Harvest
By Georgina Harding
A review
Although still in his mid-twenties, Jonathan has
already received acclaim as a photographer in Vietnam War. Having grown disillusioned with this calling,
he spends some time as a language teacher in Tokyo, and then returns to the farm
in Norfolk where he grew up. His father died, allegedly in a “shooting accident”
when Jonny was just seven, but his mother Claire still lives there, together with
his elder brother Richard, who now runs the farm. Jonny is soon joined by Kimiko, his Japanese girlfriend,
who has heard much about her partner’s past and his childhood home and now has
the chance to experience them for herself:
She had asked him to tell her about his home, many times. She wanted to know so that she could know him better, so that she had some world to fit him into, that he came from, so that he had some dimension deeper than being just an Englishman who had come to Japan…
The couple decide to stay on to help with the harvest, before resuming their travels. But rain delays the job and a brief English holiday becomes, for Kumiko, a summer among a family with its fair share of secrets, a family haunted by its past.
Although recounted in the third person, the novel’s point of view keeps changing throughout, presenting us with the different perspectives of the four main characters. It starts and ends in Kumiko’s voice and yet her character is – ironically, and deliberately – the one which remains most mysterious, the one which we least get to know on a personal level. For the other characters including, one suspects, Jonathan himself, Kumiko remains “the Japanese girl”, an outsider, a glitch in an otherwise English pastoral. But, precisely because of her “foreignness” Kumiko becomes a catalyst for the family, leading them to face an uncomfortable past. The secrets which Charlie, Jonny's father, took to the grave, remain something of a mystery - that part of the story is recounted in Harding's Land of the Living (to which Harvest is a sequel, albeit a "free-standing one").
This novel is a little gem which I enjoyed at so many different levels. Jonathan is a photographer and, appropriately, the descriptions have a strong “visual” element, occasionally vibrant with yellows and golds, at other times “grey and brown and ochre… black even”. Nature is not only vividly portrayed but, as in a Hardy novel, it becomes almost a character in itself, a timeless backdrop to the family drama which plays out in the novel.
I loved the tone of the novel: melancholy, wistful and poignant. Harding subtly conveys the complicated psychological strands which link the characters, particularly Claire’s fraught relationship with her late husband and the underlying rivalry between the brothers whose life-story is indelibly marked by the tragic death of their father. The title of the novel is not just a reference to the literal “harvest”, in which Jonny and Kumiko participate, but becomes a metaphorical one, as the family reaps the seeds sown in its past.
Understated, yet complex and satisfying,
Georgina Harding’s “Harvest” is a novel to watch (and read) in 2021.
Whilst reading “Harvest”, a playlist started to take shape in my mind, which hopefully conveys the feelings of wistfulness and melancholy which I so enjoyed. Save for one exception, these are works of classical music written by contemporary English composers. Like the novel, these pieces are lyrical and poetic, although they make use of a sometimes challenging modern musical language.
The first work is “when you’re broken up…”,
the poignant first movement of the cello concerto “Dance”. The work is by Anna Clyne (1980), who is born
in London and is now based in New York. The
concerto was written for Inbal Segev, as a companion piece to Elgar’s cello
concerto on Segev’s recent album. Harvest
is, in many ways, a novel about characters who are “broken up”, and this makes
an appropriate start to the playlist.
Errolyn Wallen (1958) has been in the news for her new arrangement of Parry’s “Jerusalem”, featured in this year’s Last Night of the Proms. Wallen’s reworking was controversial in certain quarters. However, few composers could be considered better bridge-builders than Wallen – born in Belize, but resident in the UK from the age of two, her works show diverse influences from jazz and pop to Bach. In tribute to Jonathan the photographer, here’s a movement from her work “Photography”
Lately I’ve been listening to the music of Edmund Finnis (1984). A rising star in the field of contemporary classical music, he has also written electronic dance music, which might explain his interest in musical texture. This is a movement from his violin concerto Shades Lengthen, which I feel, reflects the sense of a fugitive English summer drawing to a close.
To end, the only non-English musical piece on the playlist. As a tribute to Kumiko, as well as to Claire and her garden of roses (including Japanese ones), here's "Spirit Garden" by Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu (1930 - 1996).
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