All Among the Barley

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As the narrative progresses, we begin to realise – even if Edie remains blind to it – that Constance’s interest in the traditions of English life extends to holding prejudices against outsiders. We are tempted to share Connie’s romantic enthusiasm for the old farming days, though it’s clear that back-breaking work, anxiety, and poverty are never absent long. It is this world that Melissa Harrison sets All Among the Barley, though at a slightly later period, the 1930s.

And though one might say that its merits in theory were never achieved in practice, few would argue that someone with sincerely-held Marxist views would be likely to approve of, say, Stalin’s policy of genocide against the Ukrainian people which also occurred in the 1930s. No spoilers, but it casts the remainder of the book in a somewhat different light, illuminating the tragic consequences of the visitor’s beliefs and actions. Had she been merely misguided in her beliefs rather than embracing views that are hateful, I believe this would be a better tragedy. They had four fields at the bottom of the garden, one leading onto the next like a patchwork quilt, in shades of green and gold through the seasons.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. As few of the characters are clearly drawn I struggled to become involved although a number of hints indicating dramatic change or that people were not as they seemed kept me reading.

Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited. The ending comes with sad surprise, at least partly because it is so surprising that human spirit is caught in the maw of forces greater than itself. I loved the appearance of Edmund, the corncrake, a species which has been endangered due to the loss of habitat brought about by changes in farming methods.Soon she is a fixture of village life, helping in the fields, cutting sandwiches for the local fete.

Among The Barley delivered all I could wish for and tweaked my own memories of spending time growing up on ‘Manor Farm’ as a child. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how we can see different things in a book depending on our own preoccupations or state of mind at time of reading? It picks up speed past halfway, only to come to at a rather abrupt and not entirely satisfying ending. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The angle which seems to have been given the greatest (and compared to its treatment in the book disproportionate) coverage in press reviews and interviews, is an examination of 1930s rural themed fascism (my term).In At Hawthorn Time, the threat of catastrophe stalked the pages; here the looming menace of fascism remains more theoretical than felt. From the author of Costa-shortlisted and Baileys-longlisted At Hawthorn Time comes a major new novel. The farm is still largely run by horse power, and the book vividly describes both what has since been lost in the English landscape (for example Edith adopts an orphaned landrail or corncrake - these birds were very common then but are now almost extinct here) and the hardships endured by those that worked in it. Her re-connection to the community many years later being handled in a most alarming way when her vulnerability and lack of experience of the 'present' world is taken into consideration. She undoubtedly sees rural Britain through rose-tinted spectacles and, as time goes on, we realise that there is a political edge to her which underpins that uncritical view.