For the setting of Harvest, [Crace] has chosen an uncertain century — in both senses of that phrase. Crace’s narrator, Walter Thirsk, inhabits an agrarian community, a village that time seems to have forgotten, sealed against the wider world. Sealed, that is, until the novel’s opening scenes, when covetous, irruptive forces begin to smash through those barriers … Crace writes with a particular, haunting empathy for the displaced. Indeed, displacement doubles as his theme and as his storytelling strategy. By transposing contemporary anxieties onto distant times he allows us to feel them afresh. To say as much is not to pigeonhole him as an abstract or formulaic writer: his plots may be epic, but his sentences carry a sensual charge.
The novel begins with a pair of threats: two plumes of smoke, the first a sign of newcomers and the second of a fire at the master's hay loft. Both are harbingers of trouble, particularly once the new arrivals are blamed for the conflagration at the stable and given a week in public pillory … As with Crace's other novels, Harvest is deftly written, in language — formal, slightly archaic even — that reflects the setting it describes. It's also tightly plotted; less than a week passes from the moment smoke is sighted until the book's fateful outcome, and yet once underway, we have the sense that everything is inevitable. From the newcomers to Edmund Jordan, Master Kent's cousin by marriage who has come to lay claim to the manor and its lands, the village is under siege, but nowhere more, Crace wants us to understand, than from itself.
Its infuriating lack of temporal or geographical signposts suggests a fable—but without any of that genre’s sly moral gravity. Yet nor is this a druid-punk cousin to Crace’s more inventive works, for despite the villagers’ fear of ‘witchery,’ the supernatural is a rather tame beast in Harvest. The story is not so much simple as it is ploddingly plain. It is actually a little hard to describe, so absent is any kind of propulsive force … Far more compelling are the lamentably rare first-person plural sections dealing with human dread, which—if I try to discern some intention from the novel—I am fairly certain Crace had aimed to explore … As Thirsk says toward the end of this unsatisfying novel, ‘I have survived to tell the tale, although there’s not much of a tale to tell.’ That, I fear, is precisely the problem.
...a historical novel that takes place outside history … Walter’s origin in another part of the world shows up the (almost literal) lack of signposts as a formal decision on the author’s part, rather than a psychological truth about lives without the experience of travel. The idea of a settlement without a name, undefined by any relationship with city, diocese, neighbouring town or even county, is a suggestive novelistic starting-point by virtue of its very bareness, but a formula like ‘the place where I and Master Kent had lived before’ just sounds coy … A lot of unobtrusive work is done in the opening pages. The newcomers attempting to establish a homestead are themselves refugees from enclosure, and the way they are treated by the villagers is a portent of how things are likely to go for those who are moved on. We know what this means already. Not well.
Walter Thirsk, the narrator, tells his story in rhythmical, incantatory prose, clearly not contemporary but not inflexibly antiquated either. Readers of Crace's previous novels will expect Walter's startling way with metaphor: a midnight storm ‘enamelling’ puddles; air that is ‘stewed’; a woman's ‘finchy’ voice. They will also be unsurprised to find a good deal of specialist vocabulary and may wonder, Crace being famous for playful inventions, what terms among ruddock, longpurple, eringe, pippinjay, sorehock and suffingale are genuine … This is a novel with plenty of incident but little drama, creating its considerable power, instead, through Walter's mesmerising narrative. At the end, it may not be too fanciful to conflate Walter and Crace, as the narrator steps out of bounds and says farewell to a way of life.
Crace paints a beautiful Brueghel-like canvas of the harvest. It is the one season of the year when the whole village comes together to reap; and together they work – the women binding the sheaves, the old men making lines of stooks, the children helping, the strong men swinging ‘their sickles and their scythes at the brimming cliffs of stalk.’ As they do so, they indulge in lewd gossip and banter. We, the readers, share their sense of kinship and dread the interlopers … One of the most brilliant things about the plot of Harvest is that it is like an envelope gradually turning itself inside out. We seem to be reading about a tightly knit group of insiders (‘the paltry fifty-eight’) being threatened by outsiders. But there is no such certainty. Our narrator, the honest, wistful Walter Thirsk, the clever peasant, is eventually turned loose in the world.
A world so carefully marked between out and in, us and them — where each spring ‘we bump our children’s heads against the boundary stones, so that they’ll not forget where they and all of us belong’ — is in the process of being turned inside out. The whole terrible story, entirely absorbing, has been a subplot in the larger narrative of progress, as town, in the person of a new master, encroaches on village, and the old deep ways of farming are displaced by sheep. All told and slowly understood by Walter, himself an outsider up to 10 or so years ago (a blink of the eye in this world), the story holds us in suspense with its minute and exquisite observation of every particular until, like the unsuspecting villagers, we are let go, left to contemplate ‘wherever is awaiting us.’
Crace’s latest novel, the outwardly unassuming yet surreptitiously thought-provoking Harvest, is a moral fable that takes place during one of England’s intermittent enclosure movements when title holders to shared land, or ‘commons,’ fenced it off and evicted the peasants who farmed it. Harvest, narrated in the present tense by Walter Thirsk, one such peasant farmer, is set against the backdrop of a rise in the wool trade that impels landowners to convert their farms into sheep pastures … The two story lines’ linchpin is Walter, whom Crace endows with compassion and a contemplative demeanor. Walter is also remarkably eloquent, which enlivens his descriptions of everything from emotional turmoil to flora and fauna, but strains credibility … Crace generally avoids letting characters slip into caricaturesque embodiment of larger phenomena, a frequent occurrence in parables. And in lending itself to metaphor, Harvest attains a haunting and almost subversive quality.
Walter is well-tuned to be this story's narrator. As a relatively well-educated widower who's sidelined from work because of a hand injury, all he can do is watch. And Walter, via Crace, is a fine observer. One of the pleasures of Harvest is the degree of precision with which Crace imagines this small town, from its sexual peccadillos to its justice system to its (broken) leadership to its bad habits … So if Harvest is an allegory, what is it an allegory of? Take your pick: Terrorism, prejudice, insularity. Encroaching technology is Crace's greatest concern, though, especially the way it reshapes our very thinking.
This brooding tale opens innocently enough. ‘Two twists of smoke at a time of year too warm for cottage fires surprise us at first light,’ Walter observes. One comes from a strangers' encampment, the other from the village lord's dovecote, maliciously set alight. The fires will have dreadful consequences, but Crace lets the machinery of tragedy idle while he describes the nature of each … The novel's soaring drama remains rooted, however, in a landscape that is rhapsodically evoked.
Rarely does language so plainspoken and elemental tell a story so richly open to interpretation on so many different levels. Is this a religious allegory? An apocalyptic fable? A mystery? A meditation on the human condition? With economy and grace, the award-winning Crace gives his work a simplicity and symmetry that belie the disturbances beneath the consciousness of its narrator. It’s a narrative without specifics of time or place, in the countryside of the author’s native England, following a harvest that will prove different than any the villagers have ever experienced, in a locale where, explains the narrator, ‘We do not even have a title for the village. It is just The Village. And it’s surrounded by The Land.’
