Harvest

I once made the mistake of recommending Jim Crace’s ‘Being Dead’ to a new acquaintance.  She came across as an avid and inquisitive reader, and Crace’s award winning novel is among the most inventive and curiously moving books I’ve ever read.  The next (and I think last) time I saw her she returned my copy to me, grimaced, and remarked ‘Why would anyone want to read a book like that?’  Since then I’ve been much more careful in recommending Crace.

His latest novel, ‘Harvest’ did not disappoint me.  Both ‘Being Dead’ and ‘The Pesthouse’ focus on destruction and disintegration.  Crace’s special gift is to reflect multiple layers of beauty and emotion in  the dismantling of what humans have spent lifetimes building.  He manages this partly by investing so much meaning in the physical world, both natural and human crafted.  Buildings, animals, objects, plants, tools, clothes . . . they’re all described simply but poignantly in ways that immediately communicate their history, uses, and significance.  So when they are lost, mutilated, or destroyed (as so much is in a Crace novel) we sense the history and we experience both love and grief.  It’s uncanny that a writer can focus so unrelentingly on destruction but have such a profoundly positive message.

‘Harvest’ is the story of the destruction of a medieval English village.  The agents of change include strangers from the outside world, the forces of economic ‘progress’, and human nature itself.  The main character (first-person narration throughout) has spent parts of his life in different economic and social segments of the medieval world, and at the end he is forced to move on yet again.  The depiction of the peasants’ intimate (and perhaps shortsighted) connection to the land is quite beautiful.  So much of the power of the book comes from intimate representations of ‘things’.  We get to know what life feels like by learning about many of the physical details of daily life.  It all starts to go downhill when an outsider is brought in to map the land in an effort to convert the primitive and risky farm economy into a more advanced commodity based system.  But it’s almost as if the mapping effort itself, creating a representation which is a step removed from the physical reality, is the beginning of the end.  For Crace so much of the beauty and meaning resides in the immediacy of the physical world.

At the conclusion the main character departs, alone, somewhat broken, but also with hope for a new life in parts unknown.  He brings with him just a few necessities.  The one non-essential item he brings with him is a piece of blank vellum that he had made himself for the mapmaker.  The map was never completed, but the blank vellum had been painstakingly prepared.  It’s a symbol of the next story, his new life yet undiscovered, but also of the failed attempt to ‘lift’ the peasants one step up from their difficult and risky lives as more-or-less subsistence farmers.

Indeed the path of ‘progress’ is a difficult one, and it’s often true that we must first destroy what we have in order to be free to move on to something at least potentially better.  We’ve invested so much in what we have, so much history, so much meaning.  But in that destruction there is not just pain and regret; at the same time there is also beauty and much potential.  That seems to be the lesson that Crace teaches us over and over again in his books.  The human experience incorporates a kind of large-scale seasonal aspect that includes winters of destruction and springs of renewal.  And much of the harshness and the beauty of nature’s seasons can be found in man’s cyclical histories as well. We seem to have no choice but to build and invest, only to destroy so that we can build again.

Not every reader will appreciate Crace’s focus on the destruction.  I won’t make the mistake of recommending him to just anyone.  But you, reader, might want to give it a try.