Our first-person guide, widowed Walter Thirsk, arrived in the village as a stranger a dozen years ago. Now he recounts how, over a catastrophic harvest week, other incomers – first a vagrant family uprooted by enclosure from their homes, then a gaggle of sinister gentlemen and strong-arm enforcers – sound a death-knell for the old, collective virtues. They menace ‘a slow-paced commonwealth of habit, custom and routine’. Master Kent, the easy-going, paternal lord of this land, in fact holds no true title to it. His cousin Jordan, rational economist and would-be sheep baron, plots by degrees of force and fraud the coup that will secure his power and ‘throw a halter round our lives’.
The Crace style possesses a blazing clarity of vision, passionate microscopic observation and an untiring swing and spring of rhythm. One could set whole paragraphs as almost-regular iambic verse. This may sound affected, but Crace’s excavations of English pastoral mode involve its prose – and poetry – as much as its beasts, its tackle and its tools. Few writers can match him for pin-sharp specificity in his rapt close-ups of rural life, from the nocturnal scents of the village (‘The bread-and-biscuit smell of rotting wood. The piss-and-honey tang of apple trees’) to the rank midden of lowland ‘Turd and Turf’ which serves as boneyard and latrine. Yet the village’s unanchored quality matters hugely – even though the visiting map-maker ‘Mr Quill’ seeks to sketch and shape it into a place ripe for reason, and for business.
Where are we, and when? Details of clothes, crops and rituals leave a centuries-wide window. But for all its timeless, folk-tale qualities, this village has a solid location. From Tudors to Victorians, land enclosure in England enacted, county-by-county and field-by-field, the ‘tragedy of the commons’, as private interests claimed control of resources once responsibly shared by all. In England’s case, the sheep ate up the men (Thomas More’s words in Utopia (1516)). So Harvest takes place nowhere, and everywhere at the same time. Around the world, this kind of appropriation still happens in many different accents. Crace’s incandescent visit to a near-mythical Deep England – in a style quite as hallucinatory as the effects of the ‘fairy-caps’ his characters munch – results in a story both topical, and global. This English novel has deep roots and universal interest. Please to read it.
256 pages in Vintage paperback edition
ISBN 978-0307278975
Jim Crace