Breakfast At Libraries

Before the publication of the Booker-shortlisted Harvest, Jim Crace said he thought it would be his last novel, which somehow makes this book about a middle-aged narrator witnessing the end of a long-standing way of life and struggling to come to terms with it even more poignant.

Walter Thirsk, an inhabitant of a tiny, unnamed English village in an unspecified period, is something of an outsider, even though he's been resident for many years and was, until the death of his wife, married into one of its longest-established families. Walter is an astute observer with an eye for the bigger picture - perhaps this is what makes him the ideal assistant to the chart-maker who has arrived to map out the land on which the villagers scratch out a living communally under the direction of a manor-dwelling landowner. Walter has never seen a map of his village before despite his intimate knowledge of it (similarly, he hasn't seen his own face for over a year because nobody in the village owns a mirror) and is fascinated to see its shape unfolding on the chart-maker's page. Yet seeing the land mapped out also contributes to the sense of dread which pervades Harvest, as it's clear that the land is to be 'enclosed' - fenced off for sheep-farming instead of cultivated for crops and cattle - and that this will change the villagers' lives forever.


Harvest is not just a novel about the end of an era. It's about fear, suspicion and guilt, and the effect these have on the behaviour of otherwise decent people. Innocent strangers from another village, themselves victims 'of sheep', are pilloried without mercy for a crime the whole village secretly knows they didn't commit; family members tortured by the new landowner's stewards are abandoned to their fate. Walter's own position on the edge of the insular, 'thicketed' village community is a constant source of anxiety to him, and it's ironic that he and the other outsiders might just find themselves the last people left who can keep the village alive.

Crace's prose is astonishingly good, peppered with arresting and original imagery that gives Walter a distinctive and peculiarly convincing voice. It's fair to say that, despite the magnitude of the change that comes over the village during the course of the novel, this isn't a fast-moving narrative and many of the most dramatic events take place off the page, but I found Crace's writing such a pleasure to read that I didn't mind this at all - and in any case the sense of anxious dread that builds throughout creates tension in itself. Some have also criticised this novel for its non-specific historical setting and hence a perceived lack of 'accuracy', but this isn't intended to be a historical novel; it's more than that, and explores themes and truths about human nature that would be every bit as relevant if the setting was a contemporary one.

I chose this book because I wanted a crime novel that I would be able to race through fairly quickly, but which would still have a bit more to it than a standard murder mystery. Unfortunately, it didn't entirely meet those criteria. The set-up is intriguing and the main character is refreshingly different from the average heroine, but I didn't find The Detective's Daughter by Lesley Thomson a gripping read.

Stella Darnell is an independent, practical, emotionally rather cold - some might even say hard - woman with a successful contract cleaning business. When her semi-estranged father Terry, a recently-retired police officer, is found dead from a heart attack in an unfamiliar area, Stella begins what is for her the tiresome and irritating task of sorting out his belongings and personal affairs. During this process she discovers that Terry, in his own time, is still secretly investigating a notorious 'cold case' - the murder of a pretty, middle-class young mother, Kate Rokesmith, that took place in 1981. Terry's own house is just a minute or two from the Rokesmiths' former family home; moreover, Stella has a regular cleaning contract at a home in the same street, a home now occupied by an older woman with apparent dementia who was a key witness in the Rokesmith case. Stella, full of repressed guilt and confusion over her fractured relationship with Terry, finds herself attempting to solve the case herself - aided by a mysterious employee, Jack Harmon, whose multiple neuroses and OCD-related disorders are less problematic than his secretive, often duplicitous behaviour.

Stella herself is in some ways brave choice as a main character, and I think one of the strongest aspects of the book. She's selfish, unglamorous, rather joyless, lacks perception when it comes to others' motives, and has no real interests, let alone passions, beyond her cleaning company. That said, Lesley Thomson still manages to make her an interesting anchor for the story and gives her enough depth to make us care about her. Jack Harmon, on the other hand, is pure caricature, as is Stella's handsome dentist and occasional dinner-date, Ivan Challoner.

The narrative is pieced together from sections told from different perspectives and from different periods, which would have worked nicely if it had been less clumsily executed, but for me it simply made the story feel disjointed, as if the writer couldn't find a more cohesive way of combining the different plot strands. Thomson seems to be keen on detail, which is a necessary trait in a crime writer, but here so much of the detail in the descriptions of characters' daily business is simply superfluous that I became swiftly bored. There is also an entire subplot involving Stella's former partner which added nothing to the story but more pages.

I also guessed two big revelations - one being the identity of the murderer - very early on. There are few things more disappointing than the murderer being one of those characters who clearly has no other reason at all be in the book than to be revealed as the killer, and being able to guess the murderer is certainly not something to celebrate in a crime novel.

I could possibly have forgiven some of this book's faults if it had had some pace to it; similarly I could have forgiven the lack of pace if the plot and characters had been more engaging and original. But as it was, this book came to feel like something of a chore.