2019/122: All Among the Barley -- Melissa Harrison

I thought about the photograph of me in Connie's magazine ... my own image pressed into the service of something I hadn't consented to and didn't understand. That this could happen was further proof that I was not a real person, I realised; not real in the way that other people were real: Frank and John and Connie, for example. None of this would ever have happened to them. Perhaps I had made myself up entirely, and kept doing so every day. [loc. 3659]

Set in rural Suffolk in 1933, this is the story of Edie Mather, who is thirteen and somewhat isolated. The Mathers live and work at Wych Farm, and Edie knows and loves every inch of the land: the oaks which have grown around an old hitching-post, the barley-birds in the eaves, the horse-pond in the woods. When Constance FitzAllen, who wears trousers and writes for a magazine, comes to the village to preserve its ancient traditions, she befriends Edie, who knows all about the old customs and traditions.

Over it all hangs the distant shadow of the Great War, and perhaps the first stirrings of the next one. Some of the farm workers fought in Flanders: others never returned from soldiering. Edie, though, is more concerned with Alf Rose, and with the mysterious marks on the beams, and with her big brother's insistence that their grandmother is a witch.

This is a slow novel, but I didn't mind the slowness because of the immediacy of the world Harrisson describes. It's rural, but far from idyllic: as Constance says, "not one of these elegies for a lost world". [loc. 467] Edie's magical thinking feels organic: the beliefs and habits of a child who is aware that she has no agency in the world. There are tensions that Edie is only beginning to perceive (though the reader may be older and wiser), and Constance brings her own kind of trouble.

The framing narrative, hinted from the first page and shadowed throughout, is rather sad, and wholly convincing. I'm glad the book stopped when it does. "It will only appear strange for a moment, I'm sure of it ..."