The book:
For this April’s Shelf Improvement we have chosen a book which unites climactic storytelling with beautiful nature writing. Melissa Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time is a wonderful follow-up to her debut, Clay, and both are heartfelt modern stories set amongst the timelessness of the British landscape.
Hawthorn time is set in a month of spring, but the opening is far less optimistic - a fatal car crash in rural England. Harrison then takes the clock back, and we are introduced to the characters of the story. Jack, somewhat of a drifter; Jamie, a local boy ; and a couple, Kitty and Howard, who have uprooted from London for an early retirement. Each character has their own unique relationship with the countryside, which itself is as much of a character as any of the human protagonists.
With acclaim from Robert Harrison and Ali Smith alike, At Hawthorn Time is a fantastic example of nature and fiction combined. We hope you enjoying delving into our Shelf Improvement book this April.
What the Guardian thought:
Melissa Harrison’s debut, Clay, traced the intersecting lives of disparate Londoners – an elderly woman, a neglected child, a Polish immigrant – but paid most attention to the plants and animals thriving in the urban margins, nudging fiction closer to nature writing. It delicately explored human connections with the natural world, whether passionate or atrophied, while weaving a plot from the atomisation of city living.
For her second novel, Harrison moves to the countryside, but it’s no rural idyll: “Et in arcadia arseholes”, muses Howard, as the sound of local youths gunning muscle cars down B-roads drifts in at the window. He and his wife, Kitty, have moved down from London for their retirement, Kitty having spent decades longing for a life in the country (“You’re not even from the countryside,” Howard points out despairingly). Again, Harrison follows unrelated characters whose paths cross and converge. For local boy Jamie, the deep lanes around the village are “more familiar to him than his own body”, but his instinctive connection to nature has withered with the loss of the friend whose farm he used to roam; now he concentrates on the car he’s customising and works as a packer in the “blank, windowless shed” of a distribution centre.
It seems that even for rural dwellers, the natural world functions as a lost Eden: decades ago, Jamie’s grandfather came back from a wartime prison camp to find his place on the land gone and his wife nudging him into a job with higher status; today, tractor-drivers have become taxi-drivers while the farm around which the village grew lies empty and up for sale. The money now is all in housing development, with “new estates named after the places the developers had destroyed”.
But striding through the book comes the fourth main character, Jack, who maintains a quasi‑mystical connection to the land. Walking at night, sleeping in scrappy little woods, he has possession of a world “most people didn’t know existed”: “his passage across country left seeds and spores swirling in his wake, and everywhere was better for his having come through”. Jack’s perspective takes us into the fields and spinneys other characters merely drive past, allowing Harrison to focus in, literally, on the ground: in graceful, measured and compelling prose, she can write whole pages about soil and stones, the hundred-year history of a hedge.
The hawthorn of the title, bursting into blossom over the course of the book, has long been associated with death. Harrison writes with great depth and control about the accommodations of age, as Jamie’s grandfather begins to slip his hold on the world, and Howard and Kitty realise that their fresh start may also be a final act. Yet this is not at all a sombre book; spring surges on throughout, with each chapter headed by Jack’s laconic field notes, a reminder of what is happening in the natural world in tandem with busy human events.
Justine Jordan - Read the full review
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