I also don't know why I didn't blog about it when I finished it. I read it a few months ago, in that bleak period when I was too tired even to read. Yet I read Harvest. I couldn't not read Harvest.
Am I the only one whose relationships with books sometimes don't have words? Or is it just the nature of tapping away at a keyword (the 'j' button of which is stuck, I think with something sugary) without human contact? I mean, if it's just me, I don't have to use words, do I? And if I do, well, that's a new problem that requires me leaving my apartment.
Apart from Oryx and Crake, it also characterised my reading of People's Act of Love and Mara and Dann. Which if you read back (although I don't think I used labels back them so you'll just have to stumble blindly through 400 and something posts. Good luck), gutted me. Not only because I missed the characters and narrative style, but because my friends had just kicked me out of their snowy or verdant or dusty lives and I must have hit my head because when I woke up I was here. But here doesn't fit like there did.
Make sense? No, I didn't think so. I'm not sure I understood that. But then I did hit my head so I have an excuse.
Most of Harvest is almost unbearably creepy. It reminded me of The Village, except after a little while, you don't have time to worry about the Others - one eye is watching your neighbours in case they set fire to your house and the other is watching the gentlemen of the farm because people are going missing (well, not missing, you know where some of them are: inside the house), your brain is thinking about this idyllic but harsh life on the farm and in the village (where your neighbours are so welcoming) and your heart is bleeding for the trespassers who are now undergoing a punishment that seems like a hanging except you live and people throw squishy tomatoes at you.
Sorry, is that a bit much in one gulp? Well, that's the point, although I'm sure you realised that. Right?
Okay, now, spoilers exiled. Within the first few pages, you meet the narrator, a villager on a late 19th century farm, as he tries to convince us the villagers live autonomously. Feudal system aside, he was not born in the village, but married into it. (No one seems worried about interbreeding and the rather stupid children they seem to be producing.) So his neighbours are wary of him. Who knows what he could do?! Set fire to his own house?
Rather than being wary of him right now, they become wary of a camp of trespassers. Apparently setting a fire in that part of never never land means you are settling there, like a smoke signal (har!). The villagers and gentleman of the farm traipse towards the smoking fire to dissuade its lighters. No one appears to be home so they destroy everything like children unmaking a fort into a mess their mother has to tidy up. But no, there is a beautiful woman. Now the men stand around and gulp.
Then, like the trespassing rats they are, two men step in to help her. Her family, we can assume. One threatens the gentleman on his horse, the woman spits at him and the men are captured but the woman runs away. Some of the men go after her and you know enough to rock on your heels thinking she best run and hide like a deer. One that survives.
There is another gentleman on the farm, not propertied but an artist slash surveyor. Although he may just be an artist wishing he were surveyor because he needs the money. He goes after her too, but instead of feeling relief, you hope he runs and hides like a blerry rabbit.
Some feeling you can't name because it's hiding in the shadows is now tumbling around and making you dizzy. You don't like this situation, which is solved by everyone leaving the forest. Trespassers (minus one) in tow. No wait! There is a gallows-type structure set in some ruins of something, someone pulls out two nooses (neese?), they point the men's heads through until their chins are resting on the ropes and they are forced to stand on tiptoes. Then the villagers walk away. They intend to come back later and throw things at the men but then there is a violent storm and they snuggle up next to fires.
The narrator, not being a real villager, does come out to help them - and there I have to stop recounting that plot line because I almost spoiled it. I can tell you the woman is narry to be found, which is either a good or a bad thing. Obviously. But you don't know which to hope for. The artist is also missing. And all the men are missing the woman and all the women are furrowing their brows.
Plot line B involves the gentleman of the farm's deceased wife having relatives who suddenly decide to become farmers. The farm is technically theirs, but they are complete jerks who act like bouncers at a club where the club is anything that touches the same earth as them. They have now arrived to assess the property, because they would like to evict the villagers and turn the land to grazing. Basically replacing the villagers with cows. Bad joke. It's a metaphor for industrialisation and the disregard for the wellbeing of other humans - well, not a metaphor, it's an example.
The narrator has some suspicions about these men, but it doesn't really matter because the villagers can see the writing on the wall and they are hightailing it anywhere else but there. Well, obviously not anywhere else, but somewhere within a couple of hundred kilometres where they can make a living without being beaten by these specific men.
To recap, my dear readers, we are in the village from The Village, but the red people are hiding in the hearts of the villagers and the nooses and the entire bodies of the men who repossess the farm. Some more red things are hiding in the spaces left by the woman and the artist, who allegedly has led the exodus from the farm, but without taking his stuff.
On the bright side, you learn a lot about subsistence farming. Because the narrator is relatively new to the area (having parents who aren't cousins), he relates the learning curve of trying to fit in among these people who don't trust him (because his parents weren't cousins).
Jokes aside, this part of the story balances (and maybe draws) out the unsettled feelings that do handstands in the corner of your vision. The way the narrator describes the world around him helps you to understand why he lives among these people. There is also his sense of loyalty - he grew up with the gentleman and has never left his side. He is honest about his guilt and failure to stand up for the trespassers, his concern, and his sense of self-preservation - and his lust and jealousy.
Harvest is more than a horror story. It is more than an example: it is a metaphor for the changing times, from the pastoral to the industrial, the sense that no one explains what is going one, but someone keeps switching the signposts around. And just removes some of them. As a result, you too are wary, looking into every shadow of the story, hoping to see the young woman or a matchstick you can use to halt the wrecking ball on the horizon.
Some of the mysteries have answers and others don't - not in the way detective series have led us to understand 'answer'. I suppose even the alleged answers are mysterious. I'll bet that you feel a little unsettled and a little curious based on only a few paragraphs that are mostly facetious jokes, right? What did it for me are the tortures inflicted on those men for silly infringements. You're a vagrant, just like these people are about to become, and these people attack your shelter and wife. What are you, especially as a man in that time, going to do? Threaten their stick-thin and therefore breakable fibula is what.
These jokes are a way of dealing with what I don't understand, which is almost everything in this novel. The extent to which I am trying to deal with it is a verification of how little can be understood (which is tautological, but this seems fitting). Harvest is a beautifully told novel in which the narrator and his voice fit as perfectly as a novelist can write them. You know as much as he does - what he knows is what he has learnt and what he feels he needs to explain, and what he doesn't he still feels he needs to uncover. (And here we are at the beginning again.)
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