Engaging story but I had no trouble putting it down, or indeed falling asleep while reading it. At least it started our engaging. By the end I barely cared, and really didn't understand the reason I'd just read this story. ( )

Once again this author has impressed me with his authentic portrayal of earlier times. The book opens in a hamlet, during the 1600's.
The community attached to the manor has just finished harvesting the fields and look forward to the annual celebrations followed by a day of rest. However, some mischief makers have accidentally set fire to one of the farm buildings. When three strangers happen upon the community, they are seen as scapegoats and a chain of events is triggered which will bring about the collapse of their carefully managed rural idyll.
Their kindly master has also been widowed and with no heirs, the title to the property falls into his wife's cousin's hands. He has plans to convert the land to sheep farming which requires limited man power.
Walter Thirsk's world crumbles over a matter of days. The descriptive writing conjures strong images of life how it was lived in times past and of the grim reality experienced by these rural workers. ( )

Jim Crace's Harvest is set in an isolated English village where narrator Walt lives with a community of peasant farmers working for a well-loved Master. The book commences with the completion of the year's barley harvest, and the attendant celebrations.

During the celebrations, an act of arson occurs that burns down the Master's dovecote. While the villagers know who the guilty parties are, they allow the blame to be shifted to three itinerants camped on the outskirts of the village. This action gives rise to the second harvest in Crace's novel; a bitter harvest for the villagers of the consequences stemming from this flagrant injustice.

Crace is clever in that he never locates his story temporally. We could be reading about a remote modern community or a community in the Middle Ages. In doing so he plays up the universality of some of his themes: the relentless march of progress, fear and resentment of outsiders and, above all, the love for the land itself and the deeper meaning of occupying a place beyond purely economic gain.

Crace writes beautifully and conveys Walt's somewhat mixed feelings for his adopted village very well. Some of the descriptions of the land and the village lifestlye seen through Walt's eyes are truly lyrical. This is much more the sort of writing that I would expect to be winning prizes rather than the genre novels favoured more recently. ( )

Harvest is an ironic title for the book. The events that happened surrounded the harvest but it turned out to be the last one. The village disintegrated when three outsiders came and set off a series of events, which also came about because of a change in ownership of the land. It is an allegory of how society responds to dramatic change. It is also a study of human nature. In searching his fellow villagers' homes, Walter was seen as part of the new owner's gang and he was ostracised. No one wanted to be seen with him. An average read overall. I suppose Crace deliberately gave Walter a detached tone of voice but it didn't work here as it made it hard to get into the story. ( )

Such evocative writing! I felt as if I were right in the middle of the story. The guilt, the desire, the fury, the
powerlessness, the soil, the barley... Toward the end, the metaphors seemed to me a little heavy handed, but overall a tremendously moving book!