If the production team of The Archers ever needs a scriptwriter at short notice, they need look no further than Miranda France. For her latest book, she’s gone back to her roots as the daughter of a farming family and created a novel that’s a cross between an omnibus edition of the radio soap and the gimlet-eyed prose of Stella Gibbons. Hill Farm is set in a nameless village somewhere on the borders of Sussex and Kent. Hayes loves the land, but not farming. His wife Isabel loves the idea of the country but not the reality of the falling-down farm to which she is shackled by duty rather than affection. Their three children are in turn mystified by the behaviour of the grown-ups and transfigured by the natural world they have the luxury of observing for hours on end, watching the colony of newts regenerating their lost limbs in the tank at the bottom of the field, or setting up camp in the barn and spying on the antics of the owl that lives in the rafters.
Isabel feels herself to be trapped in a life for which she’s hopelessly unqualified, knowing nothing about farming and caring even less. The arrival of a young, muscly, free-spirited stockman from Down Under has an inevitable effect on her crushed soul.
But Miranda France has far too much invention and understanding of country life to be satisfied with a straightforward adulterous affair. Just as in an episode from Ambridge, we find ourselves swapping constantly between a number of different plot strands, from the arrival of a couple of lesbian bellringers to the disaster-ridden antics of a truculent pyromaniac called Mikey, via an earnest young vicar from Hackney and the wimpish Mr Payne, who has fled the inner city only to find a greater threat to his karma in the hedgerows of Middle England.
‘Down at the post office,’ we discover, ‘Mrs Lyall pinned her hair-piece into position and prepared herself for another day of minimal activity.’ But this is an illusion. Through the village are running currents of murderous discontent. At the village fête, for the first time ever, the farmers lose the tug-of-war to a team made up of weekending newcomers and Sergei, ‘a huge Ukrainian dissident’.
With an incredible confidence for a début novelist, Miranda France changes tack from rural romance to murder mystery, killing off one of her favourite characters and leaving the body undiscovered until almost the end. It’s a bit like that scene in Hamlet when Polonius lies on stage, stabbed and very dead, while Gertrude and Hamlet slog it out for what seems like hours, and the audience becomes restless, wondering whether Shakespeare just forgot to add the stage direction, ‘Remove the dead body.’ In this case, you feel like shouting out, ‘Find the dead body.’
But Miranda France writes with such assurance, and humour that she carries us along. Not because of what happens, but through the subtle underpinning of her characterisation. As Tom, the youngest of the children, lies awake at night, listening to the sound of scampering feet in the rafters a few feet from his head, he decides that it’s not that he’s scared of foxes, owls, rats and bats, it’s ‘their furtive activity while humans slept that chilled him. He would prefer all living creatures to keep the same hours; it was not right that some were awake while others slept.’
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