All Among the Barley focuses on fourteen-year-old Edie, the bright daughter of a struggling farming family in 1930s Suffolk, whose world is on the cusp of great change. Melissa Harrison's evocation of this rural landscape, as yet minimally affected by agricultural mechanisation, is a vivid one: the weeding of crops is still done by hand, horses still pull the plough, corncrakes still call in abundance from the hedgerows. Yet equally Harrison doesn't fall into the trap of thinking of the countryside or those who live there as unchanging pastoral idylls where change is unwanted. Canned goods make the farm wife's life easier, and it's clear that once tractors can cope better with the region's heavy clay soils, the days of the plough horses will be numbered.

But where the physical landscape of the book felt real, its emotional landscape didn't convince me so much. Some of the characters—like smiling, jolly-hockey-sticks fascist Connie—are too direct from Central Casting, while Edie's own story felt a bit airless. That, combined with a rather unconvincing epilogue, made All Among the Barley feel like the book equivalent of a glossy Sunday evening period drama on the Beeb. The cinematography is lovely, the costuming is on-point, the actors all very prestigious—but there is perhaps the suspicion that there isn't much there there. ( )

Really beautiful writing in this story of a girl growing up in England's farming heartland, but I didn't like the ending at all. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3720860.html

For some reason I apparently put this on my wishlist, and my kind wife duly got it for my birthday in April. It's a very interesting novel set in the 1930s, in a rural England where there is still a shortage of labour due to the first word war, and 14-year-old Edie is coming to terms with the world outside her farm and her village. Glamorous Constance arrives from London to write sketches of country life; but she brings much more dangerous ideas with her as well, and Edie's life ends up completely disrupted (it's made clear at the start of the first chapter that there has been a major disruption, and we spend the rest of the book finding out what happened). I thought this was a great book, if not necessarily a cheerful one, and I will look out for more by this writer. It won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019. ( )

If you like vividly painted descriptions of nature, lyrical evocations of rural life, and more specifically of farming, then this is the thing for you. And also, if you like a classic coming-of-age story, including the inevitable sexual initiation, this is it, too. Harrison brings to life a fictional village in 1930s Suffolk, England. All through the eyes of the young, fairly naive farmer's daughter Edi Mather. Many ingredients seem familiar, especially if you've already read a few Thomas Hardy novels. But Harrison adds some accents of her own. The most original of these is presented through the character Constance FitzAllen, a feisty town lady who speaks highly of the traditional values of the countryside, but appears to have a political agenda of her own. Harrison incorporates the rise of fascism in England here, but in such a way that it actually has more to do with Brexit and topics of today. Captivating and lyrical, for sure. But personally, I thought the story was slow to start. It picks up speed past halfway, only to come to at a rather abrupt and not entirely coherent ending. ( )

Suffolk/England in den dreißiger Jahren: Die vierzehnjährige Edith Mather ist eines der Kinder einer konservativen Farmerfamilie. Sie ist anders als ihre Geschwister, denn am liebsten verliert sie sich in ihren Büchern. Alle finden sie seltsam. Als die Journalistin Constance FitzAllen aus London in dem Dorf auftaucht, ist Edith fasziniert von dieser glamourösen Frau. Constanze scheint sie auch zu fördern, aber sie trägt auch Ideen ins Dorf, die das Leben dort verändern.
Das Cover finde ich sehr schön und passend. Der Schreibstil der Autorin Melissa Harrison hat mich angesprochen. Ihr gelingt es vorzüglich, die Atmosphäre in dieser ländlichen Gegend jener Zeit darzustellen. Der Krieg und die Weltwirtschaftskrise haben den Menschen hier zugesetzt. Die Arbeit ist hart und es fehlt an männlichen Arbeitskräften. Um alles zu bewältigen muss die ganze Familie mitarbeiten, auch die Kinder.
Die 14-jährigen Edie fühlt sich mit ihren Büchern am wohlsten. Sie ist im Übergang vom Kind zur Erwachsenen und hat ihre Träume. Das gefällt ihren Eltern natürlich nicht, die erwarten, dass alle ihren Teil zur Arbeit beitragen. Für Edie mit ihren Gefühlen und Sehnsüchten bleibt keine Zeit. Dann taucht Constanze FitzAllen auf der Farm auf, die sich mit ihrem Auftreten von allen anderen abhebt. Das muss einem naiven jungen Mädchen wie Edie ja imponieren, zumal ihr Constanze Aufmerksamkeit schenkt. Bei den Erwachsenen dagegen stößt die Londonerin eher auf Misstrauen, doch zunehmend macht sich der Einfluss von Constanze und ihrem gefährlichen Gedankengut überall bemerkbar.
Das Ende ist ungewöhnlich und hat mich überrascht.
Es ist eine ruhige Geschichte, die mich beim Lesen nicht so gepackt hat, aber im Rückblick trotzdem sehr intensiv ist. ( )