What a joy. What a craftsman, and what a timely reminder that the very embryo of English capitalism, the enclosure of the common land, was not that long ago. With these class sanctioned, criminal enclosures, came the wool trade, and with the wool trade came a cash surplus that could be put to no end of new profitable endeavours. It was, as Marx would have it, a brutal period of primitive capital accumulation. Wage labour was soon to follow and hey presto a brand new socio-economic system comes into being. Jim Crace, zooming in on this long forgotten bitter transition, gets the mood and bitter implications perfectly.

The significance of knowing that capitalism had a beginning , emerging as it did from a millennium of stultifying feudal backwardness, is that if something has a beginning, it is possible to envisage it one day having an end. Our current tier of ruling class masters work tirelessly to foster the illusion that capitalism is forever. Not so, I would dare to argue. The contradictions buried deep within the DNA of capitalism cannot be contained forever. We can watch almost daily those contradictions becoming more pronounced; contradictions between global capital and the increasingly irrelevant nation state, contradictions between rapacious short term, casino style finance capital and that of the needs of long term investment in social infrastructure, and of course the ultimate contradiction, that between an obscenely rich one percent and the increasingly impoverished rest of us.

The blind drive for instant profits is retarding the process of innovation and investment. There is little doubt about that. Capitalism, at least in the developed western nations, is looking increasingly decrepit. This is particularly noticeable in England, in many respects the birth place of capitalism itself. Why even a new generation of desperately needed power plants, airports and railways is the subject of decades of endless debate, hand wringing and indecision. And when decisions are finally arrived at, only the pleading for Chinese, Indian or Gulf State capital will allow for the projects to go ahead. English capital, once so virile and assertive is now all but impotent.

Jim Crace, of whom I must confess never to have read or even heard of, is every bit a literary master than is Hilary Mantel. Two truly wonderful wordsmiths, whose every line is as historically convincing as it is pleasurable. I hereby promise to return to Crace’s back catalogue.

If the prime theme of Harvest is the social turmoil caused by enclosures, a secondary theme, no less haunting in its evocation of the times, is that of witchcraft, and here Crace deals with it every bit as menacingly as did Arthur Millar in his famous, The Crucible. And once again, Crace offers his readers another sobering historical lesson that if the status of women is still far from equal in today’s version of modernity, it was a thousand times worse in the feudal epoch. And the conclusion to be drawn for those who wish to draw it; if the social and economic conditions of women can, through years of bitter struggle be improved, so through yet more determined effort, the condition of women-kind can improve still further. Depressingly though, in many parts of the world that journey of emancipation has barely begun.

But if Jim Crace reinforces one truth it is that nothing, no matter how seemingly ageless, is set in stone; not feudalism, not capitalism, not even countless millennia of patriarchism. Everything changes, no matter how imperceptibly.

So what happens at the end of the story? Feudal man is set free. Free to sell his labour power to the highest bidder. Free to roam the land looking for work. Free to be unemployed. And in the final instance, free to starve. Sobering when you think of it. This is how English capitalism started its journey and now, with the twentieth century welfare state being dismantled step by step, huge swathes of the English proletariat are in much the same predicament. As winter draws in, and the fuel bills relentlessly rise, impoverished elderly people will surely die in ever increasing numbers. And for the youth, of whom fifty percent are without jobs and without hope, the future is as bleak as ever. It seems the bitter harvest of the English enclosures is still being felt.