Its infuriating lack of temporal or geographical signposts suggests a fable-but without any of that genre’s sly moral gravity. Well, I confess to not having much clue regarding what, exactly, Crace was trying to reap in Harvest. The old bromide says that a good book reviewer evaluates the writer not on the discrete merits of the book, but on what the author tried to achieve. The long-simmering complaint about Crace: that his imagination exceeds his execution. Finally, though, I ended up feeling much the same as after senior prom: a hell of a lot more disappointed than I ever thought I’d be. 1 Later in the book, as land rights and enclosure laws came to the fore, I held out hope that Crace might be trying for historical fiction of the kind Hilary Mantel has mastered, only without all the royal glamour.

I wanted to like Harvest from the moment I opened it, thinking the first-person plural narration was heading for a version of Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily set in an antediluvian English village, its residents collectively digging into their own Jungian muck to extract long-submerged secrets. Crace’s latest, Harvest, will only renew the concerns The Pesthouse raised-and will also make Crace’s decision to retire, not yet fulfilled, seem all the more prescient ( he recently told Reuters he’s really done this time). You can’t help wanting something new, something beyond an inspired melding of science fiction and the horrors we ourselves dream up in the dead of night.”īut those two novels were, in postmodern terms, long ago. Joyce Carol Oates, not exactly known for wielding a sharp hatchet, wrote in The New Yorker that it was “an idea-driven work that might have been more effectively executed in graphic-novel form, or in film.” In The New York Times, Francine Prose concluded that “You can’t help wanting more from art, and from Jim Crace. He must have assessed his own career-much as Philip Roth recently did-and concluded that his best work was already on the shelves.Ĭertainly, reviews for 2007’s The Pesthouse, a tale of post-apocalyptic America, were not encouraging, suggesting that the wellspring of Crace’s famously deep imagination had run dry. Back in 2008, the British writer Jim Crace announced that he would retire from fiction in three years’ time, fearing the fate of the elderly novelist who is “no longer fashionable and can only find a marginal publisher and command a tiny advance.” Leaving aside the melancholy truth that plenty of writers must make do with trifling advances from small publishers, one has to take Crace at his word.

The Pesthouse by Jim Crace