SOURCE: Taylor, D. J. “Voices of the Village People.” New Statesman and Society 5, no. 200 (1 May 1992): 38.

In the following review, Taylor faults Thorpe's “tiresome” and implausible attempts at constructing a nontraditional narrative in Ulverton.

In outline, Ulverton must have seemed like a very good idea indeed. A Wessex village seen through 350 years of snapshot history. A series of fugitive, fictional voices set to illumine the rural microcosm, with a grander national pageant glimpsed fitfully in the distance. A discriminating poet's eye (Thorpe's Mornings in the Baltic was shortlisted for a Whitbread Poetry Prize) to weld the fragments together. The blurb talks about “traditional English pastoral” meeting the postmodern, and the stage seems set for a prose version of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns: history, myth and self-awareness cunningly aligned with maximal sleight-of-hand.

And it is a good idea, up to a point. For a start, Thorpe's protagonists are carefully chosen...