2026/019: Helm — Sarah Hall

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.( Read more... )