The cult of pastoral life has long been part of the English identity. Ronald Blythe’s 1969 book Akenfield – a kind of lyrical ethnography of a Suffolk village, told in the voices of the villagers themselves – vividly illustrated how this cherished way of life was on the verge of extinction. The book was an instant bestseller and has since sold over 300,000 copies and been made into a feature film and a BBC documentary.

In Return to Akenfield, Craig Taylor finds out how 35 years have altered the face of the village. The “old days,” he discovers, are long gone. The few farmers who have survived the globalization of agriculture are dependent on subsidies and increasingly computerized machines to survive; unskilled migrant workers perform the lowliest work. Villagers provide services to wealthy newcomers from the city, who buy up arable land for housing. The suburbanization of the countryside, it appears, is almost complete.

Taylor does well to educe the issues that bind all the villagers together, from orchard farmer to teacher to gamekeeper. He transcribes the villagers’ voices with skill and delicacy, careful to preserve their syntax and rhythms – clearly he has won their trust and asked the right questions.

As a young native of Western Canada now working as a journalist in London (he’s also a Q&Q columnist), Taylor is very much an outsider in Suffolk. He is aware of this, and his brief descriptions of the villagers are cautious, almost shy. He never dares more than a few details about their appearance or lifestyle (“Harry keeps a photo of his refurbished tractor on his mobile phone”). Those who know the original book may find themselves hankering for the bold authority of Blythe, who as a Suffolk native provided sharp, inspired insights into the minds of his fellow villagers (“He is a religious man listening for God in a hurricane”).

But Taylor knows he is part of what, in Akenfield, Blythe called the “new conception of happiness”: “the literate and informed” as opposed to the old “mysterious and intuitive.” Appropriately, he gives the final word to Blythe, now 83 years old, who cautions against any nostalgic sentimentality for the past, citing the poverty, the crippling work, and the suffocating insularity of the farming community. With Return to Akenfield, Taylor successfully reveals how much of rural England has been lost, and also reminds us just how much has been gained.