City folk often romanticise or trivialise country life — that it is simpler, quieter, ‘rustic’ (a compliment or an insult, depending on how and by whom that word is used). We presume that ruralites have a more visceral bond with nature; that their lives are somehow more colourless than ours; or — if they happen to be Pakistani — that they languish under a feudo-agricultural complex comparable with modern-day slavery. In popular imagination, ruralites are denied their own discrete personalities, and, as a result, we render a composite portrait of them that is woefully grayscale.

Jim Crace avoids many of these traps in his artful eleventh book, the novel Harvest, which presents the Midlands — where Crace has lived for more than four decades — and its residents in full, breathtaking technicolour. This is an England reminiscent of Hardy, of the Brontës, wrought in prose as consummate and beautiful as theirs. The very landscape, almost a character in itself, animates other characters’ lives; its fate determines their future as three invasive outsiders arrive and threaten to upend their unnamed village.

The entire story is told from the perspective of Walter Thirsk, the most trusted employee of the village master. A narrator who is also the protagonist, Thirsk is a shadow of Master Kent; not only are they both widowers but, as Thirsk reveals, “My father was his father’s clerk. My mother was his milk nurse. We are almost of an age and so must have been ear-to-ear when we were nuzzling infants.” Thirsk and his master witness their village unravel in a series of harrowing events that include arson, rape, encroachment, and killings (unintentional and deliberate, of a human and an animal).

But for Crace’s ability to make all of this melodrama feel realistic, Harvest could quite easily have turned out an odd, overwrought novel. Fortunately for readers, the plot is cannily structured and the narrative rarely loses momentum, like a top that spins toward its inevitable yet sudden finale. The end, when it arrives, may not surprise readers entirely. However, Crace treats it with manifest skill, and his writing — rich in metaphor, precise — often glints. He details flora with a botanist’s eye, with subtle flourishes such as this: “The trees were imping with infant leaves that seemed as attentive and pert as mice ears.” Through Thirsk’s voice, Crace paints the heavens like so: “Dusk has deepened now. If it wasn’t for the rain, I could be walking through the steep-domed, unlit chamber of a great cathedral, roofed by coal-black vaults of cloud.” When a gypsy woman is injured, “the blood [marks] her cheeks, like tears.”

The word ‘harvest,’ of course, takes on different meanings. Aside from gypsies who camp on the outskirts of the village and upset its harmony, another band of outsiders deals a graver blow. In the absence of a rightful male heir, Master Kent must surrender all of his wife Lucy Jordan’s lands to her cousin, Edmund Jordan II. The narrator, Thirsk, is ignorant of the laws of primogeniture. He says, “Master Kent is Mistress Lucy’s single heir.” A cartographer — the third species of outsider ironically nicknamed Mr Quill — who is commissioned to draw up maps of the village for Edmund II’s succession, replies: “Not so. He is not blood. A husband is not blood. There is a cousin, though.” Thirsk wistfully says of Mr Quill: “His mapping has reduced us to a web of lines. There is no life in them … he is shaping us again, making us congruous and geometrical with his melodies as he has done with his charts and ink.” And of Edmund II, he opines: “Master Jordan was descending by road to harvest his inheritance.” Another evocative, poignant passage speaks of how class differences manifest themselves even in our anatomy. Thirsk notes: “Master Jordan stands at the table, offers me his hand. I cannot help but reach across and shake it briefly. My finger joints clack against his rings. His palms are cool and vellum-soft and smooth.”

As the novel progresses, Crace switches from using plural first-person pronouns to ‘I’. And Thirsk, too, tentatively switches allegiance from his former master to Edmund II, whom he now dubs ‘Master Jordan’. He distances himself from his fellow villagers, who, like us, begin to mistrust him. “There isn’t one of us — no, them — who’s safe. … Something ugly and unusual has happened to us all. In just a few days we have become even more suspicious of the world.” Crace may come across as a moralist when he drops one-liners such as, “We value effort over haste,” or claims that city dwellers fail “to recognise what country folk are born to recognise, the amity in everything. Our fields are medicine. All days prove good to those that love the open air.” And some of his expressions are anachronistic (a person of that era certainly would not use ‘anyway’ and ‘actually’ quite as much as we do now). Nevertheless, most of Crace’s observations ring true, and he conveys even the most trite maxims with originality. “The eyes speak louder than the lips, it’s said — and they gather whispers better than the ears”; “Earth and seeds are soundless labourers.”

During a panel discussion at London’s Southbank Centre with other authors shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize, Crace said that Harvest’s “subject matter is contemporary,” even though it is ostensibly set in at the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, as Edmund II decides to turn his barley fields into enclosures for sheep and wool production, one realises that his ambitious (and callous) plans to inject mechanisation are almost identical to the current assault on small farmers and local milk producers by big corporations. At Southbank, Crace talked about “the narrative of enclosures ... they leave a beautiful pattern in the fields, but of course they’re actually a record of a dispossession. And so something which is beautiful is also evidence of something which is sad.”

An atmosphere of anxiety, melancholy, and desolation permeates Harvest. Those who prefer novels less haunting than Wuthering Heights would do well to look elsewhere. Amidst ashen, moor-like fields, a people are forced from their lands because the law favours the aristocracy (in our case, the feudocracy). An entire community is wrecked by unrelenting technological advancement. Interestingly, Crace uses “Progress” in a pejorative way, often in upper-case, to define Edmund II’s mission. Even today, ‘progress’ rips apart the belief, to borrow Crace’s words, “that life should be allowed to proceed in its natural and logical order.”

Harvest may be read as a parable about people whose hands are rough, warm, and chafed, and who daily battle against — and depend on — the elements. Who are drafted into a process of homogenisation that will eventually turn humankind into a monoculture.

Thankfully, Crace steers clear of presenting his village as a prelapsarian idyll, and his characters as irreproachable. Instead, he explores the poverty of human nature, which, after all, is the same everywhere — in remote areas and in towns, in Pakistan and in England. More than a 150 years ago, Charlotte Brontë immortalised the English countryside in her novel Shirley, which presages the tragic aftermath of industrialisation. What Brontë wrote echoes throughout Crace’s book: “Human nature is human nature everywhere, whether under tile or thatch, and that in every specimen of human nature that breathes, vice and virtue are ever found blended.”

Harvest

(Novel)

By Jim Crace

Picador, UK

ISBN 0330445669

288pp.