Melissa Harrison (1)

There's much to enjoy about this book. I relished the descriptions of countryside: whether the litter-strewn countryside of the demi-countryside at the edges of towns and motorways, or the fully rural landscape. Melissa Harrison's observations of plant and bird life - minutely different with each passing day - are satisfying. Village life, for good and not-so-good, is described with clear-eyed realism.

Characters too ring true. The vagrant Jack is decribed with sympathy and warmth, and while other characters may be less sympathetic - Howard for instance - all are described with compassion and are believable.

Each vignette in the book feels real. I believed in Kitty and her attempts to embrace a life in which she is to some extent still a tourist. I warmed to young Jamie as he tries to make sense of a less than satisfactory personal and working life. Even Howard's prevarications over the new life he struggles to feel at one with interested and involved me.

Only the plot as a whole failed to convince me. It takes until the very last chapter for the main characters to come together, in a totally unexpected way. The book - intentionally -doesn't answer several of the questions it poses. But I was left with the impression of a plot that was as unsatisfactory and unresolved as life itself. And perhaps this was the point. I'll read other books by Melissa Harrison that come my way. But it's her talent as a nature writer, and as a describer of character that interests me, rather then her skills as a story teller.

Written a month later, as an addendum to my original review. I've changed my mind about the unsatisfying nature of the plot. It's a 'slice of life', and as such has stayed with me, and had me wondering about the characters in the weeks since I originally read the book.
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All Among the Barley focuses on fourteen-year-old Edie, the bright daughter of a struggling farming family in 1930s Suffolk, whose world is on the cusp of great change. Melissa Harrison's evocation of this rural landscape, as yet minimally affected by agricultural mechanisation, is a vivid one: the weeding of crops is still done by hand, horses still pull the plough, corncrakes still call in abundance from the hedgerows. Yet equally Harrison doesn't fall into the trap of thinking of the countryside or those who live there as unchanging pastoral idylls where change is unwanted. Canned goods make the farm wife's life easier, and it's clear that once tractors can cope better with the region's heavy clay soils, the days of the plough horses will be numbered.

But where the physical landscape of the book felt real, its emotional landscape didn't convince me so much. Some of the characters—like smiling, jolly-hockey-sticks fascist Connie—are too direct from Central Casting, while Edie's own story felt a bit airless. That, combined with a rather unconvincing epilogue, made All Among the Barley feel like the book equivalent of a glossy Sunday evening period drama on the Beeb. The cinematography is lovely, the costuming is on-point, the actors all very prestigious—but there is perhaps the suspicion that there isn't much there there.… (más)