Аннотация
Jim Crace
Harvest
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground.
— ALEXANDER POPE, “ODE ON SOLITUDE”1
WO TWISTS OF SMOKE AT a time of year too warm for cottage fires surprise us at first light, or they at least surprise those of us who’ve not been up to mischief in the dark. Our land is topped and tailed with flames. Beyond the frontier ditches of our fields and in the shelter of our woods, on common ground, where yesterday there wasn’t anyone who could give rise to smoke, some newcomers, by the luster of an obliging reapers’ moon, have put up their hut — four rough and ready walls, a bit of roof — and lit the more outlying of these fires. Their fire is damp. They will have thrown on wet greenery in order to procure the blackest plume, and thereby not be missed by us. It rises in a column that hardly bends or thins until it clears the canopies. It says, New neig...
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