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What if Charles Dickens had written a contemporary thriller? In Under the Harrow, a group of Victorians live a semi-idyllic and unwitting, anachronistic existence, aided only by minimal trade-related contact with the supposedly plague-ridden Outland. They are products of an experiment that had become a lucrative, voyeuristic peep-box for millionaires and their billionaire descendants. But the experiment has run its course, and Dingley Dell must be totally expungedand with it, all trace of the thousands of men, women, and children who live there. A few Dinglians learn the secret of both their manipulated past and their doomed future, and it is this motley group of Dickensian innocents who must race the clock to save their fellow countrymen and themselves from mass annihilation. Under the Harrow showcases the kind of dazzling wordplay and narrative richness that have made Mark Dunn's novels and plays both commercially successful and critically acclaimed.
Imagine Plato's Republic as founded by the child of Diderot and Charles Dickens, without the fascism but with plenty of rules: That's Dingley Dell, a place where life is "perpetually shrouded in impenetrable mystery."
Dunn plows fruitful land in this follow-up to his altogether more lighthearted but no less inventive Ella Minnow Pea (2001), positing a bookish place where cultural life is governed by old encyclopedias, Victorian novels and guild labor to do William Morris proud. No one knows where the Dell of Dingley, or Dingley Dell—fans of The Pickwick Papers, or of more obscure Monty Python bits, will remember the name—really lies: Some say Campania, others East Asia, though the coal seams and "conspicuous absence of the European Jay" suggest the Appalachians. Dingley Dell isn't exactly paradise, but it'll do, and its inhabitants are content to live in its shelter, speaking a language that is a little hobbity around the edges and remaining only dimly aware, via the "suppositive postulations," that a larger world exists out there but is not to be welcomed in or sought out. It's not exactly M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, but the fact remains that Dingley Dell exists for an odd reason, and that certain Outlanders harbor ill designs on it. When those designs are revealed, it's up to the Dinglians to go to war for their own survival, having learned about guerrilla warfare from who knows where. Set logic aside; Dunn crafts a pleasing, smart entertainment that slyly comments on and draws from a whole swath of fantasy and dystopian standards, from Fahrenheit 451 to the assembled works of Tolkien. In writing of his lost tribe, his "little people from an orographically anomalous valley," he invents a believable world, one that, wicked beings that we Outlanders are, would not seem likely to last.
Does it last? Readers are left guessing to the very end. This is a lively, thoughtful and beautifully written flight of fancy.
radioguy
Posted October 5, 2011
Dunn is an extraordinary talent and this book reaffirms this. His imagination is a rare thing . . . something to be treasured. He has completed an extraordinary new work of fiction that no one will want to miss. I am lucky to have been among the few who got a early glimpse, and I was amazed at its depth and breadth. It will be a volume to be cherished.
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Posted April 18, 2011
I greatly dislike reviews, reviewers and wasting mine and other people's time so I write this only because Under the Harrow was really a most excellent divertisement which I urge you to ramble through. I read this while hiking through the Appalachain Mountains with three young children in tow. Well, not while actully hiking but you know what I mean. You know how some books just change who you are, well this is one of those books.
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Overview
What if Charles Dickens had written a contemporary thriller? In Under the Harrow, a group of Victorians live a semi-idyllic and unwitting, anachronistic existence, aided only by minimal trade-related contact with the supposedly plague-ridden Outland. They are products of an experiment that had become a lucrative, voyeuristic peep-box for millionaires and their billionaire descendants. But the experiment has run its course, and Dingley Dell must be totally expungedand with it, all trace of the thousands of men, ...