Harvest – Jim Crace

It is harvest time in the village – no name, location or period is given, but it feels like medieval England – and the tight knit isolated community are due a day off to celebrate ‘gleaning day’ when they can pick up the leftover grains for their personal rather than communal use.

But the villagers wake to see two plumes of smoke rising. One is dark, as produced by new cut green wood, signalling the arrival inside the boundary of strangers, whose roughly made hut and smoking hearth gives them squatter’s rights to stay but does not guarantee a welcome. The second plume though is paler, produced by old dry timber, which draws them to the Master's house where the hay barn and stables are ablaze.

Conclusions are jumped to and the newcomers are confronted, condemned and have punishment meted out; the two men are put in the stocks for a week while their female companion (wife, daughter, sister?) has her lustrous locks shorn.

To add to the unaccustomed turbulence, the Master’s position as landowner is under threat; now a widower, his title through marriage is disputed by a cousin with a bloodline claim. The latter has arrived with new agricultural ideas that need more sheep than men on the land.

The next seven days sees some lives lost and all lives irrevocably changed; a concentrated narrative allegorising the longer term decline of the rural workforce.

That narrative is provided by Walter Thirsk, a newcomer himself many years previous so still somewhat of an outsider. His delivery is spare but lyrical; his measured words rooted in the village – the land itself and the people – drawing the reader into the village microcosm, enclosed but never claustrophobic.

This is every bit as good as the author’s acclaimed “Quarantine”, possibly better with a stronger plot and a more familiar (to me) landscape and period.