Jim Crace's final novel generates gothic dread with its pre-industrial setting and strange vocabulary. Two plumes of smoke begin the tale: one signaling the arrival of newcomers to the outskirts of a farming village, the other the burning of the master's dovecote. At the center of the story is Walter Thirsk, a widower and relative outsider himself, although a "milk cousin" of the lord of the manor (they nursed at the same breast). The arrival of the three outsiders, plus a mapmaker and the master's cousin by marriage, portend trouble. Crace's prose seems to become more modern as the story unfolds, a subtlety that I may be imagining. In any case, the fable-like tale brings to mind the best of Par Lagerkvist.
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