A Sense of Endings

Summary

Dinah Birch reviews Melissa Harrison’s The Given World as a sombre novel about endings in Lower Eodham, an English village followed from early spring to autumn. Harrison links the inhabitants’ personal and economic losses to unstable weather, retreating wildlife, failing crops, and the decline of established rural patterns, while her knowledge of plants, animals, and agricultural labour gives the threatened landscape persuasive specificity. Birch finds this lament coherent and authoritative but argues that curses, ancestral wisdom, a river spirit, and other quasi-mystical elements distract from it. She concludes that the supernatural framing risks encouraging skeptical readers to dismiss the novel’s grounded account of damage to the English countryside as fantasy.

Highlights

• This is a novel about endings – lives, histories, the rhythms of the natural world, perhaps the world itself. “Things don’t end all at once, though, but in stages” – and the apocalyptic resonance of the interwoven stories of Lower Eodham, a small village deep in the English countryside, partly emanates from the evocations of the beauty of what is now, inexorably, leaving us.
• The Given World follows the life of the community over a period of six months, spanning the first signs of spring and the arrival of autumn. Some of the locals come from families that have lived and worked in the village for generations; others are recent arrivals.
• If the novel has a hero, it is Alan, a stoical dairy farmer who has been cheated by local landowners.
• Connor, young and hopeful, is nevertheless shadowed by an awareness of loss. “Sometimes he thinks there’s no such thing as nostalgia, that things were genuinely just better in the past.” He, too, leaves the village.
• Harrison’s evocation of a textured particularity in the life of the village is persuasive, and the sense of certainties “now drawing to an end” gives her novel a sombre coherence. But the serious heft of the story is undermined by the quasi-mysticism that runs through its unsettling events. Old artefacts – one suggestive of an ancient curse – are uncovered. There are repeated hints of a female spirit, both malign and protective, that animates the river. Alan rescues a boy who is drowning, “fighting with something in the river”. “Why did you go into the water?” “I – I don’t know, I didn’t mean to, she –”
• When the all- knowing William Welland, who seems tuned into ancestral wisdom, replaces the shoe, Roy finds that he can return to the roof and finish the job.
• To summon folklore, and hint that otherworldly powers are involved in the downfall of older patterns of life, is an unnecessary indulgence. If her readers don’t believe in the reality of river goddesses, they might be tempted to think that much else that Harrison has to tell us about what is happening to the English countryside is nothing more than fantasy. And that would be a pity.

Notes

• Lower Eodham can be understood as two villages occupying the same ground: the visible community of farmers, builders and newcomers, and an older settlement governed by river spirits, protective objects and ancestral knowledge. This second realm requires no portal; it surfaces through ordinary places such as the river, the rafters and the fields. The English countryside therefore becomes a thin membrane between contemporary life and an ancestral world that remains present but is no longer easily understood.

• The novel’s world does not end through one dramatic catastrophe but through an accumulation of absences. The badger flees, the pike disappears, crops fail, people lose their health or confidence, and younger inhabitants leave. The village may remain physically standing even as the relationships that make it a living community gradually unravel. “Ending” is therefore less an event than the slow erosion of ecological, economic and generational continuity.

• Moving from spring to autumn would traditionally suggest renewal followed by harvest, but here the seasons no longer provide reassurance. Blossom and birdsong coexist with drought, torrential rain and failed crops, making each familiar natural occurrence feel potentially final. Climate change does not need to be named directly because it appears as a disturbance in time itself, and the countryside can no longer trust that what once returned predictably will return again.

• Birch worries that river spirits and enchanted objects weaken the novel’s ecological realism, but the opposition between fact and folklore may be too simple. The river presence and the hidden child’s shoe give perceptible form to forces -- environmental agency, inherited obligations and buried memory -- that are otherwise difficult to see. The supernatural need not replace material explanations; it can express how a landscape carries histories and relationships that modern ways of thinking have ceased to recognize.

Source

Author

Dinah Birch

Publication

The Times Literary Supplement

Date

August 7, 2026

URL

https://www.the-tls.com/literature/fiction/a-sense-of-endings-review-by-dinah-birch-tls ↗

Reviewed work

The Given World by Melissa Harrison