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. ( )

Really beautiful writing in this story of a girl growing up in England's farming heartland, but I didn't like the ending at all. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3720860.html

For some reason I apparently put this on my wishlist, and my kind wife duly got it for my birthday in April. It's a very interesting novel set in the 1930s, in a rural England where there is still a shortage of labour due to the first word war, and 14-year-old Edie is coming to terms with the world outside her farm and her village. Glamorous Constance arrives from London to write sketches of country life; but she brings much more dangerous ideas with her as well, and Edie's life ends up completely disrupted (it's made clear at the start of the first chapter that there has been a major disruption, and we spend the rest of the book finding out what happened). I thought this was a great book, if not necessarily a cheerful one, and I will look out for more by this writer. It won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019. ( )

If you like vividly painted descriptions of nature, lyrical evocations of rural life, and more specifically of farming, then this is the thing for you. And also, if you like a classic coming-of-age story, including the inevitable sexual initiation, this is it, too. Harrison brings to life a fictional village in 1930s Suffolk, England. All through the eyes of the young, fairly naive farmer's daughter Edi Mather. Many ingredients seem familiar, especially if you've already read a few Thomas Hardy novels. But Harrison adds some accents of her own. The most original of these is presented through the character Constance FitzAllen, a feisty town lady who speaks highly of the traditional values of the countryside, but appears to have a political agenda of her own. Harrison incorporates the rise of fascism in England here, but in such a way that it actually has more to do with Brexit and topics of today. Captivating and lyrical, for sure. But personally, I thought the story was slow to start. It picks up speed past halfway, only to come to at a rather abrupt and not entirely coherent ending. ( )

In rural Suffolk in the 1930's the effects of the Great War still loomed over those working the land. There was some change in the air though, modernisation was slowly happening despite the global Great Depression. For everything that was moving on, there was as much standing still too. At Wych Farm, they farm the land in the old way and everyone, including the fourteen-year-old Edie Mather, is still expected to help with the harvest.

In these uncertain times the appearance of Constance FitzAllen from the heady heights of the capital looking for stories in the rural economy and hoping to capture the old ways before they disappear for good. For all her glamour, FitzAllen brings with her ideas that seem quite innocent at first, yet have deeply sinister and radical roots. As Edie finishes school and has to decide what she does next, the appeal of heading to London grows on her and she hopes that it will take her away from the unwanted attention she is getting from a lad from a nearby farm. Things are coming to a head as FitzAllen starts to push her agenda to the villagers in the pub one night.

As with her previous books, the natural world is the very bedrock of this story, but this time she has woven in the hardship of farming the 1930's as well as the alarming rise of nationalism in the UK that had certain parallels to Germany. Draped over all of this is the story of Edie as she reaches a crossroads in her life, unsure of what to do, wanting to not be the baby of the family anymore, but fearful of the future. There is something about Harrison's novels that resonate with me and in All Among the Barley, her writing is lyrical and eloquent without feeling rose-tinted and sentimental; there is proper drama within these pages. It feels authentic too, the research that Harrison must have undertaken to get the details right for the season, the region and the language spoken at the time. It evokes standing in that field feeling the late summer breeze brushing the barley. There are beautiful maps by Neil Gower too! I can highly recommend this book from Melissa Harrison, her stature with words increases with every book she writes. It is timely too as it feels that history is repeating itself at the moment. ( )