Harvest by Jim Crace

Walter Thirsk is a farmer, although it has not always been so.  He was once the servant of his master Mr Kent before he settled, travelling with him from city to city.

With his neighbours Thirsk gathers in the barley harvest in his tiny village, more a gathering of houses serving the master.  It's a feudal world and a brutal one.  The masters dovecote is burning, and despite the knowledge of the village that two of the local boys have played a prank that has gotten out of hand, strangers camping in the nearby woods looking to settle are blamed.  For the death of the of the birds most masters would hang the accused but Mr Kent is seen as mild for placing the two men: one older, one younger, in the pillory and shaving their woman companion's head.  As the older slips and breaks his neck a fury is unleashed.

This is a timeless old world where little changes over many years.  It is a world in which women are brutalised physically and sexually as a matter of course and childhood is no protection, where a whispered word, a rumour, can begin a blaze of violence.  Thirsk has lived in the vilage since he married his wife, a villager, and although she has died and he has remained he is still an outsider.  He acts as conduit for the changes that are coming to the village, where subsistance farming is being replaced by enclosure, people by sheep.

Crace's deft use of first person narration communicates the suffocating dangerous nature of the world he lives in, a tenuous veneer of civility a thin skin over lawlessness and violence, but poised against a world of nature that although ungiving and indifferent to human suffering is beautiful.