Louise Brealey narrates Sarah Hall's ambitious novel Helm, which tells stories from the perspective of the only named wind in the British Isles. The Helm is a strong northeasterly gale that blows down the slopes of Cross Fell in the Pennines, known for dislodging roofs, haystacks, trees, and riders from horses. Twenty years in the writing, the book spans centuries, featuring a Neolithic tribeswoman and seer called NaNay building a stone circle, an astrologer and exorcist known as a “wizard priest,” a Victorian meteorologist traveling by train and carriage into Helm's “onslaught,” and a climatologist measuring microplastics from an observation hut in the fells.
Narration and Style
Brealey, who has previously narrated Hall's The Wolf Border and Burntcoat, adeptly handles the novel's vast scope, lyrical prose, and sharp shifts in style and tone. She teases out playful and poetic moments while reveling in flashes of coarseness. Hall describes Helm as a slippery, shapeshifting phenomenon, hard to visualize but compelling: “Imagine a skater launching off a quarter pipe two-thousand feet high, then somersaulting. Again. And again. And again.”
Further Listening
Whistler by Ann Patchett, read by the author, follows a fiftysomething English teacher who recognizes her former stepfather Eddie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe blends true crime and social history, unraveling a teenager's death by falling into the River Thames.
