Book Review: Harvest, by Jim Crace

5 Stars

Harvest is an exquisitely-written tale of the dispossessed: impoverished indentured farmers are flung off ancestral lands as a wealthy landlord transforms his feudal holdings into more profitable grazing land for sheep. The story is set in a medieval time that is never specified, and in a village too small to possess a name, a church, or even an awareness of life in the next parish; the village’s boundaries are delineated by stones against which parents symbolically butt their children’s heads, a warning to the next generation of the limits of both geography and role that they must never traverse.

Walther Thirsk arrived in the village 12 years earlier as the servant of Master Kent, a kindly and generous lord. He fell in love with Cecily, a local girl, but even his marriage and subsequent widowing did not earn him the status of a trusted insider. His separateness is emphasized by the contrast between his dark hair and the blond hair of his intermarried neighbors. Subsequent events only serve to sharpen that divide.

Long-standing traditions are upended by two events that occur as Walter and his neighbors harvest what turns out to be their last crop of barley: the arrival of a family of squatters— themselves thrown off land that is being turned into pastureland for sheep, who are quickly blamed for a fire in the stable; and the childless Master Kent’s disinheritance of the village and manor house to his late wife’s cousin, the cruel and rapacious Master Jordan. Master Jordan has already hired the enigmatic Mr. Quill to survey his new lands, the maps providing Walter with a bird’s-eye view of the village and its tininess in comparison to the wider world into which he must soon venture.

My only quibble is that the ending was too drawn out. The last twenty percent of the book comprises more of a mental journey than a physical one, although that journey is rendered in language so evocative one feels the profound upheaval the villagers—and Walter—suffer.

Fans of Andrew Michael Hurley will love this book.