The British have a peculiar, borderline hysterical relationship with the wind. Chalk it up to some admixture of folklore and superstition, meteorological anxiety, national in-jokes, and, as with most things there, imperial nostalgia and its attendant emasculations. (As a Brit, I’m allowed to indulge in this stereotyping.) Fishermen still decline to whistle at sea for fear of stirring storms; residents of Dungeness in Kent are said to be “disturbed,” owing to constant bombardment and lack of shelter from the squall; and going out without a jacket on a particularly windy day is a common display of Blitz spirit stoicism, putting the hairs, as it were, on one’s stiff upper lip. On October 15^th 1987, the BBC’s weather forecaster, Michael Fish, told millions that it would be “very windy,” but, as for reports that there was a hurricane on the way, “don’t worry, there isn’t!” The Great Storm killed eighteen people overnight. Never mind that it wasn’t technically a hurricane; we now call any prediction that turns out dramatically wrong a “Michael Fish moment,” and the phenomenon of forecasting a worst-case scenario to hedge one’s bets the “Michael Fish effect.” A clip of his infamous bulletin was included as part of a montage for the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, installed as a strange, proud feature of the national mythos. After adopting the American practice of naming storms in 2015, the UK has started anthropomorphizing what here in the US would probably qualify as strong breezes with quaint, British-coded monikers: Doris, Nigel. “Storm Eunice,” someone might say, “has absolutely fucked my wheelie bins.”

Strange, then, that Britain—unlike, for example, France, with its mistral, Marin, and Tramontane—has only one named wind: the Helm, a strong north-easterly wind that hits the southwest slopes of Cross Fell, the highest point of the Pennines, in Cumbria. This is a Katabatic wind (that is, it flows downhill) and is accompanied by a distinctive crested dome cloud and slender roll of whirling “bar cloud” when it hits, usually in late winter or early spring. English novelist Sarah Hall grew up in the vicinity of Cross Fell, in the fantastically named Vale of Eden, and has, she’s said in interviews, been preoccupied by writing a work of fiction in some way about this wind for over twenty years. The result is Helm, an ambitious, polyvocal, deeply researched and felt novel that isn’t about the Helm so much as it seeks to be animated by it.

Helm’s experimental gambit is to situate the wind itself as a sentient, genderless narrator, possessed of an anthropological gaze cast towards this “little island,” and Cumbria in particular. Opening well before the evolution of humans to catalogue the emergence of Helm’s consciousness, the novel pursues a cosmic perspective on an intently local matrix, spanning thousands of years and operating at no less than the scale of “[c]omet, ash cloud, mass extinction, redo.” Yet if this interest in geologic timescales and the weather of the British Isles sounds austere or forbidding, Helm (and Helm) is instead often funny, too, fond of wordplay, absurdisms, dirty jokes.

Existence is boring for Helm before humans appear on the scene. Once they do, they become reciprocally interested: “Cue, afterwards, lots of identity politics, superstitions, bonkers rituals and boffin theories about Helm… Helm doesn’t care which story is true. So long as there is Helm.” Alongside a vatic, all-seeing impulse, Helm admits to vanity, neediness, voyeurism––as all good self-conscious, winking narrators ought to—with a particular fondness for watching people have sex, including “the first-ever act of the mile high club” in a hot air balloon. Some nicknames for Helm include “Cap Pincher,” “Auld Nick’s stripper” and the “Dutty skirt lifter.” The Psalms and the Quran both equate winds with angels as God’s messengers. God’s messenger this puckish, perverted Helm is manifestly not, perhaps fitting more closely to how Greeks saw winds as boisterous and rebellious deities shut up in the caverns of the Aeolian Islands.

It’s somewhat of a relief that Helm’s narratorial voice goes missing for stretches of the novel; I don’t think it would be sustainable over 350 pages. Some of the book’s sixty chapters could be described as stories in which wind merely plays a role. Helm might frame a story-like chapter in a first sentence, provide the sort of aerial perspective on the events that the style requires, but then disappear in a wisp. It’s always around, though, diaphanous and Fortuna-like.

The novel’s sixty or so chapters feature a sprawling cast of Cumbrian characters who’ve had dealings with the Helm. We have, roughly chronologically (deep breath): NaNay, a young neolithic Shaman or seer, who, as she grows older and becomes the leader of her tribe, wants to erect a “magstone,” Stonehenge-style. The tribe listen to Helm “splintering and shredding the valley, its voice mourning its own violence.” You get vivid descriptions of eclipses, skinning bears, babies who don’t “live to naming,” storms, discussions of “anma” (a cosmic lifeforce), general pagan-ness. (One might situate NaNay’s section in a contemporary strain of ancient-futurist fiction, like Missouri Williams’s The Doloriad, or Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String, wherein the neolithic and the postapocalyptic are difficult to distinguish.) Then, Michael Lang––strangely sharing a name with the creator of the Woodstock Festival––a medieval exorcist, “astrologer to kings” or wizard-priest, who wants to build an enormous carved crucifix to carry to the top of the Fell. Epistolary sections framed as written by an isolated eighteenth-century woman, Catherine, to her sister Beatrice, largely concerning her husband Nathaniel. A group of children, born into the slum that grows up around the railway following the Great Reform Act. Thomas Bodger (“Bodge to the Society Chaps, Tombo to his wife”), a Victorian polymath-inventor who wants to build a rather steampunk-sounding “Revelation Machine” that will capture Helm’s spirit, like a “windy séance.” Janni Calder, a 1960s schoolgirl with schizophrenia and an abusive “Mammy,” = who seems to be able to talk to Helm and makes offerings of trinkets in return for its protection. (Helm loves “trinkets,” offering as they do a sense of nature outlasting humans by centuries or millennia.)  Then there’s Jude, a Thatcher-hating pilot trained to fly during storms to collect data for the Met Office, and his wife Ange. And, finally, Dr Selima Sutar, a sort of vaguely hippy cloud pollution analyst from the Black Country, who’s on secondment at a golf-ball-shaped field station in the Vale of Eden partly to research pollution and climate change, partly to stop “feeling other feelings” from the end of her engagement. Selima is unsuccessfully quitting smoking, noting the irony of “adding her own share of toxic crap to the atmosphere.” She texts friends bemoaning her students’ use of AI, the microplastics and airborne polymers in the wind. There’s a suggestion of her radical former supervisor having fallen afoul of a Spy Cops-style infiltration twenty years previously. Now, Selima is dealing with the Endtrepeneurs, a shadowy group of possibly climate-deniers, possibly “right-wing incels,” or perhaps Christian apocalypse accelerationists who see mitigations of climate catastrophe as inimical to God’s plan, messaging her gnomic, ominous portents like, “We are the guardians of true heavenly knowledge. You are one of the fallen and not worthy of your place in Eden.”

Helm cycles quickly through each of the book’s discrete strands and then brings them back, in a sort of discombobulating spiral. As Helm thinks at one point: “It is all so antic…This beguiling soap opera, the unexalted congregation worshiping below Helm’s mountain.” Some single-page chapters feature medieval woodcuts, a police report, inventories, outsider artworks, diagrams, maps, equations. Rhythmically, there’s continuity across the novel’s many narrative voices, but the wealth of period-specific details gives each a distinct sound, as does the range of technical vocabularies: libations, geology, flora, climatological instruments, and methodologies.

“Helm is an ambitious, polyvocal, deeply researched and felt novel that isn’t about the Helm so much as it seeks to be animated by it.”

The gale-force speed of Helm’s sweep, the cacophony of its historical momentum, frequently threatens to knock the novel sideways. Occasionally, the novel tries to say too much and too little at once, as though fudging a more complex line it’s trying to tread. “It’s complicated,” the novel concedes. “Hard to put Helm’s fingers on it.” Sometimes this leads to outright sentimentality (“Whoever loves us, do they love us when they no longer remember us?”); sometimes, its results read like lyrics rejected from OK Computer for excessive cuteness: “Helm isn’t feeling Helmself, actually…Something has definitely got into Helm––a feeling of helplessness, of fin-de-siècle melancholy, Information Age malaise, overload, elegy maybe… Wars, pandemics… Would give anyone the ick.” Yet, just as the novel begins tipping over, it gets stabilized or righted, as if Hall has, at the last second, shifted weight windward to ballast a boat. More often than not, what stabilizes the novel is a Selima section, which provides the kind of conspiracy-thriller plot that restores impetus, or a Helm-narrated part, for its technical novelty and ability to toggle between or synthesize chronologies.

Helm’s looming presence raises a question of power that is for the most part productively unresolved: who or what, humankind or the elements, is in control? When the novel reaches the climate catastrophe of the present day, that shifts: “Helm isn’t killing Helmself, of course; Helm doesn’t have a choice in Helm’s downfall… It seems human time is Helm’s time after all.” Hall’s Helm offers an appropriately chaotic, confusing, melancholic vision of where we now stand relative to nature, entangled or caught somewhere between Fish’s “don’t worry, it isn’t!” and full-on climate doomerism. “The politics of weather––it’s nothing short of a superstorm these days,” Selima thinks.

Humanity’s power over the natural world isn’t presented as absolute, however. Helm’s characters are unfailingly convinced of the rightness of their plans to delimit, capture, “extinguish,” or honour the wind, assuming that they stand in some extraordinary relation to it, but most suffer varying levels of defeat, whether spectacular or more ambiguous. (“Such is human history––its past and future––gloriously imagined, occasionally heroic, often anticlimactic.”) Ultimately, Helm is a “tale of the tribe,” as Ezra Pound called his own “poem containing history,” a kind of encyclopedia, one aiming to be adequate to the needs of its day and grounded in place. Or, as Bodge puts it in Helm, “not weather study, exactly,” but rather a “boggling anthropology.”