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Sarah HallSarah Hall
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BiographySarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She took a degree in English and Art History at Aberystwyth University, and began to take writing seriously from the age of twenty, first as a poet, several of her poems appearing in poetry magazines, then as a fiction-writer. She took an M Litt in Creative Writing at St Andrew's University and stayed on for a year afterwards to teach on the undergraduate Creative Writing programme.
Her first novel, Haweswater, was published in 2002. It is set in the 1930s, focuses on one family - the Lightburns - and is a rural tragedy about the disintegration of a community of Cumbrian hill-framers, due to the building of a reservoir. It won several awards, including the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book).
Sarah Hall currently lives in North Carolina. Her second book, The Electric Michelangelo (2004), set in the turn-of-the-century seaside resorts of Morecambe Bay and Coney Island, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book).
The Carhullan Army (2007), won the 2007 John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 2008 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction.
Her latest novel is How to Paint a Dead Man (2009).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction
BibliographyHaweswater Faber and Faber, 2002 The Electric Michelangelo Faber and Faber, 2004 The Carhullan Army Faber and Faber, 2007 How to Paint a Dead Man Faber and Faber, 2009
Prizes and awards2003 Betty Trask Award Haweswater 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book) Haweswater 2003 Lakeland Book of the Year Award (Ron Sands Prize) Haweswater 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) The Electric Michelangelo 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) (shortlist) The Electric Michelangelo 2007 John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize The Carhullan Army 2008 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction (shortlist) The Carhullan Army
Critical PerspectiveSarah Hall’s novels – full of rain and sex and raw emotion – reveal a fascination with the effects of technological progression on human life; the interplay between the individual and community; and the possibilities of language. Her debut, Haweswater (2002), a fiction inspired by the building of the eponymous dam in the 1930s, is remarkable for its sensual texture and emotional resonance. Set in the village of Mardale, in the old county of Westmorland, which now forms part of Cumbria, Haweswater is the story of the destruction of a hill-farming community and its centuries-old way of life. Centred on the experience of the Lightburn family, the novel charts the transformation of this remote world when a man called Jack Ligget arrives with news about a project to flood the dale and build a reservoir. When Ligget and the clever, wilful Janet Lightburn begin an affair, the sense of doom which has been present from the beginning of the novel, becomes all the more palpable and menacing.
As with Hardy’s Wessex, and more recently Graham Swift’s fenland, Mardale is a living presence, and Hall’s evocation of and compassion for place is extremely impressive. She is able to produce the sort of timelessness which the contemplation of landscape can often engender. There are moments when she seems to be writing her own myths, hewn from a land she knows by instinct, upbringing and research; she might soon lay claim to being the most insightful pyschogeographic guide to Cumbria. Hall’s Mardale is a place of ‘quiet men, economical with language, who spoke only in definites and who limited their actions to useful gestures or to work.’ This laconicism is compensated for with a prose which, although suggestive and echoing, does, at times, threaten to overwhelm the novel. Hall sometimes strains for effect. At other times however, she is able to take your breath away: ‘language is old, bitten at;’ ‘rain hissed like soft glass coming from the sky.’
Hall’s second novel, The Electric Michelangelo (2004), is the story of Cy Parks, who has ‘eyes for the grotesque things of life.’ He spends his early years in his mother’s hotel, a place for consumptives with ‘ashen, bulging faces,’ coughing up blood ‘into their basins and handkerchiefs hourly.’ When he becomes an apprentice tattoo artist to the eccentric, unpredictable and alcoholic Eliot Riley, he is transformed into the Electric Michelangelo of the title, and leaves Morecombe Bay for the US, where he opens his own parlour on the Coney Island boardwalk. There he meets fellow immigrant Grace, an enigmatic circus performer who shares her apartment with a horse and hires Cy to cover her body in eyes.
Like Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo deals with loss, love and yearning, but is also a study in ways of seeing. Philosophical thesis on the art of tattooing, and carnivalesque tale of seaside resorts and unconventional lives, the novel is at its best in its opening chapters, in the vibrant evocation of Morecambe Bay at the beginning of the twentieth century: this ‘poor man’s Blackpool’ where ‘the music halls were always full,’ a place of ‘Sunday-best attire and flagpoles clanking in the breeze,’ where there was ‘sugar rock, dripping ice-cream cones, quarter-sliced ham sandwiches, tea on the beach and a variety of sticky buns.’
Hall’s third novel is many things: a critique of gender construction; a cautionary note to a self-indulgent culture; and a balanced analysis of collective living. Inevitably, it calls Orwell's 1984 and Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale to mind; and with its questions about the morality of resistance and the meaning of fanaticism it is also reminiscent of Alfonso Cauron’s recent adaptation of P.D. James' 1992 novel, The Children of Men. The Carhullan Army (2007) is faster, leaner and more thrilling than its predecessors. Set in a future where cars are ‘husks of a privileged era,’ and the rain ‘feels wounded,’ it has urgency and visionary intensity. Oil supplies are nearly dry, war rages in China and South America, and much of the country is underwater. Britain is run by the faceless omnipotent Authority, and in this fearful new world of ‘despondency and resentment’ people have become the ‘sterile subject[s]’ of a ‘wrecked and regulated existence.’ A woman known only as ‘Sister’, writing from a prison cell, tells of her escape from a regime which forces women to wear coils, which are attached ‘as efficiently as a farmer clipping the ear of one of his herd.’ Sister heads for Carhullan, where a community of ‘unofficial’ women is said to live on a fortified farm in a ‘raw landscape, verging on wilderness’ beyond the Cumbrian fells. Led by the contained, determined Jackie Nixon, whose skin ‘could barely contain the essence of her,’ the women resist the ‘old, disabled versions of (their) sex.’ It is here that ‘Sister’ will be stripped to her essence, rebuilt, and have to come to terms with how far she is prepared to go to fight.
The depiction of the life of the farm – hard, unforgiving, far removed from the repression beyond its borders but no utopia, no Shangri-la – is subtle and affecting. Hall captures the rhythms and routines of this life; the brutal facts of subsistence existence; the relationship between the people and the environment. This novel is the first of Hall’s to feature first person narration, and while the prose still has poetry, it is also that little bit colder and more abrasive, and all the more potent for it. The Carhullan Army is a controlled, sustained piece of imaginative fiction, and, like all good dystopian novels, as much a comment on the present as a warning of what the future might hold.
Sarah Hall has Sarah Waters’ gift for location, John Irving’s interest in detailed cross-generational narratives, and a poet’s feel for the heft and shape and sound of words. Her novels might be described as lyrical essays; she attempts to get at motivation and meaning through the combination of imagery and motivational analysis. She has considerable descriptive power and, if she has a tendency to say too much, her work is, nevertheless, bold, original, and moving. Readers coming to Hall’s work for the first time will be struck by its range and ambition. The only certainty seems to be that she will continue to ignore the possibility of comfort.
Garan Holcombe, 2007
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