An everyday story of hard-pressed hill farmers is all about keeping calm and carrying on
We have Susie Steiner to thank, in part, for the "Keep Calm and Carry On" phenomenon. It was her praise of the wartime public information poster in a Guardian column that unleashed a deluge of derivatives; though as she states on her website, "perhaps the less said about that the better".
Steiner's other great enthusiasm is Yorkshire, where she keeps a cottage on the moors – an idyllic location to write novels, perhaps, though a somewhat less forgiving place to live on the meagre subsistence provided by hill farming. But Steiner's debut work of fiction is a creditable attempt to view the landscape from the perspective of people with flocks to raise rather than editorial deadlines to meet.
Joe Hartle has a reasonably-sized flock and an unreasonably large debt accrued from tending 300 acres of marginal land rented from the Water Board. His wife Ann holds the purse strings and makes grim trips to the accountant, whose best advice is to sell up, though Hartles have worked this land for generations, and Joe intends that they continue to do so. The problem is that his elder son, Max, is an indolent alcoholic content to live out of his parents' pocket, and his brother Bartholomew has left to run a garden centre down south.
Steiner structures the narrative over the course of a farming year that conspires to become the worst on record. Practically every misfortune that can befall the family comes to pass, from a barn that goes up in flames in the middle of Christmas dinner to an outbreak of toxoplasmosis; while the one spark of hope is snuffed out when Max's wife has a miscarriage. Yet none of this is enough to destroy Joe's faith in the dignity of his vocation: "The ground giving up its treasure to him: it was a beautiful thing … This is what a man was meant for."
If the chain-of-disaster plot becomes slightly predictable, Steiner shows great empathy for her characters. One warms to Max's cold fish of a wife, Primrose, whose fondness for dismantling electrical appliances on the kitchen table is symptomatic of her poorly connected relationship; while Bartholomew is so uncertain of his direction that he has yet to come up with a more assertive name for his garden centre than "Garden Centre". And there's a great portrait of Bartholomew's over-eager girlfriend Ruby, who has an irrepressible appetite for life and second helpings: "Dieting, she felt, was like learning a new and difficult language when you knew you were only going to visit the country for a couple of weeks."
The book has been soundly researched: Steiner clearly knows about the dwindling market value of store lambs, incentive schemes for fuel crops and the like. What it doesn't really demonstrate is a truly elemental sense of connection with the land as evidenced in Ross Raisin's peerless account of growing up on a North Yorkshire hill farm, God's Own Country . While Steiner's prose is plain and accessible, it would be difficult to top Raisin's bloodied, been-there-done-that vision of lambing time: "a barn full of sticky articles stumbling about the place on tidgy twig-legs".
Steiner has likened the process of novel writing to knitting, which may explain why the result occasionally feels a little cosy. But it's a narrative that works hard to keep its big heart in the right place; and Mrs Hartle's domestic stoicism deserves sympathy: "It is age that's taught her a kind of dogged tenacity. She's realised, late in the day, that the stringing together of small things, and keeping going – above all plodding on – is what makes a life." If nothing else, Homecoming is a matter-of-fact demonstration of the virtue of rolling up one's sleeves, keeping calm and carrying on.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
0 comments:
Post a Comment