Akenfield, published at the end of the sixties, certainly chimes with the spirit of oral history, though Blythe has chosen to adopt a noticeably more literary form. Oral history testimonies, tend to let the person being interviewed communicate with a reduced editorial role given to any authorial presence. Akenfield, however, is undoubtedly based on people Blythe knew quite well and interviews he must have conducted. All of it lovingly sewn together with Blythe's own livid experience and remembrance of how Suffolk village life had changed even during his own lifetime, over the twentieth century. Sometimes the changes in rural life were for the good. Though Blythe is unafraid to lament also what has been lost, the sense of cohesion, of a shared understanding and lifestyle. Akenfield is an evocation of how the structure of rural life changed and how that much romanticised bucolic and picturesque unity fractured and vanished.
There is a huge amount of meticulous but hidden research behind its unassuming presentation. These are not just literary ciphers, but real individuals whose lives he has used as the basis for the people he portrays here. Men and women he encountered daily, or are a composite of a particular type of individual. Because he has chosen to fictionalise how he presents these people, one is uncertain quite where verisimilitude ends and artifice begins. Is this more an evocation than a historical document? His feeling and ear for the significant telling detail in a monologue, however, is acute, as they recounts specific jobs and lifestyles and how they've modernised since the war. Everything is pointed and given greater vivacity because it comes through his mind and pen. All sorts of local worthies, midwives, sexton, shepherds, teachers, blacksmith, the old and the young, they are all here. Each presenting their view of life in a late sixties Suffolk village. And how the arrival of the middle class incomers from the towns is changing the village, with their immaculately curated homes and an idealised view of village life.
The war turned out to be the final break in the traditional cohesion. The men who returned damaged psychologically or physically, often did not want to return to the drudgery of their old life and its limited prospects. And so a way of being that had existed for centuries, went into decline. Blythe captures the post war zeitgeist, of being caught between two forms of rural society, the ancient and the modern. The divisive pull between a collective localised unity with its sense of belonging and the individual independence of thought and self motivated action. Blythe scrupulously refuses to rose tint or overly sentimentalise the past. Though there is undoubtedly a strong vein of melancholy present, over a way of life that has simply slipped away or faded beyond recognition. There is a grief here, a real feeling for loss. Yet, one has to ask, was this not inevitable faced with the changes economic, technological and political that rolled out after the war ended?
However, the end of the unearned social deference to a class based hierarchy, was a good thing. The way farmers once treated their tenant farm workers was reprehensible, coercive and frequently cruel. That they were paid so poorly, did eventually drive young people away to towns and cities where better prospects lay. Education is now seen as opening up opportunities. Previously education had enforced a conformist and particular view of your role in society, administered in a very paternalistic, rigid manner, that depended upon the mindless rote recitation of facts and ideas. Drilling information into young minds, that most found of little use to them in the semi-indentured life that followed. Life may be more humane and self motivated these days. But there was inevitably a cost to that, which ends up being paid in social isolation, increased loneliness and lack of a sense of human connection and belonging to a society that we form together. All the things that we bemoan the loss of today, but know not quite how to recreate.
If only it was as simple as turning the clock back. Though I doubt we would really want that. I for one, would certainly find myself rebelling against the stifling restrictive nature of the old style of village life Blythe in Akenfield documents the moment just before the memory of it finally flickered out. Over sixty years later the gentrification of the rural village is pretty much complete, with only a few faint glimmers left of what a tight knit insular working village could actually be like. And whilst I understand, and have resonated to an extent, with the sense of regret and cultural bereavement portrayed, I remain unsure what one could constructively do with that now, other than just hold that knowledge and feel it's contemporary reverberations. Without letting it descend into some nostalgia soaked archetype.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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