ULVERTON

Multifaceted and many-voiced: a complex debut that's a saga of an English village viewed over more than three centuries, and conveyed as a series of distinct but interrelated episodes involving successive generations of families and neighbors. The rural charms of Ulverton are exquisitely detailed—from its famous barrow and undulating terrain to the hardwood copse that provides a livelihood for woodworkers—but Thorpe's community is by no means tranquil. A soldier home from Cromwell's campaign against the Irish finds his wife remarried and his farm taken away, then is killed for his trouble; an 18th-century farmer with a scientific approach to husbandry takes comfort in a housemaid when his wife becomes despondent, and she soon hangs herself in his cowshed; an 1830 protest of ploughmen over losing their jobs to machines turns into a bloody riot, with the leaders hanged or exiled; a generation of young men is urged to war in 1914 by the local gentry, never to return; and as fields are purchased for a ritzy subdivision by a local developer at the height of the 1980's economic boom, the skeleton of Cromwell's soldier comes to light, casting a pall over the project that keeps home-buyers away. Incidents appear in a profusion of narrative modes: through a sermon; in tavern talk, pining love letters, or the subliterate scribblings of a mother writing via a friend to her son condemned to death; in mannered musings accompanying a collection of 19th-century photographs; and, finally, in the hackneyed script of a TV documentary. A sobering, insightful, stylistic tour de force full of historical nuances and bleak humor: this is a chronological cross- section of a rural English community and its brutal way of life.