Harvest by Jim Crace: review These terms - "us," "them" - are slippery, as our narrator, Walter Thirsk, is keen for us to know. He is an outsider: a dark-haired man from the city, who came to the village (as it is known by its inhabitants - another indicator we're in an allegory) with Master Kent, whose own ties to the estate are not by blood, but by marriage to the (now deceased) heiress of the manor. The villagers are blond and placid and have been there for centuries; they are at their happiest when they are feasting off their master's bounty. The seasons are predictable, their lives relatively unfussed; without a church they exist in a bucolic semi-pagan state, naming a Gleaning Queen after the harvest, and generally sleeping around and quaffing beer. However, it only takes a moment - the introduction of a woman they term Mistress Beldam, or the threat of punishment - for them to regroup and redefine those terms, so that "us" becomes "them" quicker than a lightning bolt. Unfortunately, it's also a book of frustration, which manifests itself in the movements of almost every character. Master Kent is helpless in the face of his cousin, Edmund Jordan, who rides in one day with a few men and takes control of the manor. The villagers, when their own women are taken prisoner on suspicion of witchcraft, flee at the first sign of trouble. Thirsk himself is unable to make any kind of decision. When two strangers are put in the pillory for a crime they didn't commit, he worries about helping them; before he eventually decides to do so, it's too late. He is constantly warning us of portents to come: "I could sense the thunder and the lightning closing in on us. A mighty storm of reckoning was on its way," and so on; but no such storm ever arrives. Crace has a great gift for clarity, his prose precise and heartfelt, achieving a timeless, polished quality. Which makes it all the more sadder that it feels as if he is straining towards some deeper truth, some epiphanic understanding. Harvest is the uber-metaphor: we have to sow because we fell from Eden. Thank goodness Crace only refers to Adam and Eve at the end, or he would have been wearing his prelapsarian heart too much on his sleeve. The novel's very tentativeness, and torpidity, militate against any such insight. It's as if the sheen of the writing has put up a barrier. The reader is as thwarted as the novel's powerless narrator. Philip Womack is the author of The Other Book and The Liberators (Bloomsbury) Harvest by Jim Crace 273pp, Picador, t £14.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £16.99, ebook £7.26)