Melissa Harrison's latest novel, The Given World, offers a haunting and absorbing portrait of an English village over six months, exploring the interconnected lives of its inhabitants amid an era of ecological crisis. The story unfolds between the equinoxes of a year, in a time when the seasons seem to have lost their rhythm. Central to the narrative is Clare, a woman facing her final months after a diagnosis, whose understanding of interconnectedness shapes the novel's web of lives.
Harrison, known for her probing examinations of rural life, creates a microcosm where daily work is charged with cosmic change. The novel features a diverse cast, including a desperate farmer listening to American evangelists, a postman, and a builder struck with vertigo. The author avoids sentimentality, instead offering acute portrayals of working men and capable women, such as Faye the death doula, who respond to the demands of endings with quiet competence.
The novel is marked by eerie omens and a sense of leave-taking, as the River Welm 'sets about its final work'. While the tone can be portentous, Harrison includes wry moments, like a badger leaving the valley 'like a departing burglar captured on CCTV'. The correspondence between Clare's dying and the world's dying is handled with subtlety, not laboured.
Harrison's commitment to diverse group portraiture, seen in her previous works like All Among the Barley and Hawthorn Time, continues here. She urges no trifling with the countryside, taking an epigraph from Christopher Neve: 'The notion of country lends itself easily to sentimentality. In fact, it is never to be trifled with.' The Given World is a stunning, subtle novel for our times.
