SOURCE: Robinson, Marc. “Field Work.” New Republic 208, no. 17 (26 April 1993): 42-5.

In the following review, Robinson lauds Thorpe's skillful evocation of historical detail in Ulverton.

Adam Thorpe writes of tussocks and furze, of sarsens atop hummocks and coppices at the bottom of combes. When anxious, his creatures are “a-muck with fear”; those in despair are “husked of their souls.” Life, as it is lived here, is “field-hedged and scullery-encompassed.”

Ulverton is larded with this language of nature and work, as though Thorpe, an English poet, was determined to guard against undue metaphysics in his first novel. Speaking generously about certainties like the color of soil or the texture of crabgrass, he seems to be happily handling language rather than merely writing stories with it. Archaic words are sifted through new ones, then massed together to form clumps of observation. Rhythms of speech seem to correspond subtly with those of...