The opening episode of John Fowles's Daniel Martin (1977) involves a Devon harvest scene during the Second World War. Traditional farming methods are in evidence, most notably the use of a horse-drawn reaper-binder for harvesting the wheat. As the horse pulls the machine, a team of labourers gathers the bound sheaves, building them into ‘stooks’ (p. 8). For the young Daniel Martin, this defining image of ‘his Devon and England’ is forever shattered by the rude intrusion of modernity in the form of a German bomber, an enormous Heinkel, flying just two hundred feet above the field, filling Martin with foreboding, and the sense that ‘he is about to die’ (p. 11).

The episode marks a symbolic death, and the demise of something within the character, too. Fowles is interested in the way of life that is brought to an end after the war. The 1951 Festival of Britain is identified, not as ‘the herald of a new age, but the death-knell of the old one’; by this, narrator Martin (speaking for Fowles) means the loss of a collective principle of social organization, after which ‘we then broke up into tribes and classes, finally into private selves’ (p. 179). The novel is not straightforwardly nostalgic for the rural idyll that witnesses the co-operation of different social classes in the harvest ritual; yet the trope of an Edenic moment remains one aspect of Martin's quest for authenticity in the post-war world.