Bucolic certainties crushed under hoof

ON one level at least, Harvest is the most English of Jim Crace's 11 novels.

The Harvest Wagon by Thomas Gainsborough

ON one level at least, Harvest is the most English of Jim Crace's 11 novels. It engages more directly with the notion of Englishness and the various ways it permeates place than do any of his previous works.

Yet, as with most of his fiction, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where or when it is set.

Geography and history are central to Crace's imaginative take on the world, to the extent that he is often referred to as a "landscape novelist".

But his landscapes, and their stories, are connected only tenuously to times and places we know as real. For every familiar landfall he provides, there is a seismic drift into the strangely dislocated and indeterminate place that has come to be known as "Craceland".

Whether it's the invented Continent of his 1986 debut novel, the dystopian medieval future of The Pesthouse (2007) or the cusp of a richly imagined Bronze Age in The Gift of Stones (1988), Craceland is an unsettled and unsettling place to visit, not least because of the mistaken assumption that it's a place one knows. Even with the ostensibly real English harbour town in Signals of Distress (1994), or the Judean desert town of Qumran in Quarantine (1997), Crace is less concerned with reporting reality than with exploring the dynamics of change in communities in a state of transition.

Harvest is set in an isolated pre-industrial English village so closed to the outside world that anyone who is not blood is married to someone else who is. During the seven days of what will be the village's final harvest, Crace creates, in intimate detail, an entire way of life that is tied inextricably to the agrarian cycle, and then chillingly dismantles it.

It's a remarkable achievement, not only the portrayal of a stricken and increasingly fearful community ruled by "reap and gossip", but the voice Crace brings to the lost villages that haunt Britain's landscape.

His account of the ruin of a single, unnamed village crystallises the devastating consequences of the "dream of the golden hoofs" and England's transition from agriculture to sheep farming. In effect, it marks the end of the pastoral idyll and the notion of the common weal it nurtured.

Elderly widower Walter Thirsk, a relative newcomer to the village, recounts the growing unease that accompanies the portentous arrival of three displaced travellers on the outskirts of the settlement. Fear and ignorance ensure rapid retribution is served for supposed wrongs attributed to the hapless refugees, though the villagers have more to fear from inside than from anything the outside world might deliver.

The allegorical potential is there, and in some ways Crace can be likened to William Golding, but the novel is driven as much by plot and language as metaphor.

Thirsk is in service to Master Kent, the beneficent lord of the manor who recognises that the fruits of the soil belong to those who toil it. All share in its bounty whether the season is lean or plentiful and each knows their assigned role in a world where every thought and action is tied to the land. To leave the village is to be disowned. To invite outside influences is to risk the bucolic certainties of a way of life that has sustained the village since beyond memory.

Crace's closed world is complacent and dangerously fearful. Magic and sorcery are as real as fire and smoke. The rough cross of the pillory is defence enough against evil in a village where church and clergy are strangely absent.

For the novelist, of course, place is less to do with geography than language, and Crace is masterful in his richly poetic evocation of a vanished world.

His villagers winnow and flake. They juke and thatch. Ruddocks and dunnocks glean the cut barley fallen between the harvest and the stackyard. Pigs scour the forest for pannage. The archaic language of the fields reclaims its currency in Crace's hands and there is something mesmeric about the measured rhythms of his sentences that, at times, read like blank verse.

Crace has acknowledged the influence of the spoken word on his prose, claiming the vocabulary enriches the idea. If there are times when it leans towards indulgence and the narrative drops its pace, Crace is quick to bring it back on track. The search for the errant Mistress Beldam, the persecuted and dangerously vengeful outsider, provides much of the drama, but the real drive comes from within the manor.

Master Kent has engaged the services of the pale and malformed Mister Quill, who spends his time redrawing the known world by mapping the Common Land in exquisite colour on his vellum charts.

His purpose, and complicity, becomes clear with the arrival of Master Jordan, cousin to Master Kent and rightful heir to the manor and all its holdings.

With him comes the rule of Law, as alien to the villagers as the idea that a hedgerow might enclose a field, or that the natural order of sowing and reaping might be disturbed by something as foolish as a sheep.

The utter desolation witnessed by Walter Thirsk as the two narratives collide is no less devastating for its inevitability. This is Crace at his best, writing with deep poetic insight about the end of one world and the beginning of another, and about an England we might have thought we knew.

Harvest
By Jim Crace
Picador, 320pp, $39.99 (HB), $27.99 (PB)

Liam Davison is a Melbourne-based novelist and critic.