- Paperback: 232 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber (19 Jun 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571196888
- ISBN-13: 978-0571196883
- Product Dimensions: 21.2 x 13.4 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,829,133 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
In the heart of Wessex, 17-year-old Lewis Pike is the last of a tribe, refusing the lure of urban life, desperate to cling to his village birthright. But what does a village mean? Is it the microcosm of a wider dysfunction, as drunken poet Gerald tells him? Is it the imposition of alleged rituals like the corn dolly the "incomers" want to introduce into the harvest church service? Does it lie in the memories of his elderly grandmother? In the community forged by the illicit dogfights? Is it a family heritage, when the family is now a charity case, and Lewis can't hold down a job?
Christopher Hart's first novel takes on profound, important issues, and refuses to take easy options. At its best, his prose is taut and brutal, reminiscent of early Ted Hughes. In Lewis, he creates an increasingly tortured and brutal young man, teetering on the edge of melodrama, but at the same time can evoke without condescension the warm badinage of a Friday night at the village pub. The subplot seduction by Gerald's lusty wife Mary is less convincing, perhaps because the characters and the situation seem to belong to stock literary types. However, there should be no doubt that Hart is a writer well worth watching, and The Harvest a valuable and rare treatment of England's besieged rural life. -- Alan Stewart
Product Description
A debut novel about adolescence and first love, English nature and the profound changes affecting the rural landscape. With no job and no prospects, young country-boy Lewis Pike is casually seduced by a married woman. When she ends the relationship, his fragile world disintegrates.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
An extraordinarily powerful and convincing portrait of the death of the English countryside - told not as a rant or a sermon but as a deeply moving and beautifully written tale of love and loss - the kind of book Thomas Hardy might have written if he were alive today. Seen through the eyes of the tragic protagonist, 17-year old Lewis Pike, the English countryside - specifically the Wiltshire/ Dorset border - remains as mesmerically beautiful as ever, but its true inhabitants, the 'locals', the 'oo-ar oo-ar' joke figures of pathetic TV comedy, are gradually being driven to extinction by change and economics. Much noise is made about the vanishing tribes of the Amazon, say, or the Kalahari. With brilliant originality, Hart has here raised an answering and impassioned cry for the tribe that is vanishing under our own noses: the rural working-classes of England. This is a MUST READ!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Here a country life is shown to be just as rotten for its underclass as any urban landscape. Poor old Lewis simply isn't needed anymore and he doesn't have the ability to adapt. Perhaps the conclusion is inevitable, but the portrait that Hart paints is fascinating and just so credible. Read it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book has been described as an extraordinary and haunting first novel, giving a wholly original view of English rural life, and as dark, pagan, and utterly compelling. In fact it complements magnificently those novels which reflect on our mediocrity-saturated urban desperation.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Countryside Classic
I was on a day-trip to a local National Trust property a few miles down the road from my humble abode. Read more
Published on 30 July 2007 by Uncle Moley
sadness, yes, but wisdom galore!
Christopher Hart had done a very difficult thing. He's taken the ennui of urban existence into the countryside where it all becomes rather lurgy and nasty in the woodshed. Read more
Published on 15 July 2000
sad and compelling
i found the harvest to be a very sad novel. what struck me was the lonliness and isolation of the central character lewis pike. who you felt belong to another era. Read more
Published on 13 July 2000 by M. TROKE
Unputdownable and enlightening
Astonishingly appealing with incredible insight
Published on 15 April 2000
A haunting, unfortgettable read
Unmissable - a tour de force of English country life as you've never seen it. If you only read one book this year this has to be the one! Read more
Published on 10 Mar 2000
Trash
A weak and self-congratulatory debut, over-praised by the critics on release. The prose is, in the main, feeble; the sentence-structure, exasperating; the sentiment,... Read more
Published on 19 Sep 1999
wasp factory meets Jude The Obscure
A brilliant exploration of the decline of rural life. A very clever novel that finishes the job Hardy started last century.
Published on 31 July 1999
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