My hero / Jim Crace by Daniel Hahn

 

Mystifying control … Jim Crace. Photograph: Matt Writtle

My hero: 

Jim Crace

 by Daniel Hahn

Jim Crace is a genius. I have read Harvest, which has just won the Impac prize, three times – and I still don’t know how he does it

Saturday 20 June 2015

I

’m currently on a translators’ residency, where one of our recurring dinnertime arguments is about whether genius exists, and if so, what it is. To some, it describes an ability, a gift, that is not merely above average but is somehow beyond comprehension; not just considerable skill, but inexplicable skill. If that definition holds, then Jim Crace, I think, is a genius. His 10th novel, Harvest – a small story about great change – has just won the 2015 Impac Dublin award; as one of the judges I’ve now read it three times, and I still don’t know how he does it. (Yes, I know “genius” sounds silly, but “magic” sounds even sillier.)

The 100 best books of the 21st century / No 81/ Harvest by Jim Crace

The 100 best books of the 21st century

No 81

Harvest by Jim Crace – review

Justine Jordan on a tale of dispossession and displacement that reaches beyond history

• Justine Jordan
  The Guardian, Thursday 14 February 2013
  
  
  

A common story … Detail of a harvesting scene circa 1577 from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Click for full image. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Jim Crace's literary inheritance, he's said, is not so much the world of books as "the thousands of years of unwritten narrative, the oral tradition". His novels often reach beyond the limits of the historical record: to the advent of the bronze age in The Gift of Stones, to Christ's sojourn in the Judean desert in Quarantine, to the new dark age of a future America in The Pesthouse. Harvest, his latest novel, dramatises one of the great under-told narratives of English history: the forced enclosure of open fields and common land from the late medieval era on, whereby subsistence agriculture was replaced by profitable wool production and the peasant farmers dispossessed and displaced. "The sheaf is giving way to sheep", as Crace puts it here, and an immemorial connection between people and their local environment is being broken.

1. Harvest
2. by Jim Crace
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But how do you tell the story of a settlement too insignificant to have a name, and peasants whose only signatures are their scything styles? Crace needs an observant outsider, which is where Walter Thirsk comes in. Though the novel begins in the plural, as "we" are summoned from the harvest by ominous smoke over the manor house, Walter quickly establishes his individual voice. He came to the village in the service of Master Kent, who married the daughter of the manor 12 years ago; fell in love with a local; and has worked the land since. Both men are now widowers, and retain an uneasy familiarity dating back to boyhood, when Walter's mother suckled them both – "brothers in milk", but not family. Walter counts himself part of the village community, but – appropriately for a book that is all about power and belonging and ownership – will find himself alienated from gentlemen and labourers alike when the timeless certainties of village life are overturned. "I never was a local tree, grown in this soil from seed, to die where I was planted."

Several strangers broach the village: two men and a dangerously alluring woman, already dispossessed by enclosure elsewhere; the new lord of the manor Master Jordan, come to reclaim his family property from Master Kent, who as a widower without heirs has no claim on the manor house he married into; Mr Quill, employed to map and measure the area to prepare it for the enclosure that Master Kent hoped to introduce by consent and Master Jordan is only too happy to push through by force. The villagers' suspicion and scapegoating of the trio cowering in a thrown-together shack on the common land sets in train a series of violent events that empties the village and only smoothes the path to enclosure. Not, as Walter realises, that change could ever have been averted: "Dissent is never counted; it is weighed. The master always weighs the most." Master Jordan promises to provide Christ as well as capitalism: he will pay for a church to be built in the village at last, with a bell to summon those permitted to remain to prayer – and hurry them to work.

Crace brings his signature combination of atmosphere and exactitude to every aspect of this far‑off world, from landscape and ploughing to domestic interiors and the taste of magic mushrooms (a "reasty mix of horse's hoofs, burnt hair and candle wax"). The prose is extraordinary: rich yet measured, estranged and familiar, both intimate and austere. The narrative, though, proceeds by odd fits and starts, tracking back and forwards in time as Walter, struggling to resolve the train of consequence, reconstructs past events and considers future possibilities, guesses at others' motivations, resolves to act, hesitates, does not. It becomes gradually apparent that he is absent from nearly all the key scenes, as though the book is enacting his own exclusion from the community to which he believes he belongs.

There are many mysteries and flights of fancy in the novel, but few answers. In the end Walter is most closely allied with Mr Quill, the romantic mapmaker, who – like the storyteller in The Gift of Stones – is excluded from the world of practical work by his damaged arm. Walter also damages his hand, forcing him to abandon the toil of the harvest for intellectual labour helping Quill to chart the area. Quill's map gives Walter a different perspective on his world: not only a bird's-eye view, but an abstract representation of something previously unmediated by anything other than his own senses. "I have my blues," he thinks defensively, as he watches Quill mix up colours and remembers various skies he's seen. The map is "effortless: a lie. He hasn't captured time ... No man has ever seen this view."

Throughout the novel the certainty of the land, the "busy, kindly, scented universe of crops and the unerring traces of its calendar", is set against the human urge to shape the world into stories, to guess and theorise and surmise. Stories grounded in the landscape also loom large, in customs such as choosing the gleaning queen when the harvest is brought in, or bumping heads against boundary stones to affirm the limits of the local world. What will change with enclosure is that sense of balance: "This land," Master Kent says, "has always been much older than ourselves ... Not any more." The environmental crisis we are facing now is on a global as well as a local level. Harvest can be read in mythical, even biblical terms, but the physical and emotional displacement of individuals and communities at its heart remains as politically resonant today as it was at the time.

THE GUARDIAN

Colm Tóibín and Jim Crace on Man Booker prize shortlist

Man Booker prize nominee Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín and Jim Crace

on Man Booker prize shorlist

By Isabel Berwick
September 10, 2013

The six-strong shortlist for the UK’s best-known literary award, the Man Booker prize for fiction, was announced on Tuesday. In a group notable for its geographic diversity, four women and two men will compete for the £50,000 prize, awarded on October 15 in London.

Eleanor Catton, a New Zealander, is the youngest author on the list. Shortlisted for her 800 page, Victorian-style second novel, The Luminaries, Ms Catton will be 28 when the winner is announced.

The only debut fiction to make the final six comes from US-resident Zimbabwean NoViolet Bulawayo, 31, forWe Need New Names, the tale of a girl’s life in an African shanty town and subsequent exile in America.

The others on the list are The Lowland, by US-based writer Jhumpa Lahiri, which follows two Calcutta-born brothers, and the Canadian writer Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, a novel that links the lives of a lonely Canadian woman and a Japanese teenager.

The early favourites to win, however, are the two men on the list: veteran English writer Jim Crace for his 11th book, Harvest, a bleak story of dispossessed peasants in an unnamed feudal village; and Colm Tóibín for The Testament of Mary, a retelling of Jesus’s life from his mother’s point of view – at 101 pages by some distance the shortest book chosen. Colm Tóibín has been shortlisted twice before (in 1999 and 2004) and Jim Crace once, in 1997.

The five-strong judging panel read 152 novels submitted by publishers, and whittled the contenders down to six from a longlist of 13 books announced in July.

Chairman of the judges, the writer and academic Robert Macfarlane, said this year’s panel was “drawn to those novels that extend the power and possibility of the form”. Each of the six shortlisted titles, he said, was chosen for displaying “style, verve, experimentation”.

The linking theme in this group of books, Mr Macfarlane said, “is connection – ways of connecting, and inevitably also about connection’s dark reverse. These novels are all about the strange ways people are drawn together, and the . . . ways they are torn apart.”

Winning the Man Booker award guarantees a sales boost: the 2012 prize went to Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, the second in a projected trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell and the court of King Henry VIII. The first book in the series, Wolf Hall, won the 2009 Man Booker prize, and the two titles have sold a combined 1.5m copies.

There’s no obvious similar blockbuster title on the 2013 shortlist, nor are there any books from very small publishing houses. In 2012, three of the final six came from very small imprints, which saw sales rocket after Man Booker recognition.

FINANCIAL TIMES

Man Booker prize / Bookies' favourite Jim Crace leads shortlist

 

Man Booker prize: Bookies' favourite Jim Crace leads shortlist

Six books, set all over the globe, range from 

Tuesday 10 September 2013 11.04 BST

Time for Harvest?... Jim Crace. Photograph: Ted Thai/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Bookies' favourite Jim Crace heads the six-strong Man Booker prize shortlist, announced this morning, with his fable about the enclosure of England's common lands, Harvest.

Also on the list are young New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton's hotly-tipped historical epic about New Zealand's gold rush, The Luminaries, and Colm Toibin's ultra-short novel about Jesus' mother, The Testament of Mary.

The three remaining books are Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, moving between Calcutta and the US; NoViolet Bulawayo's debut novel We Need New Names, which takes a young girl from a Zimbabwean slum to America; and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, about a suicidal Tokyo schoolgirl whose diary is washed up from the sea.

The judging panel, chaired by nature writer Robert Macfarlane, is made up of the broadcaster Martha Kearney, the critic and biographer Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, the classicist and critic Natalie Haynes and the author and critic Stuart Kelly. The £50,000 winner will be announced on 15 October.

The shortlist

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus) 

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (Granta)

Harvest by Jim Crace (Picador) 

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (Bloomsbury) 

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (Canongate) 

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín (Viking) 

THE GUARDIAN

Man Booker 2013 / Why this is the best shortlist in a decade

Man Booker 2013

Why this is the best shortlist in a decade

Neither the diverse nationalities of its authors, nor the settings of their novels, can account for the sheer intensity of feeling and intelligence of ideas in this year's lineup

Sarah Churchwell

Tuesday 10 September 2013

Novel novels … six books that resist generic categories and divert from formal expectations

For some, the shortlist for this year´s Man Booker prize will prove a disappointment. It affords few opportunities for sniping about literariness and entertainment, elitism and populism. There have been no stories of infighting, backbiting, horse-trading or the other nefarious activities in which literary judges are said to indulge. They have not settled for safe mediocrity, or the usual suspects. The worst that can be said of this year's judges is that they have been too inclusive, a risible accusation in a supposedly democratic culture.

The Man Booker is, after all, a Commonwealth prize, as well as a British and Irish one, and the shortlist reflects the common wealth of many nations, many imaginations. It registers not only a multicultural world, but its migratory visions: an Irish writer's meditation on an ancient Middle Eastern myth; a Japanese-Canadian writer's linking of kamikaze pilots and 9/11 suicide bombers; the mingling in 19th-century New Zealand of Maori, Scottish, American, Irish and Chinese, drawn by the hope and greed that drives all frontier tales; a Calcutta family wrestling with diasporic American life and ghosts of the old world; a dark tale apparently set in Merrie Olde England, yet concerning deracination and exile; and a girl who leaves a shantytown in Zimbabwe for the false hope of the American Dream in Detroit.

But these novels are more than a catalogue of places and ethnicities, of paint-by-numbers social and political categories. It takes a fairly impoverished view of literature to measure it by the ethnicity of its characters or its author, as if we judged the Mona Lisa on the basis that it's Italian. Of the six shortlisted, Jim Crace´s Harvest is probably the most explicitly about the ways in which place shapes our identity. A parable about enclosure, it is set in an indeterminate agrarian past that resembles 17th-century England but remains carefully undated, uncharted. Walter Thirsk is an outsider who has found a home in a small farming village, but over the course of an allegorical seven days, his pastoral life descends into a dies irae. Dangerous knowledge is acquired when a man named Quill comes to map the area: the fall ensues, and only expulsion can follow. Thirsk's exile is decidedly spiritual, as well as physical, his world darkening and constricting as it sends him spinning out into the unknown.

The most significant literary locations are often interior and psychological, as are characters' journeys. Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being can be described as the story of a writer in western Canada who finds the diary of a Japanese girl whom she fears drowned in the 2011 tsunami; but it is also a metaphysical exploration of the nature of time, quantum mechanics, and the boundaries of fiction. It includes a girl from the past named Nao (Now) writing her own In Search of Lost Time, the returned ghost of a kamikaze pilot, and the near-death of Schrödinger's cat. The fact that its author is Japanese-Canadian should only be part of the story if Ozeki chooses for it to be so: which is precisely what she does, in the most meta- of all the shortlisted fictions.

In fact, all six novels are just as interested in time as in place, many of them more so. Narrative is a time-consumed form; much of the pleasure in these novels comes from their explorations of history, memory, and myth. Eleanor Catton's 19th-century romp through New Zealand gold mines, The Luminaries, spends 400 pages telling the story of one fateful day, before orbiting through a constellation of carefully charted dates, spinning backwards through Antipodean astrological cycles as history unravels. A joyous pastiche of the Victorian sensation novel, it starts with shipwreck, and moves through opium dens, prostitution, illegitimate siblings, theft, blackmail, murder and the tincture of the supernatural. Its form is extraordinary, a complex astrological charting that allows for the luminaries (traditionally, the sun and moon) to be fixed characters around whom 12 other characters orbit, in long chapters that wane to short chapters as the moon disappears. The Luminaries is a book about panning for gold, in relationships, stories and books. Like Harvest, from which it seems so different, the one so austere, the other so voluptuary,The Luminaries, too, is about how we chart our destinies.

Of the six, the books most concerned with our present world are NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland. By no coincidence, they are also the most rooted in specific political realities: Zimbabwe bursts out from the former and Calcutta defines the latter, even when it's set in Rhode Island. These are also, interestingly, the most traditional in form: a coming-of-age story and a multigenerational epic respectively. The Lowland spans the era from Indian independence to the present, telling the story of two brothers from Calcutta whose lives are shaped by political upheaval; one is murdered young, the other pursues a safe life in Rhode Island until he decides to care for his brother's widow and baby, bringing politics into his home in ways he doesn't foresee. Bulawayo's protagonist is a 10-year-old child navigating Mugabe's Zimbabwe before she is sent to Detroit (which the Zimbabwean children not-so-mistakenly call "Destroyedmichygen"). The Zimbabwean sections are told with great ebullience and linguistic brio, rich with dark comedy, before Darling leaves Paradise, her shantytown, for Detroit, that tense symbol of America's lost Edenic hopes.

Colm Tóibín's remarkable The Testament of Mary foregoes the consolations of paradise for the suffering of Golgotha. Abbreviated, condensed, it is an apocryphal gospel from the perspective of Jesus's mother. Tóibín's Mary is a sceptic who thinks her gentle son has been led astray by hubris and the adulation of the "misfits" with whom he surrounds himself, appalled that he calls himself the son of God. But it is also about memory, the way that language forms our myths, the ways in which our traditions are fortuitous, accidental. "Words matter," Mary tells us, as her son's chroniclers try to coerce her to concur with their versions. This is not a testament of faith, but of passion in the archaic sense. Memory cheats; stories reconstruct and invent, as we try to wrestle with mystery, seeking an impossible truth.

The chair of this year's judging panel, Robert Macfarlane, explained when announcing the shortlist: "We were drawn to novels that sought to extend the possibilities of the form … We wanted novel novels." And that is what they found, six books that resist generic categories and divert from formal expectations. We could seek, Polonius-like, to fit them back into hybrid genres: is Harvest tragical-pastoral, The Testament of Marymythical-historical, We Need New Names comical-pastoral? The criticism that literary prizes elicit often seems determined so to categorise and reduce, even to travesty. Doubtless such fault-finding is symptomatic of our captious society more generally, but it is not very useful. For example, deciding to pin his literary evaluations on individual words plucked from whole novels, Philip Hersher wrote in The Spectator when the longlist was announced that he could date Harvest from a character's wearing of mauve, fixing its action firmly in the 1850s, surely a strange era in which to place a story so redolent of the long 17th century; but it also flouts the timeless spirit of the novel. And is it worth chastising Eleanor Catton for allowing an 1866 character to say "hello" in The Luminaries? In point of fact, "hello" was widely used in North America by the 1840s, and many of Catton's characters travelled via the California gold rush, so who's to say what linguistic nuggets they might have acquired on their travels? As Hamlet retorts to Polonius, "O judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou!" It's one thing for a critic to be a pedant, another to be a pedant manque.

Words matter, as Tóibín says, but one does not judge a mosaic by the colour of one pebble. Nor are the nationalities or residences of the authors, or the settings of their novels, sufficient to account for the intensity of feeling and intelligence of ideas represented by the books on this list: the dark requiems of Tóibín and Crace; the comical philosophical acrobatics of Ozeki and Catton; the heartfelt protests of Bulawayo and Lahiri. It is a marvellous list of books, perhaps the best shortlist in a decade, and it does what it is meant to do: advocate for new fiction in general, and these superb books in particular.

• Sarah Churchwell is professor of American literature at the University of East Anglia.

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