Friday, August 03, 2018

Reading group: Harvest by Jim Crace

Some plot spoilers.

Clare suggested this historical novel about a rural English community that has been peaceably conducting subsistence farming under the benign supervision of a manorial landlord but is suddenly threatened with a new owner and enclosure for sheep farming managed for his own profit. It is told from the first-person viewpoint of Walter Thirsk, a relative newcomer who arrived in the village with the current landlord, Master Kent, when the land fell to Master Kent's now deceased wife, but who, on falling in love with a village girl (also now deceased), left his master's service to embed himself in the community.

Thus Crace creates a narrator with a two-fold perspective - a keen, somatic insight into the lives and perspectives of the villagers and an objectivity and insight that they in their rural innocence cannot have into the seismic historical changes about to engulf them.

It's an atmospheric novel, opening with what seem like smoke signals of doom: smoke from a newly-erected hut just outside the boundary of the village - which, ironically, will turn out to have been erected by a family ejected themselves from land newly enclosed - and from Master Kent's stables, a fire for which the newcomers will be blamed. Thus begins a series of tragic events that will end in the total destruction and evacuation of the village.

Clare said she found it an engrossing read, and most people agreed with her. There are vivid descriptions of the village and countryside that make the place almost tangibly real, and at the same time a down-to earth linguistic pithiness. What John and I found most impressive was the rhythm of the prose: there was a fluidity binding together all the elements - events and themes - and a propulsion that not only kept you reading but also created a sense of the unstoppable, formally enacting the theme of inevitable change.

People were struck by the novel's theme of contrasting and relative perspectives. The first sign of the coming change is the appearance during the harvest of a man dressed in town clothes, watching and writing things down with a quill - he will turn out to have been sent by the cousin of Master Kent's dead wife, who is now claiming the land. Walter Thirsk, having burned his hand in helping to put out the fire in Master Kent's stables and being therefore temporarily unable to do farm work, is assigned as his assistant as he surveys and maps the land. Thirsk is shocked and taken by the new perspective on the village afforded by 'Mr Quill' 's map - a completely new way of looking at it and experiencing it. He is also shocked by Quill's desire to name its parts - its fields etc - in descriptive or romantic ways rather than simply according to their use, and more generally by his romantic-aesthetic view of the landscape, which is divorced from its gritty realities. However, Thirsk remembers that this is how he too once viewed it as a newcomer from the town himself, and towards the end, when it becomes clear he is going have to leave the village, he is able to see it in that light again.

The group were a little puzzled by what seemed like some moral ambiguity. Master Kent spends most of the novel as a sympathetic character: he has been a benign landlord; he is impotent against his wife's cousin's claim on the land and is cowed by him; he appears to be crucified by the cousin's horrific effects on the villagers. (It is true that he keeps doves that steal the harvest gleanings, but the impression is that he does so in innocence, and he does have the two strangers blamed for the fire put in the stocks although their crime hasn't been proved, but then this seems naive adherence to custom). Yet when he rides away with the cousin, village women and a child accused by the cousin of witchcraft following on foot and tethered to horses, Thirsk, watching from a hilltop, sees Master Kent and the cousin amiably chatting and laughing as they ride. And Thirsk himself, too, seems morally ambiguous: after all, he has looked to his own safety above all else - understandably, perhaps, because, once the villagers are inflamed and incited to violence, his outsider status comes back to haunt him and is a danger to him. On reflection, it seems to me that these things are intended as sad but inevitable morally ambiguous consequences in a situation where people find themselves at the mercy of unstoppable and capitalistic historical forces.

People wondered in which century the story was meant to take place (the English countryside underwent enclosure from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries) and where in England. Neither of these things is stated. Some assumed it to be the earlier period, as the village was so very primitive and isolated. Others thought later, since isolated pre-enclosure rural communities stayed the same for centuries, and felt that some of the hints about town life smacked of the eighteenth century. The descriptions for me very much conjured southern England, but then some of the characters' names sounded Northern to me, in particular of course Thirsk. I think the uncertainty is the point: Jim Crace is famous for creating mythic places and situations that exist outside real-life geography and time (and although people in the group marvelled at the seeming accuracy of his research here, is also famous for saying that he doesn't rely on research but makes things up for his own fictive ends). What he does is create a dream into which one can interpolate oneself, and his novels are nearly always allegories of trends in our own time. Master Kent stands with Walter Thirsk surveying the land:
'This land,' he says, gesturing, 'has always been much older than ourselves.' ... this ancient place would soon be new, he wants to say. We're used to looking out and seeing what's preceded us, and what will outlive us. Now we have to contemplate a land bare of both ... we'll look across these fields and say, 'This land is so much younger than ourselves.'
A situation in which people are exiled by capitalist forces from homes they thought would last forever is both historically universal and crucially characteristic of our own global world.

John pointed out that much of the action takes place off-stage, due in the main to Walter Thirsk's removal from things because of his burnt hand. An interesting effect of this is that Thirsk, having to imagine scenes and fill in the blanks, keeps attributing better motives to people than they turn out to have, which creates dramatic irony and which I found poignant. John, however, said it made the novel rather dull for him. Pulled on by the rhythm, he was engrossed as he read, but he said he admired the book (finding it in fact very clever) rather than enjoyed it. He also said that, vivid as the details of the countryside were, he felt that they were rather coolly and even academically presented, in comparison to, say, those of Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13 (discussed here) where they carried a strong emotive charge. Ann, who had not said anything so far, now said that she was afraid that she hadn't like the book at all. She had found Walter Thirsk's 'eighteenth-century' register entirely fake and frequently interspersed with anachronistic modernisms - quite unlike the unique register devised by Francis Spufford for Golden Hill (discussed here) which felt entirely eighteenth-century-authentic and accessible at the same time. (I had noticed one or two modernisms in Harvest, which had brought me up short.) And because she had been very busy with other things, Ann had lost patience and given up on the book.

Clare now said something with which everyone else who had read the book agreed: that, engrossing as it had been as you read, in the end it trails away. The action reaches a climax which is then followed by a long hiatus in which Thirsk gets high and then ill on mushrooms, which not only seems out of character but holds up the action, dispelling the narrative tension, and which we suspected was merely an authorial stratagem to keep him out of the way while the final events, which he would otherwise have prevented, play out.

And that was the note on which we ended: a good read (for most of us) that disappointingly 'fizzles out'.


Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here.

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