In response to the Guardian’s top 10 novels on farming

Over at Guardian Books, Irish playwright Belinda McKeon has picked her top 10 farming novels. Here’s her list:

1. Stoner by John Williams

2. Tarry Flynn by Patrick Kavanagh

3. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

4. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans

5. That They May Face The Rising Sun by John McGahern

6. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

7. Foster by Claire Keegan

8. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

9. God’s Own Country by Ross Raisin

10. The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer   

It’s a provocative list and there are some notable exceptions, especially as numbers 2, 3 and 5 are, as McKeon herself implies with her accompanying blurbs, all fairly similar. They describe the graft of agriculture, the hard and solitary life. But there’s more to farming than blood, sweat and subsidy. Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, for instance, might be described as farming novels without actually being about farming. Gabriel Oak, Mr Boldwood and Bethsheba are all farmers, albeit of very different social classes and aspirations. While The Grapes of Wrath is as much a book about ravaged land as it is ravaged human beings: the Joads’ flee from Oklahoma’s wilted prairies to the false hope of California.

Land is central to Steinbeck’s East of Eden too, with its sensual evocation of the Salinas Valley and the fortunes of the Trask and Hamilton families who live there. The relationship between men and their natural surroundings is also evident in Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurty’s Pullitzer Prize winning magnum opus of 1985 – a book that, crudely put, melds some of the dark human themes of Moby Dick with the machismo of Westerns like Rawhide! Indeed, McMurty apparently originally conceived of his plot as a film, starring such leathered stalwarts as Jimmy Stewart, Hank Fonda and The Duke.
 
As a post-script, McKeon has overlooked H.E. Bates, a once very popular author of rural yarns who seems to have fallen into total obscurity. I haven’t read anything by Bates, should I rectify that?

PPS: It’s been pointed out to me that War and Peace is not without its pastoral scenes.