Ronald Blythe - Akenfield

*****

Exceptional and memorable 24 Feb 2007

Akenfield is a book which makes a concerted effort to fall between boundaries of fiction, biography and reportage, and as a result, is all the richer for the elements which it draws from each and blends into a most satisfying and enjoyable whole.

To deal with each element in reverse order, the book's reportage is that of a documentary of a Sussex village in 1974, although its field of vision extends as far back as the years before the Great War. The feeling is one of decline and fall, of a community which no longer is bound together by its old practices and habits, but which in many ways has benefited enormously from the changes brought about in society after the Second World War. At no stage is does this become a nostalgic lament for a lost England, but rather does Blythe reveal to us quite how hard life was for the poor in England's villages well into the Twentieth Century.

The biographical aspect of the book is to be found in the way Blythe presents a succession of different characters from the village and its surrounding area, from the farmhand to the housewife, and the magistrate in the Town. Each has his or her own story and fascinating, and often very funny, account of their lives, and one is left with a rich picture of a village society, where no one perspective is privileged over another.

And fiction? Well, Blythe makes plain in his introduction that Akenfield is a palimpsest of many villages, and its people are not single individuals but prisms through which the lives of many are reflected for us. Blythe's style of writing is brilliantly neutral and understated, even when dealing with harrowing or very funny topics (frequently the two go hand-in-hand).

Few books have made such a great impression on me.