Harvest by Georgina Harding
Review by Gary Kaill
There is a moment, in just the last couple of pages of this extraordinary book, that sends shockwaves back through everything that has come before: a sharing of information between two major characters that causes the reader to pause, slack-jawed. In lesser hands, this expertly delivered piece of narrative disruption — in actual fact, a softly rendered scene that takes place before the events of Harvest — might have choked on its own dramatic ambition, but in the hands of Georgina Harding, it lands lightly on the page and earns its power and its effect.
Fans of Harding will be familiar with that deftness of touch with which she fashions her complex and deeply humanist stories. Harvest, however, represents something of a touchstone for this often under-appreciated writer, bringing to conclusion as it does a sequence of novels that began with 2016’s The Gun Room and continued with Land of the Living two years later. Both Harding and her publisher seem to have pointedly avoided labelling the books as a trilogy; Harvest, in packaging and promotion, makes no reference at all to its connection with its predecessors. It is all too easy, of course, to view inter-connected works of this type in terms of not just their commercial possibilities, but also their scope. Everyone loves the sense of achievement, the notion of return on investment, that the epic provides. Perhaps, conscious of their knotty schema, Harding is intentionally eschewing those weary (and wearying) norms, and offering something more deliciously inviting, more generous. Find the other books if you must, she might be saying. Read them, perhaps, in whichever order you choose?
Those readers who come to Harvest unaware of its provenance will suffer little. The story it continues and concludes is vast and magnetic, but in and of itself, Harvest is a staggering achievement, regardless. It begins in the early 1970s on a farm in the Norfolk countryside. Here, Jonathan, awaits the arrival of Kumiko, a Japanese language teacher he met in Tokyo the previous year. After a brief affair, he has returned home to return to his life with his widowed mother Claire and his older brother, Richard. Having settled, Jonathan writes to Kumiko, sending her a picture of the family farmhouse, and asks her to join him. ‘Come and see me, he wrote. Just that, in soft pencil, on the back of the photograph.’
As this point, what we do know, us followers of the story so far? Everything and nothing. Each of these books chooses a particular strand of the overall chronology as its narrative foundation — they all, however, tug and twist at the timeline, revisiting previous events from different character’s viewpoints, introducing strands and sub-plots with care and restraint. Harding demonstrates a great deal of logistical savvy here. Consistently a canny remove from showy, her design ethic serves only to dramatise, to enlighten, to enrich.
The Gun Room begins the story by exploring the relationship between Jonathan and Kumiko, as well as carving out rich backstory for both. Jonathan’s self-propelled and almost wilfully reckless career as a war photographer, causes him to experience a shocking raid on a small village by US soldiers towards the end of the Vietnam war. One picture he takes there, in particular, becomes a global sensation, and its syndication earns him enough money to travel throughout Asia, pausing in Tokyo, where he meets Kumiko. Gradually, the pair come to understand their shared history. Jonathan’s dead father Charlie fought in World War II against the Japanese, before returning home to take up the family farm; Kumiko’s beloved grandfather fought in the same war: a revelation that unseats Jonathan when Kumiko casually tells him. (‘He nodded, head straight up and down like a toy. She was not to know that there was any emotional significance in that for him.’)
Land of the Living shifts focus; to some degree, it is the least expansive of the books, concentrating on Charlie and his experiences in the war — how those experiences define and disrupt his attempts to return to a ‘normal’ English life. Twice he becomes lost: once while fighting the Japanese in Nagaland; once, more significantly, when finally home. The book examines the after-affects of war with unflinching candour. At one point, Charlie visits the widow of a fallen comrade. She tells him: ‘You must have had a rotten time of it, yourself in the jungle. I hear you were lost a long time. I’m so glad you made it out.’ But the great tragedy for Charlie — and this becomes the emotional and narrative thread that sustains the sequence, and triggers and casts long shadows over subsequent events — is that he never does make it out. He remains forever lost.
Harvest’s narrative flourish is to position itself as unexpected bookend: a vessel, in concert with The Gun Room, the pair somehow cradling the whole. It is something of a relief to see Jonathan and Kumiko again, and Claire, of course. All three characters live and travel through these pages vividly, effortlessly, though Harding is clear from the off, shortly after Kumiko arrives, that the trials that will unseat all three are already in motion: ‘She’s put you in the spare. I hope you don’t mind. (She did mind. She minded very much. She minded the distance that was put between them, from the beginning.)’
Harding excels at showing to the reader a foreign world through a foreigner’s eye. Here, when writing from the viewpoint of Kumiko — transported from the vast cityscape of Tokyo to the endless green of the Norfolk countryside — she applies to that viewpoint only as much irony as is required. ‘She went to the window and pulled back the curtains. There were no other houses to see. There was no one to hear, not inside the house or outside of it. There were birds singing. She felt she was the only person anywhere. She was a city girl. She had never had that feeling before, that she was the only person in the world, getting up out of bed and drawing the curtains onto a bright day where no one was.’
Throughout, the prose is a gift: rhythmically, so finely tuned; languid and soft. Harding (again) chooses to forego the use of quotation marks: a mode that gives those passages containing direct speech a pleasing quality of texture. As if, almost, there is so little difference between her words and her characters’ words, that the effect on the page is that passages acquire a homogeneous quality. It’s difficult, one suspects, to fully weigh outcome against (Harding’s) intent on a single reading. But these pages, spare and unfussy, sing. (And Harvest certainly demands — in part, as a result of its complex plot — to be re-read.)
Of course, the success of the prose is defined in part by Harding’s work with narrative. Such is her control of a very close third person limited viewpoint, the reader can find themselves suddenly disoriented — only for a moment, as a line or passage is re-read more closely and quickly unlocked. The effect is in keeping with the tone;. Consider this from around halfway through the book, with Kumiko and Claire finding a growing ease with each other:
‘Stay as long as you like, Claire said. It’s lovely to have you here. It was lovely to be there, she said. She said how beautiful the place was, the house, and the garden that Claire had made, the church, the village, the way of life. Jonathan did not tell me, she said, that he grew up in such a beautiful place.’
It’s the word ‘there’ that indicates the switch: the signal that this is Kumiko telling the story. But, sandwiched between Claire’s words and ‘Jonathan did not tell me…’, that single section of speech (‘It was lovely to be there’) could not have been actually spoken — directly — by anyone. It’s bravura storytelling, sentence level fireworks. A technically adroit (and deepy generous, such is the intimacy afforded the reader) choice, and a narrative high-wire. Harding walks it throughout.
That storytelling brio must manage a series of events shrouded by both the darkness of the past and a looming dread. ‘It was to be a fine harvest. A fine summer.’ Claire’s words. Words from the past from when Charlie was alive, when the farm (even in his weary eyes) contained such possibilities. It is a beautifully rendered act of foreshadowing; when we re-enter the story in the present, much of the story is given over to Jonathan’s older brother Richard. It is Richard — a heavy presence, surly and unaccomodating —- who has taken it upon himself to manage the farm, to plant the fields and reap and sell the wheat crop. This is the weight Richard carries; this, and the suspicion, long-carried and finally uncovered in this closing volume (‘Who wants to dismiss a truth they have believed since the age of ten? Or a lie, rather?’), that his younger brother has more to tell about the death of their father than he has chosen to.
Rain becomes the enemy as the summer shrinks. The sense of dread is absolutely overwhelming. Richard’s urge for violence thrums as he checks the barometer daily: pressure builds. ‘Where there was warmth without wind, the humidity just hung in the crop. Wind was what he needed, to move the moisture from the soil and from stalks and from the air. It was almost August. They should have been going by now. One year they were all done by the fifteenth.’
Aside its immaculate plotting — dense, satisfying, character-driven — Harvest gains heft via its thematic intent. The land, mirroring the experience of Charlie during the war, becomes a shadowy enemy, something to be tamed and appeased. The weight of information — the guilt of shouldering the unspeakable truth, and how holding that load for another brings only a heavier burden for all. Harding utilises the device she has explored throughout: that fine and delicate balance of allowing Jonathan, the war photographer and unwitting observer of the devastating event at the heart of the story, to bear witness as he best can. His photography becomes a desperate act of sublimation, of keeping. Without it, his world — for who dares define ‘real’? — ceases to exist.
The celebrated American war photographer Lynsey Addario scrutinises the troubling ways of seeing that photography — photographing the worst acts of our fellow humans — cannot help but introduce. ‘Cameras introduce tension,’ she writes in her superlative memoir It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War. ‘People are aware of the power of a camera and this instinctively makes most subjects uncomfortable and stiff.’ This is a lesson that Jonathan is, tragically, all too slow to comprehend.
It is Claire, unsurprisingly, who moves furthest away from the crushing impact of a broken but courageously lived life. She emerges, even though anchored to the family home, as the book’s most intrepid traveller. She learns how to navigate those trials of life as a mother and widow must, as the times insist. Harding grants her a flinty philosophical outlook: ‘One learns, she said, as one goes along. One plants, she said, and then one turns away. Things grow. Or don’t.’ Her stoicism is hard-won.
At the end, a settling comes to pass, and Harding offers her characters an exit and a new way to be. The past, she seems to be saying, can perhaps be out-run. For the reader, the book’s climax is as satisfying and as just as it can be. Harvest — indeed, the entire sequence — is a profoundly haunting work, and one that charts its complex emotional landscape with great wit and at a cooling distance. That approach, its innate generosity, supports its unerring magnetism, reinforces the complexity of the book’s moral design.
Harvest is an unparalleled masterpiece, steeped in both artistry and compassion. In how she interrogates the bruised lives of her characters, while at the same time toying so audaciously with the constraints of the narrative form, Harding once again makes a case for being one of our greatest living novelists.
Harvest is published by Bloomsbury, 18th March 2021