Review by New York Times Review
Jim Crace grew up along London's northern perimeter in a housing estate that felt, he has said, like the last building before the countryside began. In one direction stretched an interminably rural England, in the other an interminable metropolis. Through this accident of childhood, Crace developed an edgeland imagination that has powered his writing ever since, attracting him to dramatic showdowns between clashing values. His characters typically face some encroaching, inhospitable new order, as in "Harvest," his glorious new novel, where they must scramble to adapt or be mowed down. The boundary zones that shape Crace's fiction are fabulous rather than realistic. In his 1988 novel "The Gift of Stones," the unimaginable advent of bronze tools throws a complacent Stone Age culture into disarray. "Signals of Distress," published in 1994 and set on the verge of England's Industrial Revolution, centers on a wrecked sailing ship that becomes an allegory for an old order run aground. In a later novel, "Being Dead," the action teeters between the living and the dead as two zoologists, murdered on a beach, play host to an ecosystem of scavenging biota, creating a fecund afterlife that Crace summons in absorbingly macabre detail. To describe "Harvest" as another novel of social decomposition might suggest that Crace is a writer who repeats himself. Far from it. While his imagination feeds off tumultuous change, he roams so widely across epochs and cultures that his 11 novels feel infinitely various. For the setting of "Harvest," he 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. The first harbinger of chaos is a rare visitor, a stranger who appears on the final day of the barley harvest. Arriving unarmed, the man brings with him no obvious aura of violence, but nonetheless he provokes unease. The villagers call him Mr. Quill, after the manner of his enterprise: "We mowed with scythes; he worked with brushes and with quills. He was recording us, he said, or more exactly marking down our land. . . . He tipped his drawing board for anyone that asked and let them see the scratchings on his chart, the geometrics that he said were fields and woods, the squares that stood for cottages, the ponds, the lanes, the foresting. . . . We could not help but stare at him and wonder, without saying so, if those scratchings on his board might scratch us too, in some unwelcome way." The smiling surveyor quietly sizes up the territory, clearing the path for a resource grab. Here and throughout "Harvest," the action feels at once historically remote and uncannily contemporary. Crace recounts the unsettling of the countryside through enclosure, that fencing off and private seizure of resources its champions euphemistically called "improvements." But this historical plot echoes with the disparities of our own age - the new enclosures brought about by merciless globalization and the widening chasm between the mega-wealthy and the dispossessed. Crace is too subtle a writer to make such partial analogies explicit, but this hint of currency gives his novel a keener edge. While chronicling the bewilderment brought on by cataclysmic change, Crace refuses to sentimentalize the old order of the imperiled village. He weighs the loss, yet remains alive to the hazards of a closed society. "It makes sense in such a distant place as this," Thirsk observes, "where there is little wealth and all our labors are spent on putting a single meal in front of us each day, to be protective of our modest world and fearful for our skinny lives." Yet such protectiveness can quickly topple into xenophobia. When a fire razes the manor stable and the dovecote, it's unclear whether an accident or arson is to blame. But a mob mentality quickly surfaces: the villagers h¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿nt for strangers, scapegoated for the felony of difference. Thirsk, a 12-year resident of the area, suddenly becomes suspect. In times of quiet plenty, he can almost pass as a native, but when tumult comes his assimilation is deemed insufficient. Through isolation and suspicion, the aging village has entered a slow spiral of inbred decline. Both main characters - Thirsk and his landlord, Master Kent - are widowers. Wandering in his master's mansion, Thirsk is reminded of "how melancholy these great rooms can be, especially when there are no dogs or children to misuse them." In its procreative obsessions, "Harvest" belongs to the resilient European tradition of the inheritance plot, since Kent has rendered his village vulnerable to hostile takeover by failing to sire a son. In its poetry of the precarious hereafter, "Harvest" calls to mind J. M. Coetzee's finest and most allegorical novel, "Waiting for the Barbarians." Like Coetzee, Crace asks large questions: How will ordinary people behave when ripped from their mundane routines, cut adrift from comforting old verities? What suppressed capacity for cruelty may surface? What untested gift for improvised survival? 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. "I slide my hand across the rough mattressing," a sleepless Thirsk remarks, reaching out for the dependable past, "and find comfort in the hollows where my Cecily has slept (and died), where her shoulders and her hips have left their body ghosts." "Harvest" is shadowed by body ghosts and soon-to-be-ghosted body politics. "I stand at the threshold of the gleaning field," Thirsk tells us, "and wonder what the future has in mind for me." From that threshold, he must adapt to cutthroat times or be scythed down by history. In his compassionate curiosity and his instincts for insurgent uncertainty, Crace surely ranks among our greatest novelists of radical upheaval, a perfect fit for our unstable, unforgiving age.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 8, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
The order and calm of a preindustrial village in England is upset by a mysterious fire and the simultaneous appearance of three strangers. The insular community strikes out against the newcomers but turns on itself in a fit, literally, of witch hunting. As slowly paced as the feudal England in which it is set, this latest by the highly acclaimed Crace, winner of the Man Booker Prize for Quarantine (1998), is a tour de force written in the precise but simple indeed, medieval language of its resident narrator, Walter Thirsk. His eye is keen, his observations insightful, and his fundamental compassion evident as he experiences the passing of his and his community's pastoral quiet. This is a spare, disquieting, unique, and ultimately haunting and memorable little novel. Its limited accessibility may restrict its audience, but followers of literary fiction will be reading and talking about it.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In his previous 10 novels, the versatile Crace has been heralded for his firmly rooted, painstakingly detailed impressions of time and place, and his latest work is no exception. In fact, the setting¿an isolated English farming village, in an unspecified past, with its ¿planched and thicketed¿ inhabitants¿is so imaginatively described that it stands as the book¿s richest character. Over the course of seven days following the harvest, the hamlet is alight with sudden change. A mysterious fire has set Master Kent¿s manor stables and dovecote ablaze. Three newcomers¿two men and an ominously alluring woman¿who arrived that same night are hastily blamed for the fire. All three have their heads shaved as punishment, and the men are shackled for a week to a pillory. When one of them dies and the master¿s favorite horse is later found bludgeoned to death, accusations of witchcraft erupt from within the townsfolk¿s ranks and nothing, not even the secretive Master Kent¿s halfhearted attempt at rooting out the truth and delivering justice, can quell the thirst for revenge that rattles the once principled town to its foundation. Walter Thirsk plays the perfect unreliable narrator; his deliberations about Master Kent¿s true intentions, his neighbors¿ guilt, and his own role in the events deepen an already resonant story. Crace¿s signature measured delivery and deliberate focus create unforgettably poetic passages that quiver with beauty. An electrifying return to form after All That Follows. Agent: David Godwin, DGA, U.K.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Crace (Being Dead) here tells the story of an unnamed English village located out of time. Walter Thirsk, who lives in the village but is not "of" the village, is the narrator, and his rich, lyrical voice draws the reader into this extraordinary novel. Part allegory, part sharp-eyed commentary on the human condition, this work, which was long-listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, finds its match in veteran performer John Keating. His reading is as evocative as Crace's prose. VERDICT This rewarding book is recommended for all listeners.-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 (The Pesthouse, 2007, etc.) 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." In the beginning, the narrator speaks for the community, "bounded by common ditches and collective hopes," yet one where "[t]heir suspicion of anyone who was not born within these boundaries is unwavering." The "they" proves crucial, as the narrator who initially speaks for the collective "we" reveals that he is in fact an outsider, brought to the village 12 years earlier by the man who is the master of the manor, and that he is someone who has become a part of the community, yet remains apart from it. There has been a fire following the harvest, disrupting the seasonal cycle, and although evidence points to three young men within the community, blame falls on two men and a woman who have recently camped on the outskirts. There is also someone making charts of the land and an issue of succession of ownership. There is a sense that this harvest may be the last one for these people, that the land may be converted to different use. "[P]lowing is our sacrament, our solemn oath, the way we grace and consecrate our land," yet that way of life may soon be over. "There isn't one of us--no, them--who's safe," declares the narrator, who must ultimately come to terms with the depths of his solitude. Crace continues to occupy a singular place in contemporary literature.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
