Back in the late ’60s, I read a review of Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village that made me want to read the book. Even though I never got round to picking it up, the title stuck all this time. Now, forty odd years later, I’ve finally read it—and I’m grateful to my memory for hanging on to it!

To be sure, I had reminders, since Ronald Blythe, now in his 90s, writes a weekly column in The Church Times composed of observations and ruminations crisscrossing a broad array of literary, gardening, historical, artistic, and religious concerns. The column is called “Word from Wormingford,” the town where Blythe now lives in an Elizabethan house called Bottengoms Farm.

To the American ear, this may all sound just too quaintly English. Believe me, it is anything but. Akenfield is based on interviews with people in the region of Suffolk where Blythe grew up and brings to life a whole range of characters caught in the rapid transition of the English countryside after World War II—transition from horse-powered to machine-powered agriculture, from farms that raised a wide array of products to factory farms, from an agriculture that required many laborers, preferably not too well educated, to one that required fewer hands and more specialized skills.

It is a process, of course, that the United States (and, for that matter, the world at large) is still going through in various ways. There are times when the fictitious “Akenfield” seems not so very different from, say, the American Rust Belt or the small towns of the Plains states.

What is particularly beautiful and intriguing about the book is the way people were willing to open up with Blythe as he asked them to talk about their experience of the times and their response to change. One has no way to know just how precisely he reproduced the interviews on which he based the work. They were certainly disguised to protect his interlocutors. Yet, each has the individuality and unpredictability that tell us these figures were not “made up” out of his own imagination.

The book is distinct from most enquiries of an ethnographic sort in that the whole project seems to have been motivated originally by pure curiosity about Suffolk and country people like those he had seen, as a child, plowing with horses. He was exploring his own world and had the gift to do it without sentimentality. Yes, he was fascinated by the past, but has no illusions about its having been a kind of rural paradise. Yes, he is part of the changing present, but sees both its advantages and its costs.

The book has two great gifts to offer the reader, even in a world that has continued changing at a great pace. One is its breadth of human sympathy. Whether you are teacher, priest, pastor, physician, judge, or just plain old citizen, you will be likely to find your human sympathies and your social awareness broadened and deepened by it

And, if you once start reading, you will receive its second gift: a series of narrative as compulsively readable as a good collection of short stories.

Happily, it is readily available in a recent reprinting by New York Review of Books, with an introduction by Matt Weiland. Take and read.