| Summary: | Sarah Moss’s latest novel, The Fell, is a pandemic novel which explores the social fractures that the COVID 19 lockdown blatantly exposed. Its oppressive atmosphere of rising anxiety in the self-isolating context of the epidemic, however, has pervaded Moss’s fiction from the beginning of her career. Her first novel, Cold Earth (2009), published a few months before the swine flu pandemic, imagined a group of archaeologists cut off from the world in Greenland as a consequence of the global spread of a virus. Her 2020 novel, Summerwater, similarly pictures a group of tourists isolated by the rain in Scotland while her 2018 novel, Ghost Wall, describes an experiential archaeological summer camp going wrong. Moss uses extreme quarantine-like circumstances to question individual responses and group behaviours. Thus, the various confining circumstances of her novels unfold as political fault lines questioning single motherhood, domestic abuse, xenophobia, scapegoating, class and gender divides. The paper will explore such rifts through attention to Moss’s diverse writing procedures from the first-person polyphony of her first novel to the disjointed use of free indirect speech, characteristic of pandemic writing, in her latest novel, using affect theory to account for her viral signature brand of writing. Le dernier roman en date de Sarah Moss, The Fell, est un roman de pandémie qui explore les fractures sociales mises au jour par la crise du COVID. Toutefois l’atmosphère oppressante construite par la propagation tant de la peur que du virus se trouve être une constante de son œuvre. Dès son premier roman, Cold Earth, publié en 2009 quelques mois avant l’épidémie de grippe aviaire, Moss imaginait un groupe d’archéologues coupés du monde au Groënland à la suite d’une pandémie mondiale. Ghost Wall, publié en 2018, narre une expérience archéologique de reconstitution de la vie des anciens Anglo-Saxons dans une forêt du Northumberland. Dans le roman Summerwater, publié en 2020, des touristes de tous horizons se ...
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