michaelcattigan's reviews
469 reviews

There are some books - most books probably - which I read, finish and review pretty much straight away. They are like those meals which are fine, tasty and enjoyable but which you move on from.

Some, however - stretching the metaphor perhaps to breaking point - I like to savour more, to digest, before turning to review it. And The Golem and the Djinni was one of those.



It creates a world of magic realism in which Wecker invokes the rich, hopeful, uncertain and insecure world of New York in the nineteenth century opening its arms to the cultures of the world. Two specific immigrant communities are conjured up: the Jewish quarter and Little Syria. There is a richness and humanity in these descriptions: men and women struggling to reconcile old traditions with a new way of life; younger generations breaking away from more traditional beliefs.

And into these two communities in modern America come two beings of distant times. One, the ancient bound Djinni - a creature of fire from the Syrian desert bound and trapped in a flask - and the other a golem, born of ancient powers aboard a ship bound for America only a handful of days before she arrives.

These two creatures are mirror images of each other: the Djinni is an ancient, shape-shifting, whimsical creature bound to a single form and rebelling against his confinement; the Golem is barely a few weeks old, forged to be a slave and obedient but set terrifyingly free by the death of the master to whom she was bound days after her awakening.

And I think that, in that mirroring, we see the crafted nature of this book: for a long book there are very few characters and each one revolves in his or her own circle, occasionally overlapping before the circles move on again. In addition to the two creatures, you only really have Arbeely, the tin smith who releases and takes in the Djinni; Rabbi Meyer who finds and takes in the golem and his nephew Michael Levy; Mahmoud Saleh from Little Syria; the American heiress Sophia Winston; and Anna Blumberg with whom the Golem works and who becomes her friend.

And Yehudah Schaalman, the Golem's creator.

I think this is the character, Schaalman, with whom I was least satisfied with. He is the antagonist and provides the final chapters of the novel with a strong plot. But, without giving away spoilers, his involvement was a little too neatly tied up and he did at times come across as the most two dimensional character in a novel populated by more rounded characters. He was a great villain. But he never really became more than a villain for me.

And I'd have liked to have seen more of Sophia. As a rich girl trapped in an engagement, she crosses paths with the Djinni and - somewhat inevitably - they form a brief liaison. But she is given some of the simplest but most beautiful and heart-breaking prose in the book as she realises what is happening between her water-based body and the flame which the Djinni had raised inside it.

Amid the dark haze of heat and desperation, she felt something shift inside her. A tendril of fire shot up her spine—and then her mind was filled with a small frightened fluttering, a noise like a candle flame whipped by a breeze. At once she knew that there was something trapped inside her, tiny and half-formed, and that it was drowning in her body, even as it burned her. There was nothing that either of them could do.

There are obvious parallels between this and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: the detailed recreation of a specific time and place; its juxtaposition with the magical realm. That's certainly all there but I prefer the comparison with Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus as both that and The Golem and the Djinni eschew the wider nation building that Susanna Clarke's novel luxuriates in in favour of a smaller and more intimate cast. All three are, however, among my favourite novels!

I loved this book, for so many reasons!!

It is the story of a week in an unnamed village in an unspecified part of England at an unspecified period. And I loved the timelessness of Crace's prose: his narrator's language is lyrical and deeply informed by the landscape but not archaic or faux-authentic.

If we were identifying a period for what is quite clearly an historical novel, the brief reference to the plague and the enclosure of the common ground to make way for an invasion of sheep would put us in the early seventeenth century, perhaps a hundred years after Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies was set.

There are clear links between this book and Mantel's. I wonder whether Harvest would have been as lauded as it - quite rightly - is without Mantel's winning the Man Booker. Historical fiction seems to have been an overlooked genre in the past, somehow insufficiently literary. No-one reading Harvest could doubt its literariness: almost every page oozes metaphor with an extraordinarily well judged balance between the literariness and the narrative voice. The language never asserted itself to the detriment of the narrator's character.

The character of the narrator, Walter Thirsk, is an interesting one: he is introduced as one of the fifty-eight villagers working to bring in the eponymous harvest; but he is also articulate beyond his fellow-villagers and somehow distant. Even a passive observer of events rather than an active actor. There are narrative reasons for that distance: when his master - and milk twin - Master Kent married into the local landowner's family, Thirsk entered the village with him as an outsider, residing at the manor house; only when he married the villager Cecily, did Thirsk join the village. He himself dwells on the correct lexis to describe his position: settled into the village but not a part of the village; sometimes included in the first person plural pronouns we and us; sometimes not.

Thematically, however, Thirsk's isolation and greater or lesser exclusion from the village is key. Over the seven days of the novel, the village faces waves of outsiders arriving: firstly, Mr Earle - nicknamed Mr Quill and quite possibly the closest thing to a hero this book has, however unlikely an epithet that might be for him - who observes and notes down and records the village, cataloging and categorising each part of the land in preparation for the enclosure of it; three strangers appear, evicted from some other village by the same enclosure of land; Jordan, the usurping landowner using local superstition and his ancient claim through his bloodline with Master Kent's dead wife to forge a modernist future; and Jordan's men, rough, ignorant and cruel. Amongst this heady brew of locals and outsiders, crimes are committed, injustices rendered, deaths dealt.

This brave new world sweeps away ancient and traditional ways of life, extinguishing them.

There is one character, the one woman in the group of three outsiders, who dominated the blurb of my copy of the book. She has a tiny role: we see her briefly four times and I don't think we ever hear her voice. She becomes an object of fascination and horror for the narrator for whom, as a widower in such a small village with almost no single women, the appeal of a new female has a magnetic carnal appeal. She is almost a cipher rather than a character: she lurks outside the harvest dance like Banquo's ghost; she evades every attempt to find and protect her, or to find her for less hospitable reasons; she never quite escapes the word witch once it is bandied about loosely. Her name is never discovered save for the label Mistress Beldam.

Crace is never, in this book, romantic or idealising in his depiction of village life: the harshness and paltry returns for back-breaking work is unstintingly conveyed. There is a lyrical delight, however, in the language and idioms of the countryside as well as its traditions: the Harvest Queen, the ribaldry of the harvest scene which opens the book, the named of the flowers and plants.

What Crace paints beautifully here is the end of an era, an end of a way of life. There's no overt political motivation decrying the Enclosure Acts or the relentless march of progress - indeed, Master Kent may have been able to manage the enclosure peacefully and to the benefit of all - but a simple depiction of loss. It is, perhaps, above all, an elegy to a way of life.

Ahhh, Eleanor Catton's Man Booker winning The Luminaries. It's certainly not a quick read!




It took such a time to read it - and admittedly my reading coincided with a stroppy baby and a hectic few weeks at work - that the beautiful cover started to wear off! The M of LUMINARIES on the front cover is being rubbed away by my finger as I hold it like this




It was at such risk of becoming dilapidated that I asked the librarian at work to cover it for me!

My 11 month old daughter also loved this book. Not so much the words (she prefers Ten Little Fingers for that!) but the pages being flicked through. In fact, she liked it so much that she'd make a beeline for it as soon as she saw it. Pages became torn as a result.

But I adored this book. I loved Harvest, The Testament Of Maryand A Tale For The Tome Being and I wondered whether this would hold its own and live up to the hype as Man Booker winner. And it did. In spades.

I am a simple fellow and I am sure much of this book swept past me. I am, after all, looking for very few things in a book: a cracking plot; compelling characters; and beautiful language. In addition to all that, there is an effort to create astronomical and astrological connections between the characters.

I am sure that much of this passed me by!

The story centres around one evening in January 14th 1866 when Crosbie Wells, a reclusive hermit, dies near to the New Zealand gold rush town of Hokitika; Lauderback, a politician, arrives in Hokitika and discovers both Wells' body in his cottage and the unconscious body of Anna Wetherell, a whore, insensate in the streets through an opium overdose; and a famously rich man, Emery Staines, disappears from the same town.

Around this cluster of events, twelve men recognise their own and each other's involvement. Each man circles this single evening whilst circling the other men as well. Orbiting is clearly an apt word to describe the way each character (and they are all men) become closer to one part of the events of 14th January and more distant from others. That much, I could recognise and - as I said - I'm sure the way each man influences the others around him probably bears some astrological significance. But one I'm ill equipped to identify.

In terms of style, this book piles narrative upon narrative, again orbiting that one night and never quite revealing the truth until the final pages. There is a very much self-aware third person narrator here who, in the opening chapters, is reminiscent of the nineteenth century self conscious narrators. This narrator initially takes the side of Walter Moody, a newcomer to Hokitika who stumbles into a conference held by the twelve men associated with the 14th January events. It is to him that each character tells their tale of involvement. And each of those tales is knitted together for us by the narrator. Circles Within Circles is an incredibly apt name for this part of the book. Courtrooms reinvent one narrative into a quite different story. Flashbacks in the final chapters cause you to re-evaluate and re-think almost all that's gone before.

The two main characters - Emery Staines, Anna Wetherell are marginalised throughout most of this book! Staines disappeared before the book began; and Anna is sequestered away for large parts of it. They are, however, brought centre stage in the final sections, and it is their voices which resound deepest. I am assuming that this pair of (star-crossed?) lovers are the luminaries, the light givers, of the title, the solar and lunar lights in the sky. I do await to be corrected, however.

It is impossible to pigeonhole this book into a genre: there are elements of Romance between Staines and Anna, elements of Crime around the investigation into Wells' death, gold thefts, fraud and embezzlement; elements of the Gothic aboard an ill-fated sea journey; elements of the mystical in the relationship between Anna and Staines as bullets that should have struck one inexplicably wound the other, addictions suffered by one and the other's ability to read and write and sign a signature likewise transferred. It is, however, simply a beautiful book! The vivid quality of Hokitika brought to life with these men orbiting the town and passing by each other; the structural complexity and aesthetic beauty of the book; and the enchanting beauty of a language which feels simultaneously natural and authentically reproducing the prose of another time and place.

After six weeks and 850 pages, I have finished the book with a strong sense of loss and a surprisingly strong urge to re-read it so that the opening chapters can be read in light if what I now know.

That urge to re-read is jolly unusual and a clear mark of just how compelling this book is.

A deserving Man Booker winner to stand alongside Hilary Mantel's Cromwell books.

I worry about Sweden.

It keeps me up at night.

I wake in cold sweats.

I worry about the weather there: the snow and freezing temperatures. I worry about the trolls. I worry about IKEA. And I worry about the people. And families.

It must be a terrible place.

Every single novel I’ve read from there – Stieg Larsson, Mons Kallentoft and now Lars Kepler – seem to hold a mirror up to show the twisted, rotting heart of Swedish families. Darkly. Incest, violence, neglect, abuse.

I suppose any country that invents the concept of IKEA must have something to hide beneath the surface of its sleek plywood exterior.

I also worry about the effect of these books on the Swedish tourist economy. Especially on any hotel, bed and breakfast or hostel labelling itself as family-run.

*Disclaimer: yes, I do understand that these are works of fiction. This is not racism; it’s satire!*

Kepler – which is actually the nom de plume of the husband and wife team of Alexandra and Alexander Ahndoril – opens The Hypnotist with the slaughter of what seems to be an entire family. The violence is gruesome but not lingered over – which is a relief to those of us with a tender nervous system! – and a couple of images of severed limbs and joints suffice.

A child is discovered still to be alive despite multiple wounds and extensive injuries and he is rushed to hospital. A familiar image then resolves: the well-meaning but somewhat brusque police officer wants to interview the child; the concerned doctor says he’s not up to it. And it’s at this point that the doctor calls in an expert in trauma care: the eponymous hypnotist Erik Maria Bark.

This is a book that jumps around between different points of view and we see the events of the story through the eyes of Bark; his wife Simone – whose nickname of Sixan I found was oddly sweet; Sixan’s father, a retired but police officer with a somewhat mythic status; and the aforementioned Police Officer, Joona Linna. Apparently Linna is the main character in the book which is the first in a series based around him.

Which is a little odd: Linna has a rather minimal role in the book and is the least used point of view; the book is not named after him; his character is barely fleshed out. Perhaps the plan is for Linna to be little more than a thread from which to hang more interesting characters that he encounters.

Erik Bark’s is the first viewpoint we see. Bark is given the honour of an extended first person flashback narrative half way through the book.

And Bark I did find interesting. His relationship with Sixan – flawed, frayed and fragile as it was – was actually quite moving. A hypnotist who doesn’t hypnotise. A doctor who self-medicates. A husband who has betrayed his wife. The way that a simple misunderstanding – the wrong person at the hospital answers his phone – fed by a previous betrayal – leads to doubt, fear and suspicion and eventually the disintegration of the relationship was actually rather deftly handled and moving. I hope that it doesn’t reflect the two Alex Ahndorils’ relationship! I’ve got enough to worry about!

There are a number of plots running through this book. The slaughtered family that opens the book is dealt with rather quickly: within 50 pages or so the injured boy, Joseph Ek, has been hypnotised, confessed to the murders, given the police the location of his surviving sister and escaped from hospital. Thereafter, Bark’s son Benjamin is kidnapped and the main plot commences. The race to find and rescue Benjamin is given even more urgency as he has a blood clotting disease and will die without weekly injections. The pace of the book is quick: the chapters are really short, perhaps 3 or 4 pages; the writing is in present tense; the changes in perspective are rapid; the writing is quite visual … it’s almost as if the Ahndorils had a mind to a film version as they were writing. A third and the weakest plot evolves as Sixan and her father investigate Benjamin’s computer in which a local gang – somewhat oddly naming themselves after Pokemon characters – have been terrorising Benjamin’s girlfriend and her brother.

The plots involving the Ek family and Benjamin’s disappearance were not terribly well integrated. The Ek plot seemed little more than a device to introduce Erik Bark and I felt it had more potential to be developed in its own right or could have been knitted into the main plot more fully. I wonder whether one was Alexandra’s plot and one was Alexander’s.

There is another gripe I have with the plotting. The main theme is that the past is never past: as a hypnotist, Bark’s research is to resolve his patients’ traumatic histories; Erik’s past betrayal gives Sixan’s present misunderstanding real pain. And the past is at the root of Benjamin’s kidnapping which we learn is rooted in the reasons why Erik gave up hypnotism. But he doesn’t remember that incident until he comes across a video of a hypnosis session. It just didn’t strike me as realistic that the phrase “the haunted house” would not have triggered Erik’s memory as soon as he had heard it!

Altogether though, a decent well paced thriller. And insofar as genres are useful (limited if at all: I do find genre a limiting concept. The temptation is to only read the books that a publisher has given a certain label too. Surely the only real genres are books-I-like and books-I-don’t-like. Otherwise we end up with Polonius wondering whether a book is

tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.

Anyway, rant over…) I’d say it is a thriller rather than crime because of the prominence of Bark as a character over Linna.

What a fabulous book!

It is rare that I anticipate a book as eagerly as this one; rare that a sequel can live up to the expectations of the first book; rare that historical fiction can grip me quite so intently! But Mantel manages all this in Bring Up The Bodies which, in my opinion, outshines the original Wolf Hall.

The original book had charted the rise of Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn and the fall from grace of Cardinal Wolsey. This book, in which Cromwell is at the height of his powers, charts the fall, trial and execution of Anne Boleyn and her replacement by Jane Seymour.

Is that a spoiler? It’s historical, there was never any doubt about the outcome. If so, what’s the point of reading it? The ending is mapped out by my (somewhat cloudy) GCSE History; the plot twists and turns that, say, C. P. Sansom relies on cannot appear here. The delight is in the people, the life, the humanity that Mantel’s language brings to what had been just names before! She invites us into a new and vibrant world populated by some of the most complete people that I have ever met in fiction.

In fact, Mantel’s language explicitly does invite us in: the present tense, the occasional first person plural pronoun that places her world before “us” as “we” explore it. By instinct, these overly writerly techniques to bridge the 500 years gap between us and the Tudors would usually irk me. But here they work exceptionally well.

Let us consider the title: “Bring up the bodies” is the cry to bring the prisoners out of the Tower to face their trial. But Cromwell is also haunted – so so haunted – by ghosts that it is almost tearjerking. The opening image is of him hawking with hawks named for his dead children. We are told that “when the house is quiet… then dead people walk about” in Austin Friars; the Christmas costume that he had made ten year previously for his daughter reminds him “Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here: a whisper, a touch, a feather’s breath from you”; following an argument with Henry, he recalls advice his father gave him and “is glad his father is with him”; the final image in the book is of a page turned over and displaying the remnants of “the cardinal’s writing… so he can see the dead hand that inscribed them”. In fact, despite being dead, Wolsey’s presence is so frequent and integral to Cromwell he deserves to be cited in the dramatis personae at the start of the book.

This is a book resonant with imagery that is redolent with symbolism but also rooted in the world if the book. The hawks circling their prey in the opening pages parallels Anne’s waiting women circling and betraying her; the proverb book given by Henry to Jane and still bearing the jewel encrusted “A” for Anne and the marks of the “K” beneath it like a palimpsest is hugely and wonderfully evocative of the effect on our lives of all our past encounters.

And finally onto the big question: how is Cromwell himself portrayed? Enigmatic and shadowy in history, “sleek, plump and densely inaccessible” as Mantel describes him. Here, he is perhaps less sympathetically portrayed than in Wolf Hall. He is certainly utterly imposing: the moment when he is beside the injured King and

seems to body out and fill all the space around the fallen man. He sees himself, as if he were watching from the canvas above: his girth expands, even his height. So that he occupies even more ground. So that he takes up more space, breathes more air, is planted and solid when Norfolk careers into him, twitching, trembling. So he is a fortress on a rock, serene, and Thomas Howard just bounces back from his walls, wincing, flinching and blethering.

This is almost a Gandalf The Grey moment facing the Balrog!

And his conduct of the interviews with Anne’s women and then her four alleged suitors and her brother is utterly chilling. He shows an utter lack of compulsion or interest in whether the five men were guilty as charged. As he tells us: he was charged to find guilty men; and the men he found were guilty of something. When Gregory asks “Were they guilty?” he meant had they slept with Anne; Cromwell heard the question asking if the court had found then guilty.

Nor is he trustworthy: as he said to Thomas Wyatt, he cannot split himself into two men, one his friend and the other the King’s man. Nothing can be said to him in confidence that it will not be used against you later.

Yet he is still wholly compelling! His utter self assurance is refreshing; his splashes of humanity and disregard for others who mock Anne even as the preparations for her execution are made; his concern for his son; and, above all his loneliness and his ghosts all humanise him.

Utterly outstanding!

I'm a sensitive soul, me.

I like books and words; I wear my heart on my sleeve. I cringe at the sight of gore and blood.

So why have I been immersing myself in gore recently? The Passage and The Twelve by Justin Cronin and now Feed, book one of the Newsflesh Trilogy by Mira Grant.





Zombies are the new vampires with World War Z hitting the cinemas and this book's been kicking about in my 'mildly intrigued' sub-pile of my 'to-be-read' lists on my e-reader.

What was it that intrigued me? It's hard to say: the cover was pretty cool; I liked the ambiguity of the title referring to the appetite of the zombies and to the blogging news feeds that the book revolves around. Moreover, though, the biggest intrigue derived here (as it did with Brooks' World War Z) from a single question:

"What on earth do you do with zombies once you've got them?"

Now, I don't mean that in a survivalist sever-the-brain-stem kind of way.

Narratively, what do you do with zombies once the visceral reveal has happened? There's no suave temptation that drips from the pores of every non-Twilight vampire; there's no cunning intelligence; there's no eternal conflict between the animal and civilised, the id and the superego, epitomised by the werewolf or Jekyll and Hyde. Once you have revealed your zombie and the audience has received it's visceral thrill or shock, they're actually a pretty rubbish antagonist. By definition.

Max Brooks ramped up the tension by scale and the sheer weight of numbers.

Grant doesn't.

Unlike Brooks, Feed shows little interest in rise of the zombies. It's events take place a generation post-Rising. The dead rose. The living adapted. Life continued.

The skill in this novel is in the imagining of how our world might adapt to cope with a threat such as zombies. How would behaviours change? How would politics alter? How would the media mutate itself? What variations would creep into our lives if something horrific occurred? How would terror of the living dead be responded to? Or be taken advantage of?

Is it too great a leap to see parallels between the post-zombie world, populated by people whose fears lead them to isolate themselves and exclude anyone else, with a world coming to terms with a War on Terror? Or a world in the grip of a fear of the incurable AIDS virus?

The rise of the blogger is the key feature of Grant's world: where traditional print media failed to respond to the rise of the undead, blogs recognised, recorded and reported on it thereby lifting their status to that of 'true' journalism. Again, the parallels with The Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and a whole host of other 'grass roots' movements connecting through Twitter and the blogosphere feels credible. In Grant's world, bloggers are divided into three categories: newsies such as the first-person narrator Georgia Mason, who report on the news; Irwins, such as her adoptive brother Shaun, who record their field exploits and encounters with the undead for entertainment value as much as education; and fictionals such as the Masons' partner Buffy who appear to write rather poor doggerel to make us all feel better. Oh and Buffy is also a whizzy techno-geek. This little trio has it all therefore: a driven and ethical reporter backed up by her action-hero brother and nerd friend. And they drive around in a van. Solving mysteries.

I did spend half the book expecting Shaggy and Scooby-Doo to arrive!

The trio manage to secure a job reporting on the campaign of a Senator Ryman in the American Primaries and then Presidential elections. Shady things happen. Tragedies unveil themselves. A conspiracy is uncovered.

I am generally a little slapdash with spoiler alerts: it is possible to enjoy a journey even if you already know the destination. Especially if the journey is a good one with nice scenery. With books, I'm more interested in the characters and writing than I am with plot and events. But here, I am going to tread carefully: there are events in the book which do warrant coming to fresh and being ambushed by.

It's not the uncovering of the conspiracy: Grant red flags the culprit pretty obviously!

And let's face it, the writing here is not great literary prose that has much merit in its own right. To continue the journey metaphor, it's like driving through the flat fenlands of Norfolk. Pretty flat. Nor do the characters work terribly well for me: they are pretty two-dimensional at times with the exception of George, our narrator.

So I'm going to let you enjoy the few way markers you come across without spoiling them!

So, to return to my question: what do you do with a zombie? Grant's answer seems to be, very broadly, 'get over it'. This is a book set in a world in which zombies live... No... Inhabit... No ... Exist? But it is not a zombie book: our antagonist is not a zombie; there are perhaps two or three zombie attacks seen in the book. It is, essentially a political thriller. With a handful of zombies.

One thing I did like - and which I suspect might have put other readers off - is the nature of the virus that gave rise to the zombie plague. Apparently Grant objected to the "It's a virus" plot device (a devil ex machina?) to explain zombies and we are treated to a fair amount of detail about the mechanics and vectors involved. I liked that part. It was, again, credible.

In short then... The good points were: some interesting world building with a fair amount of social parallels - enough to start you thinking; a string sense of the mechanics of the virus; a playful reverence of existing zombie lore and movies; decent, if slightly two dimensional, characters; some strong plot twists and pretty decent and contemplative pacing (I'm afraid the somewhat frenetic pacing of some plot-driven novels gives me a headache!)

Bad points included: competent but uninspiring writing; a lack of depth to many characters; a slightly obvious villain (though, as book one of three, I suspect this will develop); and, in my electronic version for reasons I cannot fathom, an absence of apostrophes and speech marks. In a writing style that often interposes lengthy narrative into dialogue before returning to speech mid paragraph, that became really annoying really quickly.

Miniature review due to absence of Internet and wifi. In fact, only now possible because phone can – sometimes – get some reception…

I teach.

Summer holidays are great times to read.

I expect to get a lot read so I thought this was an apt time for the next instalment of Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series.

It took the whole eight weeks! All of them. Admittedly, having new baby did impinge on reading time but not by that much. And it was a slog!

At his best, reading Martin is like watching chessmen being manoeuvred around a chess board at the pace of the Wars Of The Roses in real time. But this…?

This was like pulling teeth. None of the more engaging characters were present: Jon Snow was absent, Tyrion was absent. And who did we get in their place? Arya was reasonable as a character. But Brienne wandering around aimlessly searching for Sansa needed an editor’s red pen; Sansa herself and Petyr Baelish both needed a slap; and Samwell Tarly. Samwell Tarly. Stop whining and grow a pair!

I am currently in two minds whether to continue with the series, this book was so tedious!

Even in a series where Winter Is Coming is essentially the tag line, I had not expected its pace to be so glacial!

I loved this book, for so many reasons!!

It is the story of a week in an unnamed village in an unspecified part of England at an unspecified period. And I loved the timelessness of Crace’s prose: his narrator’s language is lyrical and deeply informed by the landscape but not archaic or faux-authentic.

If we were identifying a period for what is quite clearly an historical novel, the brief reference to the plague and the enclosure of the common ground to make way for an invasion of sheep would put us in the early seventeenth century, perhaps a hundred years after Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies was set.

There are clear links between this book and Mantel’s. I wonder whether Harvest would have been as lauded as it – quite rightly – is without Mantel’s winning the Man Booker. Historical fiction seems to have been an overlooked genre in the past, somehow insufficiently literary. No-one reading Harvest could doubt its literariness: almost every page oozes metaphor with an extraordinarily well judged balance between the literariness and the narrative voice. The language never asserted itself to the detriment of the narrator’s character.

The character of the narrator, Walter Thirsk, is an interesting one: he is introduced as one of the fifty-eight villagers working to bring in the eponymous harvest; but he is also articulate beyond his fellow-villagers and somehow distant. Even a passive observer of events rather than an active actor. There are narrative reasons for that distance: when his master – and milk twin – Master Kent married into the local landowner’s family, Thirsk entered the village with him as an outsider, residing at the manor house; only when he married the villager Cecily, did Thirsk join the village. He himself dwells on the correct lexis to describe his position: settled into the village but not a part of the village; sometimes included in the first person plural pronouns we and us; sometimes not.

Thematically, however, Thirsk’s isolation and greater or lesser exclusion from the village is key. Over the seven days of the novel, the village faces waves of outsiders arriving: firstly, Mr Earle – nicknamed Mr Quill and quite possibly the closest thing to a hero this book has, however unlikely an epithet that might be for him – who observes and notes down and records the village, cataloging and categorising each part of the land in preparation for the enclosure of it; three strangers appear, evicted from some other village by the same enclosure of land; Jordan, the usurping landowner using local superstition and his ancient claim through his bloodline with Master Kent’s dead wife to forge a modernist future; and Jordan’s men, rough, ignorant and cruel. Amongst this heady brew of locals and outsiders, crimes are committed, injustices rendered, deaths dealt.

This brave new world sweeps away ancient and traditional ways of life, extinguishing them.

There is one character, the one woman in the group of three outsiders, who dominated the blurb of my copy of the book. She has a tiny role: we see her briefly four times and I don’t think we ever hear her voice. She becomes an object of fascination and horror for the narrator for whom, as a widower in such a small village with almost no single women, the appeal of a new female has a magnetic carnal appeal. She is almost a cipher rather than a character: she lurks outside the harvest dance like Banquo’s ghost; she evades every attempt to find and protect her, or to find her for less hospitable reasons; she never quite escapes the word witch once it is bandied about loosely. Her name is never discovered save for the label Mistress Beldam.

Crace is never, in this book, romantic or idealising in his depiction of village life: the harshness and paltry returns for back-breaking work is unstintingly conveyed. There is a lyrical delight, however, in the language and idioms of the countryside as well as its traditions: the Harvest Queen, the ribaldry of the harvest scene which opens the book, the named of the flowers and plants.

What Crace paints beautifully here is the end of an era, an end of a way of life. There’s no overt political motivation decrying the Enclosure Acts or the relentless march of progress – indeed, Master Kent may have been able to manage the enclosure peacefully and to the benefit of all – but a simple depiction of loss. It is, perhaps, above all, an elegy to a way of life.