural Ireland, with the summer, before going to Oxford when her family sent her to stay in an Italian villa. Here her older unmarried sister, Lydie, a ballet dancer, is about to give birth. Their mother, Maman, (French, Jewish, English) who had several passports often left her children, and Edith reflects that this history of leaving and displacement meant they never felt they belong anywhere.

It was the people who felt safe who didn’t leave, Maman said. It was the settled, secure ones who ended up on the cattle trucks, the ones who thought it couldn’t happen here, to us. It can always happen here, to you.

Edith has been brought up on her grandparents’ farm and is familiar with animals giving birth; but as an impressionable 18 year old is out of her depth trying to help her sister. Lydie, who resents the pregnancy, is planning to have the baby adopted and doesn’t want to be looked after. Ripeness is a coming of age story, with chapters alternating between the young Edith and her older self. It’s also a state of the nation novel.

The Ukrainians, Edith has observed, have a measure of exemption from the requirement for refugees to express gratitude. They are allowed a certain moodiness. Irish people have an ancestral memory of having to flee or fight the aggressor next door…

For the first time in her life here in Ireland, Edith feels a degree of belonging. She’s happily divorced (after 40 years) and feels a familiarity in the Irish landscape which is:

as fragile and as much menaced as any and all others, but there’s something about the nakedness of limestone, something about the encounter of body and stone, that makes her feel safe.

But when as group of young refugees from an African country are housed locally, she sees the same patterns of discrimination repeating themselves. One friend, Eilidh, says:

I’m sure they’re nice enough lads but lads all the same, watching our girls in their shorts. Coming from Africa, you know yourself the ideas they have about women over there.

Racism, fear of ‘the other’ and small-mindedness can happen anywhere and at any time. Think of Brexit. Think of Trump’s America. It can always happen here, to you. This is a novel that tackles the major issues of our time.

Moss won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize for her novel, Night Waking, 2011 and has been short-listed for many major prizes, but is yet to win one. She deserves to for this novel, and I’d put my money on the Booker or the Women’s Prize.