Harvest: Man Booker Prize Finalist

This book gave a terrific description of life in Scotland, probably, back in the early 19th Century when feudal farming systems were coming to an end. It was written in the voice of a man who had worked in the city for a wealthy guy and then went with him and his new wife to the country to help manage the wife’s estate. So the narrator is an educated man, but not upper class. He fell in love with one of the peasant women and moved from the manor house to her cottage in the village and began to learn how to do the hard work of farming. Thus he is on the scene to describe the village's involvement in an incident that brings change to everyone from the lord of the manor down to the poorest peasant.I think the author did a wonderful job of tracing the events and the consequences of the people's decisions which lead to more complications until the morality of the situation weighs everyone down and makes everyone culpable in the consequences. I couldn't help but imagine very similar circumstances occurring all over Scotland during the terrible days of "the Clearances", when people who had worked their traditional fields for generations were forced off the land so the owners could more profitably run sheep. The descriptions of the work, the homes, the tools, the pleasures, and the pains of the country people of that era are fascinating and create empathy for their choices and mistakes.Up to a point the story is engrossing and moves quickly, but then the narrator starts to ruminate too much over his feelings for the place, and what his choices are. It bogs down in memories and descriptions and loses track of the characters. I think this was the author’s way of saying good-by to his literary life because he has acknowledged to the world that this is his last book. In the end the narrator walks off to an unknown future, a metaphor for Jim Crace's own situation. His writing career began auspiciously but his later books were not up to the early ones, and, unfortunately, he’s burning his bridges with this one.

This novel is narrated by Walter Thirsk, a farmer on the Jordan Estate somewhere in England. The hamlet where he lives is a day's walk from the nearest church or inn and there are few visitors. The lord of the manor, Master Kent, is kindly. He and Walter were childhood friends and Walter worked as his servant before marrying a local woman and taking up farming. The small village has no name and we are not told the time or specific location, but we are in sixteenth century England as the commons are being enclosed and an ancient way of life is coming to an end.The master's cousin, who has title to the lands, is planning to turn the estate over to sheep farming. From Henry VIII on, the Tudors set up a regime of tariff protection and subsidies to build the wool industry. It is the sort of economic policy that gives modern free trade advocates apoplexy, but it laid the foundation for Britain's wealth over the next few centuries, albeit at a human cost.The novel opens the day after the harvest. Already there are signs of the old settled ways being disturbed. Someone has set fire to the master's stables, a man engaged by the master is mapping the village, and some outsiders have arrived and set up residence. The latter are not welcome - the harvest is meagre enough and the local population has been dwindling because there are too many mouths to feed.The culprits who set the fire are known, except to the master, but the villagers seek to shift the blame to the newcomers. The villagers are also fearful and distrustful of the strange man who is mapping the land and they wonder what he is about. The annual cycle that is just ending - sowing, harvest, gleaning, celebration - has been never-ending for those born and bred here but Walter understands that the old seasonal calendar is coming to an end and that the future will never be the same.The newcomers are punished for the fire but they will seek revenge for the wrongs done to them. The master's cousin arrives with a gang of men and it is clear that radical changes are on the horizon. They take an aggressive stance towards the villagers which leads to confrontation, but how effective can this be in the face of a power most of the villagers cannot comprehend?Walter's wife died and so he is no longer wedded to this place - in both senses of the term. He begins to consider ways out. Could he go into service with the peculiar man doing the mapping, resume his role as servant to Master Kent, or should he try his chances elsewhere? These questions begin to occupy much of his thoughts.More misfortune and violence haunt the village and each household has to make a decision about its future. The ruminations that trouble Walter begin to take hold of everyone. Can the old ways survive or will the village be overwhelmed? The period in which this novel is set saw some of the most profound changes in rural life in England and the human dimension of these changes is explored in this engrossing and atmospheric story.Those with wealth and power do not see the village or its traditions in terms of the social bonds, the seasonal character of the land or the culture that understands and celebrates the world in which it lives. To men with money the village is just a set of material assets, including people, that need to be re-configured in a way that will increase the wealth of a few. As in any age, the rich are ever willing to use threats and violence to get their way. Once you are a slave to greed, seeing people and the world around you as things to be manipulated, then cruelty and force become common sense.The kindly master is seen as weak by his cousin but the villagers wait to see if he will defend their livelihoods or fall into line with the new regime. It will be a test of where his loyalties lie.The descriptions of a long lost rural life, the details of the natural world and the relationships between the villagers are all depicted in rich and eloquent prose. You are quickly drawn into the world that Jim Crace creates and I found the story absorbing. With a small cast in a very small settlement Crace has examined the impact of a momentous period in English history that has echoes even in our modern age. Jim Crace is a prolific author but this is the first novel of his that I have read. I will now be seeking out the others, for this is a great author.

I’ve been reading Jim Crace since Quarantine, a book I really liked. Since then, Crace’s work has been, for me, hits and misses. Harvest, unfortunately, is a miss.Crace’s novels are often light on plot, which is generally not a problem since he is an expert at exploring the interiority of a character. This book, however, has plot. Set in an isolated medieval village at harvest time, the post-work celebrations are interrupted by fires, the arrival of poor strangers who are suspected of the crime, and then the arrival of new landowners who are intent on changing the life of the village, a task made easier by the growing chaos. The problem is, for all the plot Crace brings to bear for a change, it all seems oddly lightweight.Part of this comes from the fact that we never get too far below the surface of events here. Crace tries to bridge the gap for us with Walter Thirsk, or narrator for this tale and the only person we really get to know well. Though he’s lived in the village for over a decade and farmed with the rest, he, too, is an outsider and has connections to the landowners. This gives him (and us) an in on all sides of the story. Still, if the action of the story is not indecipherable, it never gains much meaning for the reader.In the end, I found this novel basically uninteresting. Crace is not the kind of writer who ever generates a lot of excitement in his prose; however, when he’s at his best his precision and depth makes his prose a pleasure. Here, everything comes off as rather flat. It’s not his best work.

Such a well written book. It's sadly about the universal and timeless human reaction to newcomers in a village in times of economic turmoil. We are in an unnamed village at an unknown location in rural England. Inbred village families, family secrets and hidden vices, the village inhabitants close ranks against agricultural changes - their strong bond to land and crops makes us feel sympathy for them. The time period is equally unspecified. The language makes us think that it might be an earlier century but it could be contemporary. The balance in the village community tips over: here come the outsiders, foreign settlers. They stir fear and hate and are made responsible for all the evil of economic change and hardship. The bigotry of village families and their hypocrisy come to life. There is a threat to village harmony: it causes a snowball effect: one incident triggers the next and the next disaster. These are contemporary themes. It is a story that stirs and makes us reflect. The author well deserves the prize he was awarded. Snow BeachSnow Beach

This is the second Jim Crace novel that I've read (the first one being Quarantine) and I feel Crace is a superb writer - lyrical and poetic with undertones of threat and evil, and brilliant on the depiction of landscape and season. Harvest is a haunting, ominous and very interesting tale set in the past, about a way of life that had endured for centuries in a particular remote village in the English countryside. In the space of one week, this whole tradition and life style is catastrophically overturned. Crace's novel captures everyday realties of these farming people - the harshness and joys of peasant life which at the start of the tale will seemingly persist in perpetuity.... but it's not to be. This is a massive rupture for the villagers involved, and one that may be hard for us to fully comprehend, as most modern life is filled with change and adaptation unlike the greater constancies and certainties of our ancestors. The story is told from the perspective of a man, "Walter", who has lived in the village for many years but who was not born there and who, when he first arrived, was not a farmer. Accommodated, but not fully incorporated, as a native, Walter desperately wants acceptance but at the same time stands a little apart and prizes his position as an observer. He wants to have his cake and eat it (a very human trait), and like almost everyone else in the book (apart from the characters Mr Quill/Earle and Kitty Goss and her friend) he is very much looking after his own interests and survival in what becomes an explosive and dangerous situation. He is acutely aware of his moral failure to act while the tragedy is playing out, and once the crisis has begun to negatively resolve he makes a defiant, empty gesture. Survive Walter does, to tell the tale, but where the future will take him we are left wondering. I like this book very much indeed, although I am not sure as yet whether it will stay with me in the same impactful way that Quarantine has, although it may well do.

Rarely has the cliché of never judge a book by the cover applied so richly to Jim Crace's supposed final novel. In Harvest, not only is Crace preparing to herd the sheep in his rural idyll, he's already pulling the wool over most readers' eyes. For all its pretence, it's easy to come away believing this is simply an historical romp with a bit of witchcraft, serfs and lords and an evolving countryside sometime whenever. It is but it really isn't.And so to its cover. Harvest is a simple tale of a short time in a village being wrenched from its past; a society falling apart both from within and without. Crace abandons his usual erudite prose for a style that is altogether more luxurious and poetic. It certainly will not be a style that reads easily for some and even for Crace's biggest fans it may be laborious and overly flowery. Treacle and wading come to mind, though it is high literary and a task in itself to keep it all up. So no this is not typical Crace and he knows it.Great books have the ability to shock and surprise. That turning point, crime fiction aside, when one realises not quite whodunit but whydunit. Crace pulls the master stunt. This reviewer at least had the moment within the last few pages; that here we have Crace's story, Crace's journey into retirement. Read carefully and the clues are there. The narrator who is never present at the events, the quill plotter of space and time, the muse destructive and just out of reach but still tangible, the order the chaos, the reaping of sustenance from the barren, the vellum the blank page.... find the others for yourself. Any arguments about time and place, when smoking pipes was invented or the feudal system began or ended or any other historical accuracies are puerile. Sure Crace wanted a sound setting but it's a cover, a big green woolly cover.So, read Harvest as you wish. But it is pure allegory rather than medieval fields that Crace ploughs and it becomes all the more enlivened and dynamic when hauled out of any historical drama into Crace's real heart as he says goodbye.Fascinating and so much better than the superficial bare bones of this book relay.

Exquisitely written, this haunting tale of what happens within a week to a farming village when three strangers intrude on this closed community reveals much about human nature and its darker impulses.Crace's protagonist, Walter Thirsk, is an unreliable narrator of the events that lead the village's unravelling. That Thirsk is conveniently absent from some of the pivotal events often renders his point of view mere conjecture, and subject to rearrangement. The reader is never sure if things really happened the way he tells it. Add to that his penchant for village lore and belief in the supernatural, his interpretation of events is often preternatural. For example, Thirsk 'helpfully' sees the connections in the chain of events: "It feels as if some impish force has come out of the forest in the past few days to see what pleasure it can take in causing turmoil in a tranquil place."When the strangers are captured and apprehended for suspected arson, and more mysterious events follow, the mercenary Master Jordan, a blood-cousin of the village head Master Kent's late wife, instigates a witch hunt that drives a wedge between the villagers, and loyalties are sorely tested. Thirsk's precarious position in the community soon comes to the fore. He was not born there, having come to the village not 12 years ago, and is not fair-headed like most of the inhabitants, whose forefathers had rooted themselves in the land since days of yore. That Thirsk had been something of Master Kent's right hand man of old, and yet not quite now on familiar terms, also adds to his sense of displacement. Neither is he close to his nearest neighbour, ("John and I do not put up our feet at each other's hearths"), and though he has a part-time affair with a widow, it is merely physical and he forms no real connection with anyone. In the midst of it all, Thirsk's immense isolation becomes apparent to the reader, and his bumbling narrative only arouses pity.The simplicity of the agrarian society is rather aptly captured in the lyricism of Crace's prose, which comes through at every turn in the book. The closeness of nature is unveiled in the elements, and comes alive, for example, in these lines: "It's midnight rain, the sort that in the darkness has no form until it reaches you, until it strikes with the cold and keen insistence of a silver-worker's mallet." When Thirsk contemplates the interior of a neighbour's house that he had never seen, he muses: "It's certain that you cannot tell from how a person works or how a person strolls behind her hens what kind of life they live in secrecy."Brilliant.

I had to read this for an examination and it is not my usual fare but I enjoyed it very much and would urge others to try it though it is a slow read. It is set in the time of the enclosure acts when the old medieval system was being taken over by sheep and less common land; in a rural English village. The main viewpoint is that of an incomer who married a woman from the village and stayed, and is now a widower. The sense of medieval life warts and all at a time of change, is very developed and clearly realised. Crace is a great admirer of William Golding and their style has much in common; the careful development. of a lost world. Though death comes to the village there is no real sense of evil, beyond the heart and feelings of man and many loose ends are deliberately left untied.