‘I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion. I loathe the country and everything that relates to it… Ah l’étourdie! I hate the town too.’ Millamant’s expostulation about the unresolved pull between rural and urban life has echoed down three centuries since The Way of the World. With Melissa Harrison’s second novel this quandary brings all the splendid, closely observed exposition that it did in her first, Clay.
Set around a small London park over the course of a year, Clay featured several parallel, disparate lives which met some while before infinity, along with a telling eye for flora and fauna which created a metropolitan pastoral. At Hawthorn Time, too, comes with a tantalising prologue which anticipates three strands one May. Howard and Kitty have moved to a village (with a warehouse on its edge), where she, a guilt-haunted aspirant artist, fits in better than he does (a former roadie and retired haulage operator, he is preoccupied with dealing in rebuilt vintage radios); teenager Jamie is eager to leave, but is stuck with a job in that warehouse and haunted by childhood memories of visiting a friend in a farm now up for sale — the one which draws back itinerant, notebook-filling Jack, who, through a fraught London, ‘navigated by a kind of telluric instinct’.
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