Not a comfortable read, rather one that sets you pondering about humankind and its capacity for violence, cruelty and how we treat ‘the other’ within our midst. The emotionally flat narrator observing a hamlet’s descent into chaos is both heartening and alarming and really touches the reader with his inability to even try to stop what is happening when his intervention could have possibly changed the course of events. Above all, it is the selfishness of each and everyone that hits hardest, selfishness as both a base position and a fallback position. It precludes both the concept and practice of altruism and for me that it is chilling. Are there lessons in this novel for the modern world? Or perhaps it is simply a reflection of it. In my dotage I frequently assess the Thatcher years in Britain as those years in which our non-existent society became selfish, when all of us were encouraged to look out for number one, but perhaps, as this book suggests, this is universal fact of the human condition that periodically comes to the fore. Does history describe a constant battle between the individual and the collective? But there is also the battle between rural and urban going on and the myth of the rural idyll, so beloved of the Romantic poets, is exploded for good. This is a powerful novel not only in its story but also in the manner of its telling, and it is a novel that I am likely to return to, given time.
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