Customer Reviews:
 Brilliant, heartfelt ethnography of a vanished culture: ours November 23, 2000
21 out of 21 found this review helpful
Ronald Blythe's Akenfield is a book about the past. And approaching the past always involves both sadness and exhilaration: the latter because, rightly or wrongly, we see ourselves in the past, feel at home there, and know the pleasure of its kinship; and the former because we know the past is irretrievably lost, its faces vanished, and its words and songs and experiences, its life and laughter, its sharp pain and flashes of joy irredeemably gone. This is the experience of the reader in Akenfield--and this is the book's blessing. Even after thirty years, Blythe's book about the people who live in a small rural village in Suffolk, and who told him candidly and completely the story of their lives and their village, restores to us a world we still know, but barely. It reminds us of an England that--along with single family farms, hedgerows, village pubs, and rural silence--has seen its time pass, and its depth and flavor lost. But neither the book nor the people whose lives are captured in its pages should be romanticized. That would be injustice. Akenfield is peopled by characters who without adornment or pretension tell the stories of their lives, of its bitterness and struggle, along with its victories and unexpected moments of pleasure: from farrier to farm student, from ploughman to pig farmer, from saddler to schoolmaster. We hear the voices of the nurse, schoolteacher, poet, wheelwright. We hear the magistrate, the apple-picker, and the gravedigger. These are the voices--and the lives--of generations that came before us. They are the voices of the Great War and after, of the growing middle class between the wars, of the incursion into rural existence of electricity, the telephone, the main road to Ipswich and then London, of the Second World War and the soldiers' return. The voices are familiar, they are friendly. They are also heartrending, and the stories they tell--particularly of conditions in agrarian English society in the early 20th century--can be sad and even shocking. Yet this is also a magical work, a work of art--one invaluable to any ethnographer, but one that transcends ethnography or anthropology because of its simple humanity. The book's preface refers in passing to the Domesday Book of 1086; and, because Blythe insists on remaining a recorder instead of an author--because he transcribes the words of others instead of describing what they say--consciously or not he has wrought similarly as important a documentary history of life and society at the end of our last millennium as we received from the Normans at its beginning. Akenfield is a remarkable, enduring achievement, and surely stands as one of the finest examples in English history of the living, breathing spirit of late 19th and early 20th century English culture.
A very realistic portrayal of a bygone time April 14, 2000
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
For lovers of country tales who say things were better then this book gives a very balanced reflection. The ramblings of some of the village folk are just pure poetry.
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