Sitting stoned on a hill above his village, a young man muses on his place in the world. Connor is proud to have fenced pastures while his mates have been away at university. But it’s overwhelming to think of all their lives being equally real and urgent. Are they part of the same story or separate ones? A phrase comes to him from a book he hated at school: something about “the roar on the other side of silence”. In this fine, subtle and strange novel from one of the most probing writers of contemporary rural life, Melissa Harrison earns that nod to George Eliot, whose words she gives to an anxious and ecstatic labourer clutching a can of Fanta.
The Given World follows the inhabitants of one village in a river valley, a place “as old as anywhere”, for six months between the equinoxes of a year. The time is now, or an imminent future when the seasons seem to have “ceased their metronome”. At first, the central figure appears to be Clare, who knows each flagstone of the ancient priory that has been the centre of her life. The six months are her dying time, from diagnosis to last thoughts. But, in a way that pays tribute to the solitary Clare’s understanding of interconnectedness, the novel goes out from the priory to trace a web of lives. In the breezeblock bungalow next door, a desperate farmer tunes in at dawn to American evangelists on the radio. Like Saj the postman, we call at addresses where literary fiction rarely bothers to ring the bell.
Readers familiar with Harrison’s work will recognise this commitment to a kind of diverse group portraiture. All Among the Barley (2018) located us with absorbing immediacy in 1930s East Anglia, watching every member of an agricultural community through the heightened perceptions of an adolescent girl. Intensely private experiences were held in shifting relation to public politics and currents of international history.
The Given World presents another microcosm. The small particularities of its daily work are charged with a sense of cosmic change. This is concertedly a novel of, and for, an era of ecological crisis. Illegible omens light the sky; sleepers toss through “vast unsettled dreams”. Summer brings “strangled stasis”. We bear witness to an enigmatic leave-taking as a lone woman, like a late-walking ghost of Eliot on the Floss, looks down from a footbridge into the stream. The River Welm “sets about its final work”. With its omens and warnings, the novel comes close to a portentous tone that’s true to the times but can be flattening. I was glad of idiosyncratically wry moments. A last badger leaves the valley, “grey rump bouncing like a departing burglar captured on CCTV”.
The correspondence between Clare’s dying and the world’s dying is thankfully not laboured, but there’s congruity in the way the village’s capable women respond to the demands of these endings. Faye the death doula measures palliative drugs with expert hands. Five teas on the worktop signal, with welcome economy, the presence of women gathered to do what each can do.
It’s much to Harrison’s credit that this novel of strong feminist bearings should offer some of the most acute portrayals of working men I’ve found in recent fiction. Roy is a builder struck with vertigo while working on a roof. He mentions it to his builder’s mate of 20 years, except the mate is dead and Roy is alone, talking it over with himself. Having 5 Live on the truck radio gives some semblance of company. Can he no longer do his job? “Maybe this is it … Call it a day.”
Harrison has long been interested in what goes wrong when we sentimentalise the rural. The self-appointed “countryside correspondent” in All Among the Barley travestied the community she purported to revere in columns of honeyed prose about strong harvesters doing work “that purifies the spirit”. At Hawthorn Time (2015) included among its cast an amateur artist doing versions of the picturesque. Her breakthrough came by looking hard at what and who was actually there. Harrison, meanwhile, observed the resilient green spirit of an itinerant worker travelling between farms.
The Given World takes an epigraph from the painter and art critic Christopher Neve, a potent interpreter of “unquiet” landscapes: “The notion of country lends itself easily to sentimentality. In fact, it is never to be trifled with.” Harrison urges no trifling or generalising. For her, strikingly, ancient lores and superstitions are not to be taken lightly, either. They come down to us from people literate in the earth’s signs and alert to forces beyond immediate understanding. Harrison has drunk deep in the culture of the rural eerie, and the novel feels for the uncanny effects of environmental change.
For me the novel’s ecological seriousness has less to do with eeriness than with its spreading of narrative weight across many lives. No one gets to dominate; only the community’s most arrogant figure would want to do so. It’s a bold choice in a market hungry for redemptive plotlines, emotional journeys, standout characters. Refusing to prioritise any one inhabitant’s story, Harrison works towards a communal form. It’s made from distinctive personal idioms but strives for a voice that’s composite or impersonal. There’s no Greek chorus chanting us to a certain end. Instead: indefinable tensions, quiet griefs, makeshift tributes. The beam of narrative attention moves from the river rising, to a marriage breaking, to a man reading in a static caravan. This is the novel’s ethical work and its power. “Lit by chance” in a moment’s sun, a caterpillar bends itself into a series of hieroglyphic shapes, their meaning “impossible to ascertain”.
