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May 21, 2014andreabroomfield rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Admittedly, Harvest is not an easy novel to read. It is deeply unsettling, and although it is a highly literary work (beautiful prose, a slow and careful cadence), it can also be a page-turner in the worst of ways: you dread what will come next, but you nonetheless are mesmerized and reluctant to put the book down. There's so much one can say about the plot or literary style of the novel. My only contribution to the discussion is to suggest that Crace gives voice, and a lit match, to resentments, pains, and anxieties that the Industrial Revolution brought scores of humble village people, and that have had striking ramifications, as overlooked or unconsidered as they might be. As difficult and as unfair as feudal English village life and the class hierarchy was, the rhythms of nature were largely unquestioned, and the routines were fixed, or seemed to be so. Common land allowed common people a place to raise their meat supply and milk and cheese supply. Their livelihoods of working for the lord of the manor net them a share in the precious grains and fruits that the lord brought in each year. The seasons gave the villagers' labor a sense of purpose and productivity, well as some time to rest when the winter was at its deepest. While some years harvests were sparse and people were hungry, in other years, harvests were plentiful and (if people labored hard), there was enough to eat. The coming of agricultural reform, itself part of a long and painful Industrial Revolution, upended these rhythms, hierarchies of class, and unquestioned routines. Although there was unrest in the form of rick burning and other vandalism carried out by petrified agricultural laborers, the ultimatum for most was to submit to the changes brought about from elsewhere, particularly London and the new cities of the Industrial North with its Captains of Industry. Enclosure of land and clearing of brush ended many people's abilities to raise some of their own food. Laborers were no longer hired and housed year-round, so those who remained in agriculture often found themselves starving. The majority were forced, due to starvation, into mill towns to take jobs at new factories, where they lost what little autonomy that they had had as farmer laborers. Crace, with the spectacular ending of his novel, thus gives credence to the smoldering, sorrowing, and lingering feelings of helplessness and worthlessness that thousands of rural Englanders would have felt from the mid-1700s into the late 1800s. In giving credence, Crace subtly suggests that this story of change, or "progress", is hardly a dead one. We live in a time of tremendous upheaval, where little if anything of the old ways and means of labor can be depended on. Our technological revolution thus ties us to a previous revolution that would have seemed long forgotten, but perhaps, Crace is suggesting, forgotten only at our peril.