Review by Peter Reason
Melissa Harrison combines duties as novelist and nature writer. Her nature writing often takes a narrative form, and her novels pay greater respect to the contribution of the more-than-human world than do many novelists. She writes a regular column in the Times; offers Encounter, ‘A guided nature journal that lives in your phone’; @witnessmarks, a subscriber newsletter on Substack; and The Stubborn Light of Things a podcast. Shiny reviews of other titles, both novels and non-fiction can be found here.
The Given World centres around a small village in rural England, set in a valley, ‘a green crease sunk into England since forever’ with a river running through – a river which threads its own influence through the book’s human stories. The title comes from the inscription inscribed on an old sundial at the converted priory where Clare, one of the inhabitants, lives: Fides datis mundi, ‘Loyalty to the given world’.
Each chapter is written in close third person from the point of view of a different village inhabitant. No overall narrative is offered, no central exposition, development, climax and resolution, although a thread of belonging, change, and loss and a building sense of foreboding runs throughout. The vignettes in each chapter echo and overlap each other as they are played out in village life: the newcomers and the longstanding, young folks and the old, conflicts over land use, greed and generosity, illness, frailty and death, family and generations, unspoken affairs; and the river itself with its flooding and its sometimes-usable ford meandering through the whole. So the reader, as they might in a village, will have favourite characters, some they dislike, and others they are indifferent to; the reader will be care more about some stories and bored by others.
After I had read my review copy I offered it to my wife Elizabeth. Brought up in a small village, she felt the overall portrayal felt right. But she had trenchant criticisms as well: ‘Too many characters to keep track of… like a Russian novel’, she said, wanting a list of dramatis personae, or a map so she could locate them all. While I enjoyed the interweaving of narratives and the way the novel pointed toward themes without resolving them, Elizabeth was more haunted by the gathering sense of the ending of things, a feeling that comes to a climax in the final chapter. However, from our different perspectives, we found lots to talk about, although she remembered different stories to me. She was touched, for example, by the contrast between Clare in her untidy converted priory still caught up in her father’s legacies, and Angela in her carefully curated house that now ‘looks exactly like I wanted it to’.
The story of Hilda stays in my mind, an old lady out walking with an open heart, noticing how ‘the world just reveals itself to you, and oh!… it’s wonderful’, when she tumbles into a crater by the side of the path, completely concealed by the undergrowth, and lies undiscovered for several hours. We are lying right there with her, we feel her sense of foolishness, her discomfort, her concern that she be found before she wets herself. The writing here is sensuous, intimate, we are with her in her embarrassment and deeply concerned for her safety.
In contrast, there is Hugh, a retired doctor with his drinking habit, his expensively restored red Porsche, his sexual indiscretions that have (so he thinks) ‘never troubled’ his wife (even as they have become expensive to maintain). And his self-justification: ‘the memory of the younger Grey girl’s small breasts rises in his mind… there was no harm in asking her to take her camisole off…’; he hadn’t touched her except with the stethoscope and ‘the briefest accidental graze of his knuckle…’, all so casually mentioned to convey just what an unpleasant character he is and, more generally, how sexual abuse can be normalized.
I think what I enjoyed overall about the book was the sense that we were indeed offered an intimate portrait of the ‘given world’, a portrait Fides datis mundi; a this-is-how-life-is-ness in a small community, both human and its more-than-human context. I look around at my own local community and recognize similar relationships, similar local joys and miseries that one doesn’t solve, but rather lives with and through. But how do we give ‘loyalty to the given world’ when haunted by the feeling that the givenness, the taken-for-granted, is crumbling before us?
Peter Reason is currently engaged in a series of experiential co-operative inquiries exploring living cosmos panpsychism: He has been regularly sitting with the River Avon and with invocation and ceremony addressing River as a community of sentient beings: “If I call to the world as sentient being, what response may I receive?” He is writing about this inquiry in at Learning How Land Speaks. He also edits Objects&Lives, short writing and imagery reflecting on household and personal objects that retain value through the memories they hold and their associations with family and cultural history. His online presence is at peterreason.net.
Melissa Harrison, The Given World (Hutchinson Heinemann, 2026). 9781529154894, 272pp., hardback.
BUY at Waterstones via our affiliate link.
