Man Booker Shortlist - Book 06 - The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

WoodsieGirl's 

Man Booker
Challenge

Our good friend WoodsieGirl has read all the books on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize for the last few years. This is not because she is an avid reader, with varied interests and is constantly on the lookout for new great fiction. She does this purely to mock my inability to organize my book list. Honestly. It's evil. 

Anyhoo, once again, she has kindly written up reviews of each book for us.  

THE LUMINARIES

ELEANOR CATTON

THE BLURB (Amazon)

It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky. 

The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction. It is full of narrative, linguistic and psychological pleasures, and has a fiendishly clever and original structuring device. Written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly evoking a mid-19th century world of shipping and banking and goldrush boom and bust, it is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery. It is a thrilling achievement for someone still in her mid-20s, and will confirm for critics and readers that Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international writing firmament.

THE REVIEW

When the Booker prize winner was announced, I groaned inwardly. Because of course, it was the one I hadn't read yet. The one I'd been putting off due to its daunting size. The one that had caused the library assistant who gave it to me to remark: "Oh, you're the one that reserved this! Good luck..." in a rather unnecessarily foreboding fashion.

I was a little surprised to see it announced as the winner, as it had seemed like the outside choice to me. Up against literary heavyweights like Jim Crace and Colm Toibin, I hadn't really thought the second novel of a relatively unknown young writer would stand much of a chance. I'd promised myself I wouldn't harp on about Eleanor Catton's age in the way ALL of the media coverage of her win did, but just allow me a moment here - she's twenty-sodding-eight and she's won the Booker prize! I'm 29 and have achieved precisely nothing with my life. NOTHING. *wails*

Ahem. 

Anyway, since I started reading this the day the winner was announced, I was very curious about what it would be like. This year's shortlist was exceptionally strong, so I thought this must be something truly special to have scooped the prize. I wasn't disappointed.

The Luminaries is astonishing. I found it a little slow-going at first - the first couple of chapters are heavy with exposition and introduce a truly dizzying array of characters that took me a while to get straight in my head - but it was well worth persevering. If it wasn't for the fact that I could only read this book at home (at 832 pages it was FAR too big to fit into my handbag and read on the train!) I'm sure I would have zipped through it in a few days.

In a way, I'm glad its size forced me to read it in small chunks, as it's the kind of story that really rewards slow, careful reading. I don't want to give away the plot here as it is so carefully, intricately unfolded as one character after another tells their version of events, the points of view overlapping and moving forwards and backwards in time until the full story gradually reveals itself.

Most of the reviews I read of The Luminaries mention its structure: twelve characters, their roles directed by their astrological charts; twelve sections to the book, each half the length of the section before so the book wanes in mimicry of the waning moon. I noticed this - it's hard not to notice the decreasing chapter and section lengths, and the character list at the front of the book lists each character and their astrological association - but I didn't find it as distracting or irritating as I thought I might when I first read the description of the book. In the hands of a less-skilled writer this could have been an obvious gimmick, but Catton weaves it in with enough skill that you stop noticing and just get carried along with the plot.

I was hugely impressed by the characterisation throughout the novel. There's a huge amount of characters to keep straight, each with their own distinct voice and motivation, but Catton succeeds in making each of them a fully-realised individual. I've seen some reviews that complain about their artificiality, but I rather thought this was the point: The Luminaries is a pastiche of a Victorian sensation novel, so the characters are by necessity playing certain archetypes. That doesn't mean that the characters are flat: on the contrary, Catton has created characters that feel like real people as well as playing well-worn roles.

The Luminaries is one of those books that had me rushing towards the end, while at the same time wishing it would last longer - quite a feat for a book of its length! As a final note on the size of it: I was tempted to get the Kindle edition once I saw the heft of the library hardback copy I borrowed, but I was glad I didn't in the end. The plot is so complex that I regularly found myself flicking backwards and forwards to remind myself of previous chapters and what other characters had said about the same events - and ebooks, unfortunately, don't really lend themselves to that kind of easy scanning! Plus, the hardback is weighty enough that, should someone have the temerity to interrupt you while reading it, you could beat them senseless with it. Which is always a useful feature of any good book, to my mind.

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2013

Shortlist 06 - The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

Shortlist 05 - The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

Shortlist 04 - We need new names - NoViolet Bulawayo

Shortlist 03 - A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

Shortlist 02 - Harvest - Jim Crace

Shortlist 01 - The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2012

Shortlist 06 - Umbrella - Will Self

Shortlist 05 - Bring up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Shortlist 04 - The Lighthouse - Alison Moore

Shortlist 03 - Swimming Home - Deborah Levy

Shortlist 02 - Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil

Shortlist 01 - The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

Visit her blog HERE

Visit her other blog HERE

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WoodsieGirl Shelf - Table of Contents

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Guest Stars - Table of Contents

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Full - Table of Contents
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Table of Contents - The WoodsieGirl Shelf

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The Woodsie Girl Shelf

You've probably noticed the wonderful reviews (and recent Man Booker Shortlist Challenge) cropping up by the fabulous WoodsieGirl (Laura) - book clubber, cake baker and Very Awesome Person. 

We've decided that it's only fair that we give her a little space...in the hopes of conning more stuff out of her! Ha ha, I'm only kidding of course. 

Honestly.

Being suspicious makes your heart smaller. 

Here you'll find all our WG reviews, poetry picks, playlists (as soon as I ask her)and more!

About our contributor (doesn't that look official!)

Laura, aka Woodsiegirl, learned to read almost before she could walk and has never quite recovered from the realisation that the real world isn't like the stories. She tweets occasionally as @woodsiegirl, and blogs about books and life (in that order)here.

Reviews

Mental Health Reading Challenge - The Psychopath Test
Giraffe LBC - 04 - Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Poetry Picks

In Mouldy Land - Terry Jones

Shortlist 06 - The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

Shortlist 05 - The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

Shortlist 04 - We need new names - NoViolet Bulawayo

Shortlist 03 - A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

Shortlist 02 - Harvest - Jim Crace

Shortlist 01 - The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin

Shortlist 06 - Umbrella - Will Self

Shortlist 05 - Bring up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Shortlist 04 - The Lighthouse - Alison Moore

Shortlist 03 - Swimming Home - Deborah Levy

Shortlist 02 - Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil

Shortlist 01 - The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

Contact Details

Say hello on Twitter - @WoodsieGirl

Visit her blog - WoodsieGirl - HERE

Visit her other blog - WoodsieGirl Writes - HERE

Recipes

Sweet Tooth

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Guest Stars - Table of Contents

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Full - Table of Contents
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Man Booker Shortlist - Book 05 - The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

WoodsieGirl's 

Man Booker
Challenge

Our good friend WoodsieGirl has read all the books on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize for the last few years. This is not because she is an avid reader, with varied interests and is constantly on the lookout for new great fiction. She does this purely to mock my inability to organize my book list. Honestly. It's evil. 

Anyhoo, once again, she has kindly written up reviews of each book for us.  

THE LOWLAND

JHUMPA LAHIRI

THE BLURB (Amazon)

From Subhash’s earliest memories, at every point, his brother was there. In the suburban streets of Calcutta where they wandered before dusk and in the hyacinth-strewn ponds where they played for hours on end, Udayan was always in his older brother’s sight.

So close in age, they were inseparable in childhood and yet, as the years pass – as U.S tanks roll into Vietnam and riots sweep across India – their brotherly bond can do nothing to forestall the tragedy that will upend their lives. Udayan – charismatic and impulsive – finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty. He will give everything, risk all, for what he believes, and in doing so will transform the futures of those dearest to him: his newly married, pregnant wife, his brother and their parents. For all of them, the repercussions of his actions will reverberate across continents and seep through the generations that follow.

Epic in its canvas and intimate in its portrayal of lives undone and forged anew, The Lowland is a deeply felt novel of family ties that entangle and fray in ways unforeseen and unrevealed, of ties that ineluctably define who we are. With all the hallmarks of Jhumpa Lahiri’s achingly poignant, exquisitely empathetic story-telling, this is her most devastating work of fiction to date.

THE REVIEW

The Lowland is Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri's second novel and fourth book (the other two were collections of short stories - one of which, The Interpreter of Maladies, I read a year or so ago and can highly recommend). It spans more than 50 years in the life of several generations of a family. I apologise in advance for spoilers in this review - I'm not sure I could do an accurate review of this book while keeping it spoiler-free!

The book opens in Calcutta in the 1950s, and we are introduced to two young brothers: Subhash, the older and more cautious of the two, and Udayan, his impulsive but beloved younger brother. As they grow older, both become involved in the radical communist movement (following the Naxalite uprising which, I must admit, I'd never heard of previously - this book really underlined how ignorant I am of Indian history). While Udayan gets drawn deeper into the movement, Subhash, disturbed by the violence he perceives within the movement, decides instead to leave for America, to study for a PhD. He does not return to Calcutta until several years later, when Udayan has been executed by the police, leaving behind his new wife Gauri, a brilliant student of philosophy, who is in the early stages of pregnancy.

Wanting to protect Gauri and Udayan's unborn child, Subhash marries Gauri and takes her back to Rhode Island with him. Together they keep up the pretence that the child, Bela, is Subhash's daughter, telling no one in America (including Bela) about Udayan. The book then follows the course of the family's life in America: the disintegration of Subhash and Gauri's loveless marriage; Bela's somewhat neglected childhood, with her two academically-brilliant but frequently absent parents; and Gauri's inability to be a mother to her daughter, culminating in her running away to Southern California to take a university lecturing post, abandoning her family, when 12-year-old Bela is on a visit to Calcutta with Subhash. The final part of the book charts Subhash and Bela's lives following this abandonment: Subhash attempting to comfort the daughter he adores, while still concealing from her that he is not her biological father; and Bela's rootless, nomadic adult life spent in communes and working on farms.

It's a little difficult to know where to start in reviewing this book. It's so vast and all-encompassing, but at the same time very intimate. I was reminded while reading of the phrase "the personal is political" - this is very much true of The Lowland. Lahiri manages simultaneously to evoke the political upheaval of post-independence India, the Indian immigrant experience of America, and the lives of feminist intellectuals in the 1970s to present; alongside an intimate portrayal of family lives, mother-daughter relationships, and the grief of Udayan's sudden death that ripples throughout the entire book. The plot is not complex exactly, but is certainly multi-layered. Lahiri frequently switches viewpoints, to give us everyone's side of the story. The brief synopsis I've given above is really only the bare bones of the plot - there are many other diversions and digressions which add to the whole picture. I was particularly moved by the passages concerning Subhash and Udayan's mother, who never recovered from her son's violent death. We see her visiting the very spot where he was murdered, every day for decades - only stopping when her infirmity and dementia prevent her from leaving the house.

Character-wise, some are better drawn than others. I never felt like I really got to know Bela: although we are given glimpses of her adult life, as a child we don't really see much of what she is thinking and experiencing, only seeing her through the eyes of her parents. I thought this made it difficult to sympathise with her as a character - although this could be because most other characters were so vividly drawn by comparison. 

Gauri was one of the most interesting characters for me. She's not a sympathetic character - it's hard to like someone who abandons their child - but then it made me think that we probably judge women more harshly for this than we judge men who do the same thing. I did sympathise with her in a lot of ways: she's an academically brilliant woman born into a time and place where that is not an easy thing to be, and unprepared for the social expectations put on her. It's not until quite late on in the book that we find out more about the days leading up to Udayan's death, and what precisely his (and her) involvement in the Communist movement was. When it comes, it's muted but quietly shocking: we see that Gauri has lived with a secret every bit as crushing as Subhash's concealment of Bela's true paternity has been. When Gauri abandons her family, she completely disappears from the text until very close to the end, when we get a few chapters outlining what has happened to her since and her feelings of guilt and shame at abandoning her daughter. I did think it was appropriate that she doesn't get a neat, happy reunion scene with Bela: what actually occurs is tough to read, but feels more realistic.

In case it's not clear, I loved this book. Lahiri's writing is beautiful and confident, and the story she tells is astonishing in its scope. I think this is a very strong contender for the Booker, and it's probably my favourite from the shortlist so far.

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2013

Shortlist 06 - The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

Shortlist 05 - The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

Shortlist 04 - We need new names - NoViolet Bulawayo

Shortlist 03 - A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

Shortlist 02 - Harvest - Jim Crace

Shortlist 01 - The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2012

Shortlist 06 - Umbrella - Will Self

Shortlist 05 - Bring up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Shortlist 04 - The Lighthouse - Alison Moore

Shortlist 03 - Swimming Home - Deborah Levy

Shortlist 02 - Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil

Shortlist 01 - The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

Visit her blog HERE

Visit her other blog HERE

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Guest Stars - Table of Contents

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Full - Table of Contents
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Man Booker Shortlist - Book 04 - We need new names - NoViolet Bulawayo

WoodsieGirl's 

Man Booker
Challenge

Our good friend WoodsieGirl has read all the books on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize for the last few years. This is not because she is an avid reader, with varied interests and is constantly on the lookout for new great fiction. She does this purely to mock my inability to organize my book list. Honestly. It's evil. 

Anyhoo, once again, she has kindly written up reviews of each book for us.  

WE NEED NEW NAMES

NOVIOLET BULAWAYO

THE BLURB (Amazon)

'To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti and not even this one we live in - who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?'

Darling and her friends live in a shanty called Paradise, which of course is no such thing. It isn't all bad, though. There's mischief and adventure, games of Find bin Laden, stealing guavas, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices.

They dream of the paradises of America, Dubai, Europe, where Madonna and Barack Obama and David Beckham live. For Darling, that dream will come true. But, like the thousands of people all over the world trying to forge new lives far from home, Darling finds this new paradise brings its own set of challenges - for her and also for those she's left behind.

THE REVIEW

NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names is a coming-of-age tale. It follows a young girl, Darling, through her childhood in the optimistically named Paradise, a slum somewhere in Zimbabwe, and her move to America as a young adolescent. 

In the first part of the book, we meet Darling's gang of friends in Paradise - kids with names like Godknows and Bastard, who spend their days playing games made up from hearing the news around them (like "Find Bin Laden") and leading raids on the nearby, wealthy town to steal guavas from the trees. Life is hard in Paradise: there are frequent references to the children's hunger (hence the guava raids), and hints of the violence that characterises their lives. In one memorable chapter the kids find the dead body of a young woman hanging from a tree, and after initially running terrified from the scene, they return when one of them points out that the dead woman's shoes looked new, so they could make good money from selling them. Darling's father is dying of AIDS, and 11-year-old Chipo is pregnant after being raped by her grandfather. However, it's not a bleak book: despite the hardship, Darling and her gang of friends act much as children everywhere do, accepting the world the way it is and playing their games.

We see the social and political upheaval of the area through the children's eyes, as they describe incidents they don't really understand: such as the displacement of their families from their homes that lead to their lives in Paradise, and the initial jubilation followed by disappointment of democratic elections in the country. Sometimes these moments are successful, but I sometimes found them a bit unconvincing: as when the children act out the murder of a revolutionary leader. This could have been a very powerful scene, and it is graphic enough to pack a punch, but I just found it a bit contrived. By comparison, another scene describing a visit from an NGO handing out toys and clothes for the children, and food for the adults, is much more affecting - Bulawayo does a fantastic job of portraying the children's excitement at the visit, mixed with the shame they feel and sense from the adults. "They just like taking pictures, these NGO people...they don’t care that we are embarrassed by our dirt and torn clothing, that maybe we would prefer they didn't do it...We don’t complain because after the picture-taking comes the giving of gifts."

All the children dream of escaping Paradise, but it's only Darling who manages it: she has an aunt in America, and as a young teenager she is sent to live with her. The second half of the book focuses on Darling's life in America, and the disappointment she finds. It is not how she expected it: it is cold (Darling is unnerved by the snow: "coldness that makes like it wants to kill you, like it's telling you, with its snow, that you should go back to where you came from."), unfriendly, and she misses the familiar sights, sounds and smells of Paradise. Ultimately she feels guilty for leaving Paradise. When she speaks to Chipo (by now raising a young daughter) on the phone, Chipo chides her: "You think watching on the BBC means you know what is going on? No, you don't...it's us who stayed here feel the real suffering."

We Need New Names is a book with a lot to say about Zimbabwe, immigration, cultural and physical displacement, poverty and relative poverty. However, I didn't think it hung together all that well as a novel. It felt more like a series of short stories, and I think it might have worked better in that way. The second half of the book in particular is fragmented, which made it difficult to really get invested in the story or with the characters. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it's the strongest off the shortlist - it's not a patch on The Lowlands, which deals with some similar themes.

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2013

Shortlist 06 - The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

Shortlist 05 - The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

Shortlist 04 - We need new names - NoViolet Bulawayo

Shortlist 03 - A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

Shortlist 02 - Harvest - Jim Crace

Shortlist 01 - The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2012

Shortlist 06 - Umbrella - Will Self

Shortlist 05 - Bring up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Shortlist 04 - The Lighthouse - Alison Moore

Shortlist 03 - Swimming Home - Deborah Levy

Shortlist 02 - Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil

Shortlist 01 - The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

Visit her blog HERE

Visit her other blog HERE

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Guest Stars - Table of Contents

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Full - Table of Contents
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Man Booker Shortlist - Book 03 - A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

WoodsieGirl's 

Man Booker
Challenge

Our good friend WoodsieGirl has read all the books on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize for the last few years. This is not because she is an avid reader, with varied interests and is constantly on the lookout for new great fiction. She does this purely to mock my inability to organize my book list. Honestly. It's evil. 

Anyhoo, once again, she has kindly written up reviews of each book for us.  

A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

RUTH OZEKI

THE BLURB (from Amazon)

'Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.'

Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery.

In a small cafe in Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao Yasutani is navigating the challenges thrown up by modern life. In the face of cyberbullying, the mysteries of a 104-year-old Buddhist nun and great-grandmother, and the joy and heartbreak of family, Nao is trying to find her own place - and voice - through a diary she hopes will find a reader and friend who finally understands her.

Weaving across continents and decades, and exploring the relationship between reader and writer, fact and fiction, A Tale for the Time Being is an extraordinary novel about our shared humanity and the search for home.

THE REVIEW

A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki, is a strange and sprawling book. It's two intertwining stories: that of Nao (pronounced 'now'), a Japanese schoolgirl writing a diary about what she intends to be the last days of her life; and Ruth, a Japanese-American writer who finds Nao's diary washed up on the shores of her remote Canadian home. The chapters alternate between Nao's diary (translated and with added footnotes and comments from Ruth), and Ruth's story of reading the diary and trying to find out what it means and what has happened to Nao.

Both tales are fairly sad. Nao, having grown up in Silicon Valley but moved back to Japan as a teenager when the dotcom bubble burst and her father lost his job, doesn't fit in and is horrifically bullied by her classmates (culminating in an attempted rape and a humiliating online auction of her underwear). Her parents don't seem aware of their daughter's struggles - particularly her suicidal father. Her only real support comes from her grandmother Jiko, a Buddhist nun.

Ruth's tale is less dramatic, but still melancholy. She is suffering from writers' block, grieving from the recent death of her mother, and struggling to adjust to life on a remote island in British Columbia, having moved there from New York to be with her husband. She becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Nao. Her claustrophobic days spent Googling Nao and her family and avoiding her gossipy neighbours are a sharp counterpoint to the drama of Nao's life.

Weaving through both stories are some pretty big themes - taking in Zen Buddhism, Japanese kamikaze pilots of the second world war, the morality of suicide, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011, the nature of time and memory, oceanic currents and the Pacific gyre, and even quantum mechanics. It's an ambitious novel, and it's hard not to be impressed at its scope.

So I'm not really sure why I didn't enjoy it more. For some reason, despite being impressed at the ideas and the ambition behind it, I just couldn't get into the story. It could be that I found the teenage narrator, Nao, incredibly irritating - I did sympathise with her plight, but her voice really grated on me after a while. I also really didn't enjoy the sections of the book that veer into magical realism. This is entirely a personal preference, so other readers who do enjoy magical realism may get a lot more out of the book than I did, but I generally don't get on with that particular genre!

Although the concept and the ideas within the book are fascinating, ultimately I think the writing lets it down. It's certainly not as strong as the previous two Booker shortlisters I've read so far (Jim Crace's Harvest and Colm Toibin's The Testament of Mary), so I don't think it's a likely contender for the winner.

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2013

Shortlist 06 - The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

Shortlist 05 - The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

Shortlist 04 - We need new names - NoViolet Bulawayo

Shortlist 03 - A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

Shortlist 02 - Harvest - Jim Crace

Shortlist 01 - The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2012

Shortlist 06 - Umbrella - Will Self

Shortlist 05 - Bring up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Shortlist 04 - The Lighthouse - Alison Moore

Shortlist 03 - Swimming Home - Deborah Levy

Shortlist 02 - Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil

Shortlist 01 - The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

Visit her blog HERE

Visit her other blog HERE

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Guest Stars - Table of Contents

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Full - Table of Contents

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Man Booker Shortlist Book 02 - Harvest - Jim Crace

WoodsieGirl's 

Man Booker
Challenge

Our good friend WoodsieGirl has read all the books on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize for the last few years. This is not because she is an avid reader, with varied interests and is constantly on the lookout for new great fiction. She does this purely to mock my inability to organize my book list. Honestly. It's evil. 

Anyhoo, once again, she has kindly written up reviews of each book for us.  

HARVEST

JIM CRACE

THE BLURB (from Amazon)

As late summer steals in and the final pearls of barley are gleaned, a village comes under threat. A trio of outsiders – two men and a dangerously magnetic woman – arrives on the woodland borders and puts up a make-shift camp. That same night, the local manor house is set on fire. Over the course of seven days, Walter Thirsk sees his hamlet unmade: the harvest blackened by smoke and fear, the new arrivals cruelly punished, and his neighbours held captive on suspicion of witchcraft. But something even darker is at the heart of his story, and he will be the only man left to tell it . . . Told in Jim Crace’s hypnotic prose, Harvest evokes the tragedy of land pillaged and communities scattered, as England’s fields are irrevocably enclosed. Timeless yet singular, mythical yet deeply personal, this beautiful novel of one man and his unnamed village speaks for a way of life lost for ever.

THE REVIEW

 Harvest is Jim Crace's second book to be shortlisted for the Booker (he was shortlisted in 1997 for Quarantine). It is his 11th book, and he has said it will be his last - although authors announcing they're quitting writing rather puts me in mind of people who rage-quit Twitter, and then are quietly back a week later...

In Harvest, Crace tells the story of seven devastating days in an unnamed English rural village, in an unspecified time period (probably late middle ages?). The book opens with two linked events, on the eve of the harvest: a fire is started at the manor house; and three strangers appear on the village borders. The strangers are quickly (and wrongly) blamed for the fire, setting into action a violent chain of events that hastens the village's demise: as, unbeknown to the villagers, their way of life is about to be taken from them. Their common land is to be enclosed for sheep to graze on - wool production being more profitable: "the sheaf is giving way to the sheep".

The story is told through the eyes of Walter Thirsk, a local man for the past 12 years but still regarded as an outsider - as becomes clearer as the events of the week unfold and the villagers close ranks against these outside threats. Walter had arrived in the village as the servant of Master Kent, who had inherited the manor house through marriage. Now 12 years on, with Master Kent's wife dead, leaving him no heir and therefore no claim on the manor, the new lord of the manor, Master Jordan, arrives to claim his inheritance and usher in the changes that will drive the villagers from their land and deprive them of their land and their ability to feed and support themselves. 

On one level, Harvest is a superb historical novel. It's a vivid depiction of the lives of subsistence farmers in the middle ages. I loved the descriptions of the harvest, and of the traditions and rituals that surround it - such as the harvest feast, and the selection of a "Gleaning Queen" from among the village girls. I also really enjoyed the depiction of the tensions, rivalries, family feuds and gossip of such a small, closely-knit settlement - where there are only a few family names, and everyone is related to one another either by blood or by marriage. The link between the people and the land is close - these are people that have lived in the same way, on the same land for generations. It is this that makes the threat of enclosure so dire: it is not just the land that is threatened, but the very history of the village:

"We're used to looking out seeing what's preceded us, and what will also outlive us. Now we have to contemplate a land bare of both. Those woods that linked us to eternity will be removed by spring... flocks will chomp back on the past until there is no trace of it."

On a deeper level, Harvest is also an allegory for displacement and exclusion. The main protagonists are all outsiders: Walter Thirsk, still not accepted despite marrying into and living among the villagers for 12 years; Master Kent, who stands apart as the lord of the manor already, but whose precarious position is exposed by the arrival of Master Jordan; Mr Quill, the mapmaker employed to map out the land and the new enclosures, who cannot find a place among either the villagers or the masters; and Master Jordan himself, who wields his outsider status as a weapon, imposing devastating changes on a land and people that he neither understands nor cares to. And then there are the three strangers whose arrival is the catalyst for the changes that ensue - two men and a "dangerously magnetic" woman - displaced from their own land by the same type of enclosure that is threatened here. By the end of the novel the villagers, their efforts to present a united front to all these outsiders having proved worthless, have lost their land and become wandering outsiders themselves.

I thought this was an excellent book. The writing is vivid and detailed - occasionally comical, but mostly tragic. The narrative occasionally wanders a bit, as our narrator struggles to make sense of events that are rapidly overtaking him, but this just added to the general sense of powerlessness within the novel. My only complaint is about the characterisation of the woman who appears with the trio of outsiders at the beginning of the novel - or rather, the lack of characterisation. We are told she is "enthralling to behold in ways they never could explain". We never find out her name - the villagers nickname her Mistress Beldam: "Beldam, the sorceress. Belle Dame, the beautiful". And all the village men - our narrator, Master Kent and Mr Quill included - appear instantly infatuated with her. And I was never satisfied as to why: either why Mistress Beldam is so beguiling, or why it was necessary for the purposes of the plot that she be so. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but it just irritated me: the "beautiful, mysterious woman" trope is so overused in fiction, and I really expect better of a Booker shortlister.

Other than that point, which irritated me but didn't spoil the book for me, I really enjoyed Harvest. Based on this and The Testament of Mary, this is shaping up to be a very strong shortlist indeed!

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2013

Shortlist 06 - The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton

Shortlist 05 - The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri

Shortlist 04 - We need new names - NoViolet Bulawayo

Shortlist 03 - A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki

Shortlist 02 - Harvest - Jim Crace

Shortlist 01 - The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin

The @WoodsieGirl Challenge 2012

Shortlist 06 - Umbrella - Will Self

Shortlist 05 - Bring up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel

Shortlist 04 - The Lighthouse - Alison Moore

Shortlist 03 - Swimming Home - Deborah Levy

Shortlist 02 - Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil

Shortlist 01 - The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

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Guest Stars - Table of Contents

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Full - Table of Contents
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