Twenty years in the making, Helm is a sweeping exploration of the mutual history between human beings and the environment. Helm, also known as The Barley Thief and Ewe Blinder, is the name given to the omniscient wind located in, over and around the Pennines in northern England.
The novel’s charm is in its contradictory combination of “atmospheric principles and folktales”. It opens almost macrocosmically, with an extended description of the beginnings of Helm, the land it hovers above and the human beings who have perceived and felt it. The style is disorienting at first, at once scientific and somehow Miltonic.
Sarah Hall proceeds to weave together a dozen or so temporally disparate narratives whose characters have nothing in common beyond their often spiritual interactions with Helm. The novel traces the swell of industrialisation, the beginnings of deforestation and the eventual, casual pollution caused by modern life. Characters in earlier timeframes are connected with the earth and elements in a way that few of us moderns can quite comprehend.
Particularly owing to each narrative having a unique literary style, the novel reads like a series of short stories snipped up and patchworked together. There is no overall plot connecting them, only Helm. While this results in plenty of cliff hangers, the jumping timeframes only cause us to forget exactly what cliff we were hanging off, though we know it is located somewhere in the Pennines. Hall attempts to address this disorder within the novel, writing that “Helm will scatter all the pages, rearrange the chapters, Helm will tell Helm’s story in every possible way.” One can’t help but still think that this would, in reality, make more sense as a series of short stories.
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Helm wants to be witnessed, and the novel indulges this fantasy, though Hall points to human beings’ general demand for nature’s passive beauty and our anger at the various inconveniences it causes. This is, above all, a piece of ecocritical writing, with Hall asking us to reflect on human carelessness. Hall’s mantra is to “measure the damage in order to reduce it” and, though she is tentative to look to the future, there remains an element of hope for an antidote.
