Harvest By Jim Crace,
Picador, Rs 599

What some people have started calling “Craceland” — the fictional universe of Jim Crace’s ten novels and three books of short stories since 1986 — is a peculiarly English commodity. The blurbs describe it as “timeless”, but the costumes and props in Harvest are quite recognizably dated and located, as is the landscape. Historically, its moment might be called Early Modern, but without the academic fustiness evoked by the phrase for the lay, usually British or Anglophile, reader with a nose for the past. The appeal of a novel like this to the contemporary imagination would lie somewhere between the pleasure afforded by those modern-authentic Stratford/BBC productions of Shakespeare and his coevals, and the narrative richness of books by Medieval-into-Renaissance historians — Johan Huizinga, E.P. Thompson, Keith Thomas, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Natalie Zemon Davis — that have now become quasi-literary classics.

Crace tells his Paris Review interviewer that his early novels were about “communities in transition”. But so is this one, his latest. Even if he refuses to name the village in Harvest, calling it simply The Village, and the land around it The Land, one does not have to know a great deal of history to place its lushly “invented” fable about the enclosure of agricultural commons by aggressive wool merchants — “the sheaf is giving way to sheep” — somewhere in the English countryside, sometime in the 16th century. I tried hard not to, for the novel was up for the Booker, but I found myself repeatedly going back to the Robin Hood picture-books and films of my childhood as I read Harvest, my visual memory mixing them up with images from The Seventh Seal and The Name of the Rose, while hearing, somewhere in the background, the kitsch-dulcet strains of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Greensleeves. And when Crace’s narrator, the good widower Walter Thirsk, sleeps — or “couples” — with the widow, Kitty Gosse, and relishes how “her creamy stomach sways and frowns like a shaken posset [hot milk curdled with ale and spices]”, I suddenly remembered, after what felt like centuries, the batty old woman with a sweet gargoyle face from whom I used to buy home-made quince jelly at the craft fair in Cambridge.

Now, this sort of thing never happens with a book like The Name of the Rose — this slightly twee, somewhat confected nostalgia for the familiarity of a home-grown past trying to pass itself off as a universal human condition — even when Eco treats us to the most delicious, and unmistakeably modern, narratological bliss. Crace’s novel is, of course, full of Good Writing, of beautiful English prose, recreating with painstaking effortlessness the texture and feel of what it might have been like to live and grow and die and rot in another age of which there can be no unmediated memory today: “the knot and thorn of living [t]here”. Yet, there could sometimes be an exquisite facility in an Englishman’s unalienated access to the Englishness of the English language that makes his words of ancient pedigree fall like English drizzle on his readers, but without making them wet — a singularly un-drenching quality, a consummate, often epic, slightness that leaves not a rack behind.

Here is Thirsk recalling a “privy trip” to a low point in the marshes, appropriately called The Bottom: “The trees were imping with infant leaves that seemed as attentive and pert as mice ears. So I was struck and ‘humbled’ by the beauty too, and only later by the carnal stench. I was an innocent. In that first season I tumbled into love with everything I saw. Each dawn was like a genesis; the light ascends and with the light comes life. I wanted to immerse myself in it, to implicate myself in land, to contribute to fields. What greater purpose could there be?”