All Among the Barley

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While Connie may be keen to celebrate tradition, those around Edie are aware of the need for adaption and for balancing progress against tradition.

However she is also a successful novelist – her second novel “In the Hawthorn Time” being shortlisted for the Costa Prize and longlisted for the Women’s Prize – and I had seen this book as an outsider for the Booker longlist (in fact given the theme that the judges seemed to pick out across their books I am perhaps surprised at its exclusion).

As harvest time approaches and pressures mount on the entire community, Edie must find a way to trust her instincts and save herself from disaster. Powerful and subtle and richly detailed , this is a book that inhabits its territory, knows its people, and follows its own haunting logic. Her older sister Mary has recently married and lives nearby (Edie struggling with the sudden break in their relationships) as do her mother’s parents (Granfer and her squint eyed and mysterious Grandmother). Connie’s character is well drawn and her likeability maintained, despite the fact that, evidently, her mindset is one for which the author herself has very little time.

This feels like a straightforward read but the more I think about it, the cleverer it is at making literary capital out of various and sometimes contradictory relationships between present and past. I enjoyed this book and found it an 'easy' read with its gentle and rhythmic pace following the seasons. Melissa Harrison is the author of the novels Clay and At Hawthorn Time, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize, and one work of non-fiction, Rain, which was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. As Wendell Berry has said in his poetry, the entire language of traditional farming began to disappear with mechanization. In the course of the story, female emancipation and modernization are met and challenged, as are anti Semitic views in practice.There’s the depression after all, and he’s one of those typical men of his time who bottles up his feelings, resulting in sudden rages.

I felt as though she perceived me more clearly than my family did, for they all took me for granted, whereas she seemed curious about who I was and what I thought. Moreover, the novel captures the sense of loss inherent in the community as a consequence of the Great War. The coming of age drama at the centre of the novel was quite sensitively handled but it was underscored by the secondary theme of witchcraft. And yes, I can see how someone like Constance would make an lasting impression on a young girl, especially an adolescent like Edie. The water was chill at first, but by the time it was around my thighs it felt blood-warm; the pond might have been shady, but the weather had been hot for weeks.A preoccupied, bookish girl at heart, Edie is something of a loner, one who prefer books to the company of other children. Connie is also complex, with her intense fondness for both Edith and her mother, her ability to charm even the stolid menfolk with her talk of politics and new ideas, though not at the expense of rural traditions, of course. Her parents are tenant farmers with the help of John, who survived the battlefields of WWI, and Doble, their old farm hand. A deeply atmospheric work, steeped in the rhythms and traditions of the English countryside and the rhythms and traditions of its literature.