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After the 'blowfly vaccine' incident, I'm aware that we're coming to the mid-point of the book and am wondering where the plot will turn next. I'm willing to take 'time out', however, and put all my questions and anxieties to one side for the moment. Yes, a kind of maternal 'anxiety' is the right word for how I feel about Sam. I find myself being very critical of the parents, looking for an opportunity to explain why things might be going wrong with him. I want a happy ending.

That's one level, anyhow. On another level, I'm quite happy for now to be learning about sheep-rearing and feel quite knowledgeable, especially after watching a few episodes of 'Victorian Farm' on TV! (I'm unashamedly a 'town', I'm afraid, altho' I did look after a sow and its piglets for a friend of my Dad's when I was14 - my special responsibility over a few months was (apart from 'mucking out') to feed the runt of the litter with a bottle). Anyhow - back to the sheep - perhaps the farm is where Sam belongs: this is his true element, which he'll never transcend - never mind the brilliant mock exam results. (I note in passing, with relief, after the chicken incident, that he's kind to animals -at least there is some moral inner core to him -and he's in tune in a solid, non-romantic way with nature, which is also kind of steadiness.)

By about page 105, I'm beginning to feel impatient (fickle reader that I am) for something to happen. I'm starting to tire of whether the girl will come or not, am not in fact too worried at this stage about Sam's lack of control, despite narrative pointers ("remember, lad, you've not always t'owerance over your doings" p.105) and I'm not interested too much in Norman's farm and Whitelock Homes, altho' there is a warning of a kind of disintegration there too. I want to ignore all the signs, am waylaid by wondering just who is this Greengrass from 'Heartbeat'. (Does anyone understand the reference?) Also, just who is sobbing - p.98 -"Leave me alone"? I'm also into criticizing Sam's mother again -(bottom page 117): couldn't be worse, she's said all the wrong things -" You must've come out backward"- thinking only of herself, completely undermining for a young person struggling to find a sense of self-worth etc. I'm going off the track a bit here maybe....

I thought I'd take a moment here to decide what it is about Raisin's descriptive style which makes it seem so original. If Sam Marsdyke is going to wax 'lyrical' about anything, it will be about the moors. Lyrical isn't the word, though, and 'poetic' would be beyond the range of a rough-cut farm lad who lives and works by the rhythms of the land. For Sam, the beauty of nature is all physical sensation and movement
-" the vast of pink-brown carried on endless, steeping and slacking, darkening, for twenty miles, but off eastward the land dipped, furrowing into Glaisdale valley and a small beck glinting, dribbling away to sea.Sit, Sam, it's beautiful." (p.131)
Similarly, the oilseed rape fields are a "butter -coloured mass" "bulging and writhing with the breeze"(p.147).

Raisin's use of verbs in descriptive passages reminds me of David Mitchell's style in his novel 'Black Swan Green'. Here the boy narrator is from a relatively well-to-do family, living on the kind of semi-rural modern housing development which Sam's people would have despised. He's a self-conscious poet in the making: " A peardrop sun dissolved in a sloped pond. Super-heated flies grand-prixed over the water. Trees at the height of their blossom bubbled dark cream (...)" (p.117).

I would have to say I prefer this less sparse style.

And what about this from Cider with Rosie? Here is the (adult) narrator remembering a summer from his boyhood in an isolated Cotswold village around 1918: "bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things." (p.42) Now this is the real 'God's Own Country'!