Sarah Hall enjoys words. The prose in her most recent novel, a work of climate fiction with encyclopedic tendencies, is by turns coy, cynical, coarse and chatty: The name humans give to a valley ‘after some Christian–Pagan bunfighting – is Eden. Seriously? OK, it is quite pretty.’ Helm is the only named wind in the UK: a northeasterly gale that blows down the southwest slopes of Cross Fell. The wind has enchanted Hall since her childhood in Cumbria, and she has been working on versions of this novel for twenty years. In that time, we have seen ample evidence of both her inventive language and her concern for the environment. The Carhullan Army (2007) tells of a future Britain after climate collapse and Wolf Border (2015) charts the reintroduction of wolves in the North. Helm is not simply a book about a wind or about climate change; it is a much larger tale about the ways in which we understand nature.

After a prologue about the emergence of life on earth as seen from Helm’s perspective (‘Comet, ash cloud, max extinction, redo’), we are given the story of NaNay, the first of eight interwoven narratives that take us from the early Bronze Age to the present day. A seer-like outcast, NaNay is searching for the Magstone that will complete the Magsca stone circle and placate the belligerent wind. Next there is the wizard-warrior-exorcist-priest Michael Lang. His Christian world view is no less ‘superstitious’ than NaNay’s: where she saw ‘anma’, an all-pervading life force, he sees the Devil. He has come to the Eden Valley to drag a cross to the summit and drive the demon wind from the mountain. 

Modernity brings scientific understanding but not necessarily appreciation. In a section devoted to the late 18th century, we have the letters of Catherine de Peyster. She is confined to the house by her husband, Nathaniel, who seeks to destroy NaNay’s stone circle with gunpowder. A generation later, Thomas Bodger, a