The Deepest Furrow

The Deepest Furrow by Jonathan Wood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As is always the case with Mount Abraxas Press, this artifact is beautiful. The woodcut cover by Matus Durcik is deceptively quaint and rustic. And while the narrator of The Deepest Furrow seeks solace in a return to the rustic, he finds it anything but quaint. Voluntarily leaving the drudgery of urban office-labor, with its demeaning social structure and seemingly shallow inhabitants, the narrator abandons civilization for the simplicity of life "among the peasants" so to speak. He finds that the simple life isn't so simple (especially when he interacts with the children of the rural folk) and that a return to the soil is, well, precisely that.

This is the second Jonathan Wood book I've read. I found this one a bit more accessible than The Haunted Sleep. Wood's facility with poesis is evident here, with just enough of an experimental edge to add zest, but not so much as to overwhelm. The subject matter kept things down-to-earth (at times, literally), and the narrator's voice, that of a mid-level office-worker, felt correct.

One must note the strong existential streak herein, as noted in my review of The Haunted Sleep. It is a prominent part of the fiction, though this is more of a working-man's existentialism, more Kierkegaard than Nietzsche. In the end, though, does it really even matter? I think Wood would argue "no".

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