Beating the Bounds

• BuyHarvest by Jim Crace
  Picador, 273 pp, £16.99, February, ISBN 978 0 330 44566 5

Jim Crace is as much ‘out-of-pattern’ as the narrator of his new novel, a settled outsider. He can hardly even be said to resist the pull of publishing convention, any more than aluminium resists a magnet. He’s attracted to unlabelled, marginal or parenthetical times and places, environments that might seem unpromising as settings for fiction, even actively hostile to the growth of narrative. Harvest follows this trend: a historical novel that takes place outside history.