The European Prize for Literature (EUPL) is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – and, because of lockdown making promotion of the prize more difficult, I’m one of the bloggers who has been asked to help raise awareness of the prize and of the UK winner – Melissa Harrison, with All Among the Barley. I’ll get onto that, but first here’s a quick video explaining what the prize is… (I’ll also be doing a giveaway – check out the bottom of the post for that.)
I’m all for prizes that raise awareness of authors we wouldn’t otherwise hear of, and my reading of non-British European writers is pretty lamentable. It’s even more lamentable when it comes to those writing now. And I’m afraid that hasn’t changed with the 2019 winner I’m writing about, because she’s British, but at least I can go and look at the others among the 13 winners awarded in 2019.
I had heard of All Among the Barley before I was sent it to review, but I think only because I’d been so drawn to that beautiful cover. The ploughed fields, the swallows (maybe; look, I don’t know anything about birds). I am in danger of being like the townies who wander through the setting of 1930s Suffolk, seeing only the idyllic and not noticing the hard work, the striving for modernity, and the real lives behind the thatched cottages – particularly during a year apparently famous for drought. Except I grew up in the countryside, so I know it can be beautiful and difficult simultaneously.
My name is Edith June Mather and I was born not long after the end of the Great War. My father, George Mather, had sixty acres of arable land known as Wych Farm; it is somewhere not far from here, I believe. Before him my grandfather Albert farmed the same fields, and his father before him, who ploughed with a team of oxen and sowed by hand. I would like to think that my brother Frank, or perhaps one of his sons, has the living of it now; but a lifetime has passed since I was last on its acres, and because of everything that happened I have been prevented from finding out.
This is the opening page – well, the opening after a quick preface – and it quickly immerses us in the world she lived in. That ‘I would like to think’ sentence gives the reader a sense of mystery, but we forget it (I forgot it) as we are swept into her world. Edie is a young 13-year-old, a little more innocent than the other children in the community, a little less prepared for the outside world. At the same time, she fully knows difficulties. Her father drinks too much. Her mother has to make up for his shortcomings. She sees poverty, vice, brokenness. But she also sees the beauty of the world around her – and Harrison is wonderful at natural descriptions, giving not just the aesthetics of the stunning countryside but also its practicalities.
In October, Wych Farm’s trees turned quickly and all at once, blazing into oranges and reds and burnished golds; with little wind to strip them the woods and spinneys lay on our land like treasure, the massy hedgerows filigreed with old-man’s-beard and enamelled with rosehips and black sloes. Along the winding course of the River Stound the alder carrs were studded with earthstars and chanterelles and dense with the rich, autumnal stink of rot; but crossing Long Piece towards The Lottens the sky opened into austere, equinoctial blue, where flocks of peewits wheeled and turned, flashing their broad wings black and white. At dawn, dew silvered the spiders’ silk strung between the grass blades in our pastures so that the horses left trails where they walked, like the wakes of slow vessels in still water.
Into this world comes Constance FitzAllen. She shocks the locals by wearing trousers, and is there to document the old rural ways of life, and is keen to preserve it. I was initially reminded of Valentine Ackland, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s partner, who made similar investigations in similar trousers – but her resulting book, Country Conditions, was about the importance of good plumbing and hygiene in rural communities. Connie is much more concerned with setting rural life in amber – writing for a journal, but also lamenting any developments. Edie’s family don’t take kindly to this at first – they want machines that do the work faster; why would they roast food on an open fire if a modern oven is superior? – but they are won over by her charm and enthusiasm.
And Connie does come across as a delightful character. I was fully charmed by her. Which… well, I shan’t say more on that front.
Edie is certainly charmed by her, and sees her as a gateway into a new way of thinking – London, confidence, and adulthood. I find coming-of-age novels tricky sometimes, but I thought Harrison did a great job of showing the development of a teenage, torn between the dual wishes to enter adulthood and to remain in the safety of childhood.
And now the elephant in the room for anyone who knows my taste well: historical fiction. We know I’m not a fan. I have read so very many novels written in the 1930s that I did wonder why I’d need someone writing in the 2010s to tell me about that world. Sometimes it didn’t quite work – Harrison was very obviously writing from 80+ years’ distance, and the mores and morals of the 21st century seeped between the cracks of the world she was depicting. There was the implicit value system of a later day – but this was ok because Edie was also looking back, if not from 2019 then from many decades after the fact.
And there are twists and developments, which I shan’t spoil, that nobody writing in 1933 would have included.
All in all, I was impressed by Harrison’s writing style and descriptive abilities, fond of Edie, and startled by my own earlier reactions when more details of this world emerge…
* * Giveaway time! * *
EUPL are offering up a free copy – if you’d like one, please tell me your favourite rural novel (or novel with a rural setting) in the comments. I’ll pick a winner on Sunday 17 May 2020. It’s open anywhere in the world (though lockdown may mean it’s an ebook, depending who wins. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!)
And head over to the European Prize for Literature site to learn more about them.
As someone who grew up on a farm, left it for the attractions of city life and is now nostalgic for life lived according to nature and its seasons, this book certainly appeals to me. And that cover! Thank you for the opportunity to win it and for all your reviews and recommendations over the years.
My favourite contemperary rural novel is The Horseman by Tim Pears. It is so beautifully written and led to to his other marvellous works. But I shall always treasure Lark Rise to Candleford, which read as a teenager in urban Wilverhamotin made me long for a country life.
My favorite contemporary rural novel is The Excellent Lombards by Jane Hamilton, about a girl growing up on her family’s apple farm – honey crisp apples? too new!
My favorite classic rural novel is a biography of an apprentice farmer, a young Englishman who boards with a well established, well respected farming family. He goes through the day to day work while taking note of the farm workers he is learning from. Sorry not to remember the title or the author – I read the Penguin many years ago.
Sounds like Corduroy by Adrian Bell?
Corduroy! That’s it! Thank you very much.
It’s a great prize, although I won’t go in for the draw as I’m oddly not always a fan of the rural. But well done for championing this – we certainly need to bring more unsung authors to general attention!
My book group read this in January. We had mised feelings about the book: loved the descriptions of the fields and meadows. And we were interested in farming before the war. We were less impressed with the plot, but felt that overall it was a good choice for us to read and discuss.
This book has been on my radar for a while. It sounds very good indeed. I think my favourite rural novels (can’t pick just one) might be Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, My Antonia by Willa Cather and Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.
Have you listened to Harrison’s new podcast, The Stubborn Light of Things? It’s a wonderful taste of the rural while we are all in lockdown. A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr is probably my favourite rural read.
A Month in the Country is an excellent book, I just learned there is a film with Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh.
Did not know that. Thanks!
A Place On Earth — Wendell Berry
A favourite rural novel is Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. I have an ageing Penguin copy on my shelves, decades old but still readable.
I was going to put A Month in the Country, but I see it’s already quite popular here, so I will move on to another I love -Tessa Hadley’s The Past. What a job she did, making an old country house and its surroundings come alive with creaks and smells and vistas and generations of secrets!
May I nominate Rose Tremain’s ‘Sacred Country’, also set in the Suffolk I know, love and recognise but, in typical style, also ranging far and away from its roots. I read and adored it when it first came out (early 90s, I think) and have been fascinated to see its journey from relative obscurity to contemporary ‘relevance’. Though the lives depicted couldn’t be further from my own, it’s a novel I hold in huge regard and with great affection. Plus, I can never meet a ‘Marguerite’ without thinking of a certain beloved guinea fowl….
Someone has already mentioned this but my favorite would have to be A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry.
I’ve already read and loved this book so won’t enter, but I can also recommend Harrison’s earlier novel At Hawthorn Time, which has a contemporary setting. One of the things I really liked about All Among The Barley was the way she referenced or evoked a whole lot of writing about rural life from the 1930’s. I think she pulls off the period thing (not normally a fan either).
Lark Rise to Candleford..by a country mile..:-)
My favorite rural novels are Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell and Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen — are those rural enough? I also love Cold Comfort Farm and My Antonia. And The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck is also wonderful.
My favourite rural novel(s) is actually a trilogy by Jane Smiley which starts with ‘Some Luck’ it’s about an Iowan farming family and how their lives shift and develop over the course of the 20th century. It’s got huge scope to it, but it’s dealt with deftly & is incredibly readable.
For a rural book set in Britain I’d have to choose ‘A Month in the Country’ which captures something about a British summer that is so nostalgic & sun drenched.
My favorite is 1000 Acres by Jane Smiley, a reworking of King Lear set on an Iowa farm.
This book sounds great – my mum’s family were farmhands but she and her siblings mostly went to university and got non-agricultural jobs, so I am always interested to read books that sound a little like the very colourful stories that my granddad told. I think my favourite rural novel is O, Pioneers! by Willa Cather (I also love Lonesome Dove, but since some of that takes place in cities I’m not sure if it counts here).
Lark Rise to Candleford for me too. If rural can include village life I loved The Village by Marghanita Laski.