Adam Thorpe, Ulverton (Minerva, 1993)

The paperback copy of Adam Thorpe's Ulverton which I've just finished reading is inscribed with Gregory's name and a date of purchase of 2006.  This means he almost certainly bought it in one of Edinburgh's wonderful second-hand bookshops, perhaps Armchair Books: the nearest thing you'll get to Shakespeare and Company outside Paris.  For the last few years there's even been a book festival based around a group of these shops, which brings readers and writers together in their wonderful, musty-smelling spaces for a few days in June (see www.westportbookfestival.org).  Those bookshops are much missed in our new Manchester life: this fine city doesn't seem to have nearly so many.  There's a good Oxfam bookshop on the Wilbraham Road in Chorlton, and an excellent second-hand emporium at the back of The Art of Tea in Didsbury, but that's it for our discoveries so far.  If any Manchester readers know of others, please alert me to them in the comments section.

Anyway.  Nostalgia trip over.  I've been meaning to read Ulverton for some time; on every occasion since, I imagine, 2006, that I've roamed round our bookshelves saying, "I don't know what to read next", Gregory has replied, "Ulverton?".  Finally I've got round to it, and it's the greatest justification so far for this project of actually reading the books I own.  A word of caution, though: taking on Ulverton is a commitment.  Thorpe asks a lot of his readers - you'll be decoding dialects, following an intricate network composed of many threads, and rummaging your brain for all the history you can remember since the English Civil War.  This is not undemanding reading for the few minutes before you fall asleep each night.  Happily, Thorpe amply rewards the effort.

Thorpe had published a couple of collections of poetry before this, his first novel, appeared in 1992.  It was greeted with what I believe it's traditional to call "a chorus of praise".  Ulverton is such an ambitious novel that Thorpe would have been lauded just for the scope of what he had tried to do; to have pulled it off is a yet more remarkable achievement.  The novel takes place in the fictional village of Ulverton in Somerset at twelve different historical moments: it begins in 1650, as one of Cromwell's soldiers returns to the village after five years' absence to find that his wife has taken a new husband, and ends in 1988, with the attempts of a property developer to cover the ancient fields around Ulverton in new-build housing.  Each episode moves us about thirty years forward in time, so that the Civil War opening is followed by a sermon given by the parish priest in 1689 against the rise of non-conformism in the village and its pernicious influence over previously loyal Anglicans, which is succeeded in its turn by the the ruminations in 1712 of a farmer bent on improving his land in line with the most up-to-date innovations in agriculture, and then by the letters from 1743 of the lady of the manor to her lover.  Other chapters detail the dire punishment meted out to a villager accused of stealing a hat in 1775, the machine-breaking which swept through southern England in the riots of 1830 and the coming of the First World War.  To add to this huge variety of context and incident, each episode uses a different narrative device: there is everything here from letters to first-person testimony to screenplay.  As Hilary Mantel observed in her review, Ulverton "draws the reader into its task of reconstructing the unrecorded history of England.  And sometimes you forget that it is a novel, and believe for a moment that you are really hearing the voices of the dead."

Inevitably, some of the chapters involved me more than others.  Those that have stayed most vividly in my memory are those from 1743, 1830 and 1914.  In the first, the mistress of Ulverton Hall has just given birth to a son by her lover, a young classics tutor now in London, to whom she writes a series of increasingly desperate letters begging his return.  She believes that their relationship has escaped detection, but as the months wear on and she remains confined to her room, on the pretext that she has not yet recovered from her delivery, it is clear that her imprisonment amid the gloom - she is not allowed to open the shutters - and coal fumes is a punishment for her transgressions.  Almost a century later, another series of documents gives us an insight into the events of summer and autumn 1830, when farmers ran riot, breaking the agricultural machinery which threatened their livelihood and extorting money from those who were keeping them in penury.  By December many of the offenders were on trial, facing death or deportation, and a young lawyer is summoned from London to take their depositions, which are interleaved in this chapter with his letters to his fiancee.  The writing in these two sections is a virtuosic performance, an exquisite act of ventriloquism: we can almost believe, with Hilary Mantel, that these are documents dating from the periods themselves.   Here is the lawyer decribing the village in 1830:

We are set up in a room of the Manor in the settlement (for so I grace it) named Ulverton - or Ulvers - or Ulverdon - makes no difference - the most dismal place one can imagine - the seat of the Riots in this part of the country - with ditch-mud in the place of road and not a head of thatch without its sprout of moss and weeds.  The main Square hardly merits justification of its nomination: but it is more a Circle of despondency about a dripping well, whose handle creaks the rope up so loud it forces me to ask for repetition from the Examinants at least ten times of a morning.

By 1914 the prose is plainer, but no less evocative, as a retired colonial administrator tells us how the able-bodied men of Ulverton responded to the rousing calls of the Squire to volunteer themselves for the great fight.  As a line of men forms across the village square, one farmer hangs back, calmly explaining when challenged that he would rather "bide at home".  The Squire heaps shame upon him, but surreptitiously keeps at home a handful of men who are excavating a barrow mound on his land.  Eventually they too elect to fight, and only the older and more infirm remain on the mound to hear the church bells tolling each time news reaches the village of another death on the far-away battlefields.

Percy Cullurne, the refusnik farmer, is given the nickname "Bidatome", and endures its chants until it has become worn into "Bid'm" by use.  In the next section, from 1953, this nickname is still in use: the narrator refers in passing to Cullurne as "Bidem", remarking that she has no idea why he is always called by this name.  This is only one example of a technique that Thorpe uses throughout the novel: the sections are bound together by countless details of place - we recognise the same fields and farmhouses over and over again - and of people - the surnames endure from generation to generation.  The result is an extraordinarily rich palimpsest, not unlike a section through an archaeological dig: layer piles on layer, as the events we saw taking place in 1650 become ever more deeply buried and yet their traces still visible, even when the passage of time has made them indiscipherable.  This is the most profound impression which I took away from Ulverton, of the extreme fragility and yet equal durability of the past.  By the end of the novel Ulverton Hall has undergone dereliction and restoration by the National Trust, but the crimson damask wall coverings installed by the unfortunate Lady of 1743 are still there, buried beneath later accretions.  The pub is refitted by a developer in 1988, to the disgust of the locals who bear the names of their ancestors whom we first met in 1650, but his plans for new housing are about to be derailed by the discovery of bones pointing to a crime committed as long ago as the very beginning of the novel.  The sections are knitted together so intricately and so convincingly that I wished I had read Ulverton more quickly, to immerse myself in its world more completely.  As it was, I found myself continually flicking back, trying to remember what had happened two hundred years ago at Five Elms Farm, and why it was significant that a particular orchard now no longer existed.  Thorpe's achievement is to have created an entirely holistic picture of English rural life and history and to have taken his readers on a richly detailed journey through time and space, all without leaving this one tiny and unremarkable patch of ground.