All Among the Barley

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Harrison describes it in lush detail that makes you feel you are there, not just the flora and fauna as she sees it, but how it changes with the seasons, or even as day turns to night. She’s a regular guest on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, and has also appeared on the Today Programme, Start the Week, the Arts Show on Radio 2, the Arts Hour on the World Service, and on Monocle 24. Well, I’m no anti-Semite, of course, but they’re not from here, and if we’re not careful they’ll mar the character of England forever – not to mention the way they undercut wages and take work away from ordinary people, just as the Irish did. Running through the book is the need for farmers to balance the preservation of traditional methods with the drive for progression and change.

Incidentally it was also Orwell who, in the late 1930s, shrewdly pointed out that Fascism had become an empty term of abuse used by anyone to describe anything they didn’t much like. I had expected ducks or moorhens to explode from the margins, as they would have had I gone into the pond by the house, but it seemed that no wildfowl made this pond their home. I hadn’t realized until I read the comments that Melissa Harrison had also written Hawthorne Time, which has been on my TBR list since shortly after publication (I’m not making much progress on that list). We and Edie also see more the tensions in the small farm community – her father’s struggle with despondency and alcohol, her mother’s odd relationship with John whose political differences with her father become increasingly open as the tensions between tradition and progress become greater. While George Mather shares some of Constance’s beliefs on the benefits of protection, John, the experienced farmhand, takes a more open view, sowing the seeds for future tensions to emerge.Williamson’s classic, Tarka the Otter, was described by Ted Hughes as “a holy book, a soul-book, written with the life blood of an unusual poet”, and there is in Harrison’s work a similar kind of poetry, an in-the-bone connection with the natural world that contrives to be both sparklingly precise and wildly exhilarating. The fields were eternal, our life the only way of things, and I would do whatever was required of me to protect it. Deeply evocative of a historical moment - rural England between the wars, before mechanisation - it is also, unmistakably, about questions that press hard on us now, above all the dangers of nationalism, and how easily a love of place can be corrupted into something dark and exclusionary. In At Hawthorn Time, the threat of catastrophe stalked the pages; here the looming menace of fascism remains more theoretical than felt.

her central character Edie, many decades later, looks forward to ending her days going back to where she had spent her formative years, presumably hoping to find it as she left it. It takes a while for Constance to show her true colours, but the hints are dotted here and there throughout . Nonetheless, I very much liked Constance FitzAllen through most of the book and admired the way that, politics aside, she developed an abiding love of her surroundings and was eager to play her part in village life, and help out with harvesting and farm work. From the author of Costa-shortlisted and Baileys-longlisted At Hawthorn Time comes a major new novel. She sees a “murky broth” of nationalism, “anti-Semitism, nativism, protectionism, anti-immigration sentiment, economic autarky .She lives at Wych Farm, near the village of Elmbourne, with her mother and father, her brother Frank, and two farm workers, the aged Doble and the horseman John, who had served in the war and experienced things that he does not wish to remember. There are many areas of sadness in this book from the harsh words of Edie's father to the death of Edmund the corncrake but maybe the saddest of all was the incarceration of Edie into the mental institute, abandoned by her family.

Women in rural environments had to do their duty, be careful to fit in and not be seen as different. I am more familiar with Melissa Harrison’s nature writing and have bought her non-fictional "Rain: Four Walks In English Weather" as Christmas presents. He recorded their stories and depicted their ways of life, which in some respects were not so very different from in Chaucer’s time. 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. Her second novel, the Costa-shortlisted At Hawthorn Time, presented a determinedly modern portrait of rural life that, while full of wonder, could also be bleak and brutal.

In the 1930s, disaffected by socialism and appalled by the possibility of another war, he became an outspoken supporter of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.

Soon she is a fixture of village life, helping in the fields, cutting sandwiches for the local fete. Powerful and subtle and richly detailed , this is a book that inhabits its territory, knows its people, and follows its own haunting logic. She is also interested in superstitions – witch marks, curses, forms of protection and the like – drawing on an active imagination fuelled by folklore. 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.The autumn of 1933 is the most beautiful Edie Mather can remember, though the Great War still casts a shadow over the cornfields of her beloved home, Wych Farm. Though I was very moved by the working out of the story, I had some difficulties with both characterisation and plot.