The past is another country: Ripeness, by Sarah Moss, reviewed

Spectator

a day ago

Sarah Moss is a prolific and vital novelist whose books encompass an array of subjects from Victorian social reform and 19th-century Japan to broken Brexit Britain and eating disorders. She combines teaching at University College, Dublin with writing in real time: The Fell, set during the second lockdown, came out in the summer of 2021, while My Good Bright Wolf, an experimental memoir about her anorexic breakdown in late 2020, was published last year.
A forthcoming Channel 4 adaptation of Summerwater, which explored national identity and isolation against the backdrop of a soggy Scottish holiday park, may catapult her into the sort of gold-foil territory enjoyed by Maggie O'Farrell or Ali Smith. If not, then perhaps Ripeness, her ninth novel, will.
Set partly in contemporary Ireland and partly in 1960s Italy, this is a tender book that explores issues such as identity, belonging and consent, themes that fit into Moss's wider oeuvre. 'Ripeness, not readiness, is all. Life has no form, you don't get to choose.' So mulls the protagonist Edith, riffing on Shakespeare's familiar lines, pitting a youthful Hamlet's readiness for death – 'voluntary, an act of will' – against an ancient Lear's ripeness – something that 'happens to us as to plums and pears, regardless of agency or volition'.
The age dichotomy is deliberate. The novel features two different Ediths at two different life stages. The first is 73, living alone and happily divorced in present-day Ireland. The second is 17, taking a gap year before studying at Oxford. It is the mid-1960s and hemlines are rising everywhere, but 'had not reached the thigh of Italy'. Edith has been dispatched there by her mother, where her sister Lydia, a ballet dancer, is waiting out the final weeks of an unwanted pregnancy in her ballet master's sumptuous villa.
Moss alternates chapters and perspectives, switching between third person for the older Edith and first person for her teenaged version, who is recounting her Italian adventure to an unnamed 'you'. This, it emerges, is her sister's child, who is handed over for adoption at birth. Edith writes without expectation that her words will ever be read but can't think what else to do.
Despite the dark underside to what happened to Lydia, which has a parallel in the older Edith's story, this feels like a novel Moss had fun writing, not least because she gets to indulge the childhood love for ballet she detailed in My Good Bright Wolf. Her imagery is vivid. A jar of plum jam is 'still slightly warm, as if asleep'; Irish dry stone walls have 'a kind of stone lace… a tracery'.
In Moss's hands, ripeness is more than just old age: it represents every woman's fertile body, to which too many men have helped themselves over the ages. This is an important and convincing book.