A Sense of Endings
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.