Harvest by Jim Crace

This is book number five for me to read of the Man Booker Prize 2013 long list books, and while it is incredibly well written and the story has a good wrap up at the end, it is not exactly my style.  It is the Man Booker style, though, and I could see it sailing on to the short list--the prose is complex and rich and evocative of the place and time that the story is set in.  It is just a little bit too much for me--I prefer sparser speech, but I can see the artistry that the author brings to this book.  He has stated that this book will be his last, and if that is the case, he has certainly closed his writing career with an admirable work.

The story is set in England in a pre-Industrial time period.  The land is feudally owned and operated, the law is dispensed locally, and what the master says goes, regardless of things like truth and fairness.  The harvest is critical to the survival of the town and it's people, and Crace is at his best when he is describing the process.  You can smell the earth mingled with sweat as people labor to bring in the grain.  You can imagine their urgency to get the work done and the anxiety that there are not enough of them to get the work done in time. 

Two things come into the village life that set about a chain of events that leads to its evacuation.  The first is a woman of unsettling beauty.  Her arrival one night with two men in tow coincides with a destructive fire that throws immediate suspicion on them.  The second is the arrival of the new master of the house.  He rides in on horseback proclaiming to know God and all that is good, but things quickly go from bad to worse.  We see the story through the eyes of an outsider.  Walter Thirsk rode into town 12 years before and fell in love, so he never left.  He was tied not to the place, but to a woman, and when she died, he ceased to have the same intense connection with the place--and truthfully, he was still more or less an outsider to them.  It was sometimes hard for me to follow the exact story that unfolded, but again, it is so beautifully written that did not lead to distress.