The tragedy of a hamlet

Jim Crace’s novels have one thing in common, which is that each is set in an entirely original world. None of these worlds is of a specific time or place, but they seem to have some connection to our own lives. The subjects Crace tackles are varied, from a microscopic study of death (Being Dead) to an eremitic retreat in the Judaean desert (Quarantine). They all deploy a terrible, lyrical, beauty that is nothing like any other novel I have ever read. Some of them are dystopian (The Pesthouse), some are set in very faintly demarcated places, or places that we recognise because we have dreamed of them. Yet this is not science fiction. It is rather a re-imagining of the world, using the available tools. It is as though Crace looks beyond and beneath the obvious, for the elemental, to produce prose poems whose cadences are accumulatively mesmerising.

Crace’s new novel is the story of an unnamed, and almost unknown, English village in — I think you can more or less establish — the middle of the 15th century.