Helm

Image credit: Allen & Unwin

While there is absolutely nothing fun about being in a ready slump, the inflating sense of accomplishment that comes from finally finishing the book that you were struggling through is nothing short of magnificent. It’s a different kind of reading experience that comes from encountering a book that provides challenges, takes you out of your comfort zone, makes literary/character/narrative decisions that you can’t really fathom... or a mélange of everything heretofore mentioned.

This month’s book for Bookclub was Helm by Sarah Hall, a book that is about everything and nothing, is enlightening and confusing, and took me over a month to read because once I had put it down, I struggled to aspire to pick it back up again.

Helm is a ferocious wind that presides over the southwestern slopes of the Cross Fell range in Cumbria England. Helm doesn’t know when Helm was born or when Helm will die, nor does Helm really care. But humans do: the Neolithic tribes that tried to placate it, the Dark Age zealot who attempted to banish it, the Victorian steam engineer who tried to capture it, the free-spirited little girl who loved it, Dr Selima Sutar who is trying to study it, and a whole bunch of other people all have stories connected to Helm.

The blurb advertises that this is a life story of Helm, though that term is about as unstable as the subject matter. The novel is a collection of individual stories, spanning throughout the ages of human history, that all have some tie-in with Helm. They are stories without closure, that raise questions about their narrators, and teach us little to nothing of Helm.

The sensual reading experience of this book was funnily enough like being caught in a multidirectional wind. With the exception of the 4-6 central stories, there is nothing that grounds the narrative or keeps you fixed and focused on a cemented path. The tone, the tales, the characters are discordant and higgledy-piggledy and it feels like there is no real space to breath and take in the sights before another blast from the narrative wind (either the ‘character’ of Helm or the narrative devices that Hall employs) scoop you up and deposit you somewhere else; like Dorothy and Toto.

Having so much happen (and seemingly nothing resolve) over the course of 300+ pages made this a very challenging book for me. So much so that I failed to really admire the scenic walk through the Ages or the Historic Tour of How Human’s Destroy the World that the author takes us on. The messages about climate change did not become present to me until they were literally voiced at the end.

Image credit: Faber

This book is a literary achievement. One that I think people smarter that me, able to see further than me, and more attuned to the subtle mechanics of narrative devices are able to appreciate more than I can. While I recognise the tricks and tropes that make this book different to other speculative fiction, and appreciate that the reading experience was reflective of the nature of the narrative subject, I just really struggled with it. I turned up to Bookclub having only made my way through half of it.

Author: Sarah Hall, 2025

Published: Faber & Faber Limited, London, 2025