Then this Remembrance Day morning I read news of migrants trapped on Europe’s borders, pawns, weapons, canon fodder in a dispute between autocratic, nationalist leaders. How accidentally relevant our class was, I joked! Only that morning did I realize November 9 is the anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall.
On Tuesday, I suggested they think about the three time periods relevant to the novel: the Iron Age society that the “experiential anthropology” class in the novel recreates, building the titular ghost wall to keep out enemies the novel’s setting right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which the characters discuss and 2018, the date of publication, the time of Brexit and Trump’s Wall, which inform the novel’s themes. I’m about to start reading Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall with my first-year fiction students.
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