They build bungalows with thatched roofs and plastic dormer windows. They banish the rural night with solar-powered garden lanterns. They loll on cushions in sunken sitting areas and gaze out at gardens left to grow wild "for nature". They are the "import", a term with rather less charm than the Irish "blow-ins" and losing something, perhaps, in translation from the Dutch. But if ever a book deserved to be read in every European language at this time, it is Geert Mak's study of a countryside in flux.
What Ronald Blythe's Akenfield did for Suffolk in the 1960s, or John Healy's Nineteen Acres for small-farm Mayo, Jorwerd achieves for the windswept north of the Netherlands and for every European village that feels itself and its memory flying to bits as the dormitory-people move in. The cog-wheels of farm decline are familiar enough: the treadmill of mechanisation and debt, the monstrous inflation of the bovine udder, (Jorwerd is, aptly, a Friesian village), and subsidies and quotas chasing each other's tails.
The details bring a deeper recognition: caps and haystacks left in the past, one kind of green grass, shrink-wrapped into silage; the rising stench of slurry. In 1995, at the end-point of Geert Mak's chronicle, the Netherlands had the most intensive agriculture in Europe but less than two per cent of its people still had anything to do with farming (with machines, one man can milk 100 cows on his own). Farmers who can't keep up with the economies of scale, the muttering of computers in the cowshed, sell out their land and milk quotas to even bigger factory farms, or to yuppie developers hustling yet more bungalow parks and yachting marinas. By 1985, one-third of Dutch villages no longer had a grocer's shop; a quarter are no longer on a bus route. At night, one police patrol car may cover more than 50 villages and a couple of towns, with a bundle of ordnance survey maps in the boot.
Jorwerd (pop 330 and falling) is the village where Geert Mak, now a journalist, spent his youth, a small circle of houses and farms around a stumpy but paintable church. Outside is a flat, green infinity with enormous skies, dusky and snowfilled in winter. Mak's long stay in the village provides some memorable vignettes of scenes, weather and people, but the book cries out for illustration: without it, one reaches for the lumpen world of early Van Gogh, which is only a part of the story.
What does it mean, to lose a village? The best of the book is a patient, perceptive teasing out of village values, traced through the lives of his candid, often stoical interviewees. Some would fit anywhere in Connacht: the "iron law" of neighbourliness; the conservatism which is all about survival; the social control that is the downside of caring. Jorwerd's big row, when the plan for a community centre upset the owners of the village pub, could have happened anywhere in Mayo.
The village is tougher, more resilient than Mak expected, even more content and proud. Its agriculture, after all, "died wealthy", and a whole new package of subsidies rewards the farmers for looking after nature and the environment. The young people have shaped their own rural pop culture, tough and distinct and out of its mind on Saturday nights. A decade ago, before the turn-around in Ireland's fortunes, Jorwerd would have been read with painful recognition of what a declining village can lose in culture and identity. Today, it has an urgent extra value, both to natives and blow-ins (and priests and planners and development committees) as an ordnance-survey map of the social change now upon us.
Michael Viney's latest book is A Wildlife Narrative
