2026/019: Helm — Sarah Hall

[tamaranth]

2026/019: Helm — Sarah Hall

There they are, the exuberant, flamboyantly dressed couple, petting beneath a gargantuan inflammable. Helm is buoyed by the aerial company, and oddly nauseated. Something about the creepy, crêpey surface of the inflatable, and the oo of the balloon, and the balloon itself, its potential to burst and issue forth a loud, deflationary, unfunny raspberry. Cue, globophobia. [loc. 1090

A luminous wild tale whose protagonist is Helm, Britain's only named wind, an accident of geology and meteorology who's as vivid a character as the humans with which Helm interacts. (Helm's pronouns are Helm/Helm's.) After an intensely lyrical opening that depicts Helm's existence before the coming of humans, the novel skitters backwards and forwards in time ('Time happens all at once for Helm, more or less') focusing on a handful of individuals. These include a Neolithic seer, a medieval warrior-priest, a nineteenth-century meteorologist and his wife, a neurodiverse child growing up in the 1960s, a glider pilot, and a researcher studying microplastics in the environment. Helm likes to collect what Helm calls 'trinkets', souvenirs of encounters with humans -- 'so fun and terribly worrying'. These include an ejector seat from a Tornado jet, an iron skullcap, a tobacco pipe, an iPhone... And Helm is not always invisible to humans: some think of Helm as a demon, others as a friend, or a deity, or a fragile natural phenomenon, or a wild destroyer.

All of these are valid.

Hall's prose is marvellous, literally and metaphorically. Each of her characters has a unique voice (I liked Helm best) and each character's arc -- not always told sequentially -- could have been a novel in itself. I loved the Cumbrian dialect (cowp, spelks, glisky) and the sense of place. The chapter from the perspective of glider pilot Jude is an excellent evocation of the joy and terror of unpowered flight, too. And Janice, who draws Helm for the doctors at the asylum, has a unique and profound connection with Helm, which Helm clearly reciprocates.

Perhaps the division of narrative was slightly uneven, but researcher Selima Sutar, whose narrative is most detailed and subjective, serves as our modern viewpoint, coming to understand that Helm is under threat by humans. Helm, I think, knows that: when Michael, a priest sent to exorcise the fiend of the fell, asks in a dream how long Helm will live, the answer is 'Eight more centuries. Until you kill me.' [loc. 2319]

I was delighted to see this novel on the British Science Fiction Association Awards Longlist: it is about climate, and arguably about non-human intelligence and making contact.