Silence and solitude permeate Melissa Harrison's latest novel, The Given World, a stunning tale of rural life set against an era of ecological crisis. The story follows the inhabitants of a village in a river valley over six months between the equinoxes, capturing a time when the seasons seem to have lost their rhythm.
A Microcosm of Interconnected Lives
The novel opens with Connor, a young man sitting stoned on a hill above his village, pondering his place in the world. He is proud of his work fencing pastures while his friends are at university, but he grapples with the overwhelming thought of all their lives being equally real and urgent. A phrase from a book he hated at school comes to mind: "the roar on the other side of silence," a nod to George Eliot that Harrison uses to illuminate the anxious and ecstatic labourer clutching a can of Fanta.
At first, the central figure appears to be Clare, who knows every 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. However, the novel extends beyond the priory to trace a web of lives, paying tribute to Clare's understanding of interconnectedness. In the breezeblock bungalow next door, a desperate farmer tunes in at dawn to American evangelists on the radio. Like Saj the postman, we visit addresses where literary fiction rarely bothers to stop.
Harrison's Commitment to Group Portraiture
Readers familiar with Harrison's work will recognise her commitment to diverse group portraiture. In All Among the Barley (2018), she located readers with absorbing immediacy in 1930s East Anglia, observing 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, where the small particularities of 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 a 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 is true to the times but can be flattening. I was glad of idiosyncratically wry moments, such as a last badger leaving the valley, its grey rump bouncing like a departing burglar captured on CCTV.
Feminist Bearings and Portrayals of Working Men
The correspondence between Clare's dying and the world's dying is thankfully not laboured, but there is 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 is much to Harrison's credit that this novel of strong feminist bearings should offer some of the most acute portrayals of working men I have 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.
Resisting Sentimentality
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 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.
Ecological Seriousness and Communal Form
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 is a bold choice in a market hungry for redemptive plotlines, emotional journeys, and standout characters. Refusing to prioritise any one inhabitant's story, Harrison works towards a communal form. It is made from distinctive personal idioms but strives for a voice that is composite or impersonal. There is no Greek chorus chanting us to a certain end. Instead, there are indefinable tensions, quiet griefs, and 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.
