The Given World by Melissa Harrison

Reviewed by Timothy Niedermann

Lower Eodham lies in the valley of the river Welm, somewhere in rural England. It is a small, ancient village with a little church, St. Lucy’s, whose bells have long since ceased to be rung to mark the time of day. Villagers like to tell stories of the fairies that might still be hiding about from pre-Christian times, including a witch, who lives in the river disguised as a hen pike.

Clare Grey lives in her family home, Alwins, an ancient Benedictine priory turned into a private home, where she scrupulously tends the gardens, having made them her own after the deaths of her parents. She herself is no longer young and is not feeling well. And she is alone. Her sister and only close relative, Rachael, left home long ago to live in London.

Once mainly a farming community, Lower Eodham is changing. Families that had been in the village for generations are dying out or moving away. City people wanting a second home and retirees who want a quieter life are moving in. They buy the old houses and then either remodel them extensively or simply tear them down to replace them with something modern. Farmland is being developed, and even those few farms are left are being taken over by corporate owners. The single exception is the farm of Clare’s neighbour across the road, Alan Jopes, who keeps a few cattle on the land he hasn’t sold. Among the townsfolk, nostalgia for the simplicity of the village of their childhoods mingles with anxiety about the future.

Each chapter in The Given World carries the name of one of the villagers. With considerable skill, author Melissa Harrison probes the minds of men and women, young and old, from Clare and Alan to Connor, a farm boy who leads a bit of a double life making music on Spotify, to labourers to a retired doctor and others. The contrasts in the vocabularies Harrison employs with each character are particularly riveting, revealing as they do the inner workings of very different minds, those of old farmers, real estate agents, doctors, older people, all with a different perspective on Lower Eodham—what it means, where it is going. In her acknowledgements, Harrison mentions that she actually rode in a harvest combine as part of her research. Her attention to the details of work processes such as harvesting and thatching is impressive and extremely effective in creating a deep sense of the atmosphere of the village and its surroundings.

Harrison’s vocabulary is almost voluptuous when it comes to describing the natural world in and around Lower Eodham. Not just the sheer number of plants and animals, all of which she names, but their growth cycles and behaviour. Animals burrow and reproduce. Birds sing and build nests. Nearly uncountable species of flowers bloom in fields and woods alongside roads and in Clare’s garden.

But this year something odd is happening. On top of the disruptions going on in the village thanks to the newcomers, Nature itself is changing. And this is an undercurrent running throughout the book, something described but not sharply defined. It is present not just in Harrison’s descriptions of the plants and animals, but also in the movement of the river itself, the Welm. Normally, the Welm follows the rhythm of the seasons, rising and falling, freezing in the winter, flowing fast in the spring, meandering through the summer and autumn. And the villagers follow this rhythm as they walk and drive next to it on paths and over it on bridges and through a ford that is central to the village.

But this year nothing is right. Crops are not ripening normally. Birds are not singing. Animal dens and burrows are empty. The river is erratic. Its seasonal flow is changing, and it is flooding more aggressively. All this adding to the sense of unease pervading Lower Eodham.

Harrison has written a captivating book, literally spellbinding, as if ancient forces are reacting to the changes happening in the village in their own mysterious ways. And Harrison doesn’t try to define them. Instead, she creates a deep, visceral sense of the very much living entity that Lower Eodham is.

The Given World is published by Biblioasis.