This is the first volume of a trilogy. Set in rural England in 1911 it includes vivid, detailed accounts of the routines followed by ploughmen, servants, blacksmiths, housewives, wheelwrights, children, grooms and carters hour by hour, day by day, season by season. Cows, pigs, horses and sheep are born, raised, worked and slaughtered. The class system rules society so harshly that the occasional kindness or intimacy across the class line only serves to emphasise just how omnipresent the system is. Yet the overall effect (on me, anyhow) is to emphasise how impressive people sometimes are even in awful circumstances. I was reminded of George Orwell's definition of tragedy: "A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him."
I'll be reading the remaining two volumes of this series.
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