Wales Arts Review

Greatest Welsh Novel Part One

Emyr Humphreys - Joe Dunthorne - Stevie Davies - Ron Berry - Dan Rhodes - Iain Sinclair - Christopher Meredith - Caradog Prichard

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 1 Wales Arts Review Contents

Senior Editor Gary Raymond

Managing Editor Phil Morris

Design Editor Wales Arts Review is excited and proud to announce that 2014 marks the year in which Dean Lewis we launch the search for the Greatest Welsh Novel. Over the course of 2014 Wales Arts Review will publish a series of essays by some of Wales’ top literary voices nominating a longlist of twenty five novels marking the finest long works of fictional prose our nation has ever produced. Each issue we will announce the latest title to be added to the longlist, Fiction Editor along with the nominating essay. When all the nominating essays have been published we will open a public vote focussing on that longlist to find the Greatest Welsh Novel. The John Lavin winner will be announced at the Wales Arts Review Roundtable event toward the end of the year, where an award will be handed out to either the author, estate or publisher of the winning work. The longlist has been compiled by a team of Wales Arts Review’s writers and editors, as well as some guest voices. It is a diverse collection of old and new, and Music Editor there are a fair few surprises in there. Here is Part One. Steph Power 3 A Toy Epic by Emyr Humphreys – Gary Raymond

5 Submarine by Joe Dunthorne – Non Fiction Elin Williams 6 Shifts by Christopher Meredith Editor – Dylan Moore 7 Un Nos Ola Leuad by Caradog Prichard – Ben Glover Jon Gower

8 Awakening by Stevie Davies – John Lavin

10 So Long, Hector Bebb by Ron Berry – Craig Austin

11 Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl – Gary Raymond PDF Designer 13 Gold by Dan Rhodes – Jamie Woods Ben Glover 14 The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis – John Lavin

16 Downriver by Iain Sinclair – Steven Hitchins

18 Cwmardy & We Live by Lewis Jones – Jon Gower

19 On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin – Gary Raymond

21 The Valley, The City, The Village by Glyn Jones – Jon Gower

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 2 A Toy Epic by Emyr Humphreys

by Gary Raymond

erhaps a strange choice for some to open Wales Maddox Ford, Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf – in particular Arts Review’s nominations for The Greatest Welsh The Waves which folds an avuncular arm around A Toy Novel, Emyr Humphreys’ A Toy Epic, published Epic from beginning to end, from head to toe), but also he in 1958 (although Humphreys started it in 1945), is conducting these experiments at the fault lines of fear is best described by its somewhat emotionally detached and exaltation that the early part of the twentieth century title. It is, in publishing terms, a novella, but in terms of inspired in its artists. theme and scope it is as far-reaching as any potent national Modernists of the time fell pretty much into two statement, as richly symbolic and thoughtful in its own way categories: those like Eliot and Pound who embraced the as any Dr Zhivago or Grapes of Wrath. It is a story of a new world, albeit warily, the one scarred by the coruscating country in transition, told through the humble comings of trenches of the Western Front, embittered by the political age of Michael, Iorwerth chaotics of Imperialism and Albie. It is a story and Fascism as one faded about the end of a world and the other matured that had lasted longer than (with different levels of folktales, the world of the seduction for some cases). harrow and Shire horse, of They built literature out of chapel and Sunday best. iron and mud and It is the story of the concrete, and painted with moment when Wales palettes of grey. Others became the Wales we like Yeats and Edward know today, and stopped Thomas warned against being the Wales of our what they saw as the nation’s compulsively onslaught of modernity and nostalgic psyche. But most industrialisation. But their significantly, A Toy Epic is work was touched no less Wales’ most important war by an unbridling of their novel. genius, fed by the same To this last point we revivifying air that allowed will return. them to experiment. For Firstly, however, let us the novel, modernism look at the significance of meant that rules were now this book as a piece of there to broken, affect now literature, published and had a different, more written, as it was, during prominent role in the what is generally regarded narrative, and fiction was as the dark ages for the no longer the sole kingdom modern British novel of of the storyteller. Tolstoy 1945-1960. may have given a cameo A Toy Epic is Wales’ to a cognizant dog to shining example of discuss the roll of nature in modernism. Humphreys, nihilism in Anna Karenina, in this book at least, in this but modernists could go period of his writing, is a much further and for much modernist in the exact longer. A Toy Epic is a sense of the word. He is marvellous example of experimenting with form modernist techniques (albeit in the footsteps of employed to condense the

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 3 reading experience whilst opening up the riches of prose’s without and within, the erosion of tradition, the significant potential. internal migrations of a country experiencing an industrial It is an advance in literary ambition from Humphreys’ pattern that was witnessing its communities move closer to first attempt at a modernist narrative, A Man’s Estate, in the coast. that it looks at the events of the wider world from a But A Toy Epic has one extremely powerful central three-pronged personal, localised, and, largely, narrow theme, the one I mentioned at the outset, and one which understanding of the world. The march of the modern world dominates the book and all subsequent themes, and that affects everyone, whether they are aware of it or not. A Toy is war. The novel is framed by the First and Second World Epic is a novel that explains the world, explains Wales, but Wars, and the shadows of both, one gone and one looming, does it while never letting go of that ‘innermost flame’ that colour the novel dark. War is the ultimate representation in explores the ‘extraordinary quality of an ordinary mind on the book of the modernists’ dilemma: war, although a threat an ordinary day’ that Woolf talked about when distancing to the very existence of civilisation, can also advance it. herself from the superficiality of those novelists she termed The myth of heroism in war is challenged in the book. ‘materialists’. A most memorable passage has Michael perusing the Humphreys takes the lessons of The Waves even photographs in a roll of honour at his school. Michael thinks further. As we spin through the apparent simple coming of of them as not only ‘innocent’ but also as ‘pathetic’. The age story, gliding from the internal perspectives of the three school itself is a mechanism to assert different roles within boys often from paragraph to paragraph, as the story gains the masculine hierarchy. Albie is being groomed for the pace we are also subjected to subtle but significant shifts officer class. The doomed young Jac has his future keenly in time and space. A conversation at Albie’s parents’ mapped out, mainly because of his aptitude for rule- breakfast table, for instance, can take in several years of breaking, but a rule breaking that has a constant alignment breakfasts and can be used to display both the growing with the behaviour associated with the masculinity that awareness of Albie, the mild disintegration of his family unit, leads men to war. but also the alterations of public life, to society itself and the Throughout the book there are allusions to the causes very bones of civilisation. This will take up half a page and of war, to working class and middle class oppressions – to do the job of seventy from a Victorian novelist. Humphreys the treatment of the kulaks to the Easter Rising to the was looking for something pure. He had been influenced persecution of the Jews in NAZI Germany. Wales becomes heavily by the syntactical tricks of Faulkner in The Sound linked to such radicalism in the book. A barber snipping at of the Fury (as well as Woolf’s shifting perspectives in The hair mentions how Welsh nationalists should be put up Waves), which A Toy Epic resembles closely in the details against the wall and shot. Divisions are everywhere, of its most technically daring passages. But he had also complexities are everywhere; rifts, loggerheads, the masses been influenced by M.M. Bahktin’s 1937 essay ‘Forms of engulfed in the uncertainty of war. Time and the Chronotope in the Novel’. Bahktin, borrowing Fascism, the ugliest and most potent of political fads in from Einstein, adopts the chronotope as a term to describe the nineteen thirties, felt less surely in Wales than a particular type of literature: elsewhere in Europe, has a strong presence in the book. And it sinks sagaciously into Humphreys’ powerful ideas In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal about language. There are no Blackshirts in Wales, but indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, there is the pulpit, and Humphreys has no problems linking concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on the rhetoric of religion with the rhetoric of politics, with all of flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space the corruption and the rot, and the ‘whipping up of fervour’. becomes charged and responsive to the movements Here Humphreys speaks clearly about his literary attitudes of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and to war. Language fails it – the rhetoric of the pulpit wins out, fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. it sends men to their death, but can never explain why they die, not really. As Jacqueline Rose writes so well, ‘the That Humphreys pondered this idea, this mode of concept of war is incapable of calculating, or mastering, the narrative transport, and then took thirteen years to perfect chaos, inconsistency, and randomness of the object it is the one hundred and eighty pages of A Toy Epic until its meant to predict and represent.’ And so the novel itself publication, shows a brilliant literary mind chiselling away becomes a rich smattering of random events, tragedies and at some very exacting innovations. So is A Toy Epic even disappointments, of characters trying to come to terms with a novel? (Virginia Woolf, after all, called her The Waves a what life throws at them; some fail and some hold on for ‘playpoem’, not a novel). If a novel is about the scope of a dear life. What A Toy Epic states very convincingly is that world within the bindings of a book rather than a word count, war is a part of the human condition, not a temporal space it most certainly is. that stands opposite to ‘peace time’. But Humphreys’ masterpiece is not just about the But Humphreys is always primarily concerned with the technical achievements. individual – A Toy Epic is not a cold novel, despite the It is a very moving story of three boys growing up. It is impression I may have given up until now. Progress of a story about childhood, and Welsh childhood specifically, humanity and community aside, the journey from childhood and between the wars specifically; it is about church versus to maturity of the three boys is what drives the story along, chapel, about class, about different types of masculine is what makes it worth the riches that come interred. identity, about prospects, about sex, marriage and definitely A Toy Epic is a Great novel. It is set in a time and a about death. It is a book about how a moment of minor place, yet transcends these things, bringing the immediate madness can change a life forever, and how nurture can along with it to the everlasting questions of the human get its claws firmly into nature. As M. Wyn Thomas points condition. And this happens bedded with warm and real out in his full and excellent introduction to the Seren edition, characters, whole and fragmented all at once, and always the boys are supposed to represent the polarities at work Welsh. in Wales during the time; the anglicanisation of Wales from

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 4 Submarine by Joe Dunthorne

by Elin Williams

liver Tate is, as a teenage development into the man he will one your opinion may be on King, he is protagonist, one of the most day become. undoubtedly a master of character. believable characters in a The book is inherently Welsh Considering that this was initially teenage fiction novel I have purely because it is written so Dunthorne’s creative project in ever come across. In fact, I would go convincingly from a teenage university, the skill he displays so early as far as to say that he is the perfect perspective. There is no striving to on in learning the craft is very representation of a fifteen year old boy. create a sense of place; Oliver lives in impressive. Oliver is flawed. He is Writing a believable teenager as an Swansea and so quite simply we see intelligent, neurotic, paranoid, adult is inevitably difficult, but Joe Swansea from his own disinterested delusional, well-read, funny and Dunthorne does it with such skill, it is view. Colloquialism occurs naturally pretentious. It is the character that very difficult to poke holes in the (being brought up twenty miles from makes the book such a success. character. He has succeeded in Swansea, the novel is a home from Oliver’s character is so big, it creating a perfect teenager by steering home for me personally). dominates the novel. away from the stereotypical Dunthorne’s novel was and instead engages made into a film, and rightly directly with a younger self. so; it is perfect for the Written during his BA alternative cinema screen. creative writing course at In fact, the reason I read the the University of East book initially was because Anglia, it is likely that the film was so fantastic, Dunthorne was particularly and I was thrilled to be able close to Oliver’s age at the to expand on Oliver’s antics time. Yes, he explores the in the novel. Directed by sexual awakening of the Richard Ayoade and teenage boy, but he also starring Craig Roberts as engages with curiosity and Oliver Tate, the film is a a sense of pretentiousness hilarious and mostly that is typical of an accurate portrayal of intelligent teenager. Oliver Oliver’s life. The film was reads the dictionary and shot on location in and thesaurus and begins his around Swansea and the diary extracts with a Word magnificent Paddy of the Day. He is also Considine stars as Graham meticulous about grammar Purvis. Capturing Oliver’s and constantly corrects his sense of generic peers. The book follows individuality through camera Oliver as he experiences shots is very well executed his first sexual encounter and the fantastic cast are with bad girl Jordana perfect in their portrayals. Bevan, a passionate Of course, alternative or teenage affair which ends not, in true ‘Hollywood’ style in tragedy. He becomes the film ends with Oliver and obsessed with his parents Jordana. The book is not so marriage, becoming optimistic. (I should have convinced that his mother is alerted you to that spoiler having an affair with before hand – apologies.) Graham, an old boyfriend of Again, this is a sign of a hers. Desperate for his good book for me. When parents to reconcile, he books end on a pessimistic keeps close tabs on his note it is more realistic. The depressive father and breaks into Oliver’s character is extremely fact that this novel adhered to this just Graham’s Gower cottage in an attempt well-developed, and one reason for this solidified its greatness. to convince him that he is deranged is that there is no censor. Oliver shares Although perhaps not considered and capable of anything. Oliver’s life is every repressed memory, a few which as one of the greats of Welsh literature, full of ups and downs, from listening to are quite shocking to read. Dunthorne I would argue Submarine is deservedly his mother pleasure Graham sexually explores every awkward angle; he one of Wales’ best novels, simply in a tent to deciding to feed rat poison does not shy away from anything. This because it just is Welsh. Dunthorne’s to Jordana’s dog in order to prepare is quite rare in not only teenage fiction writing is engaging and well-crafted. her for the death of her mother, Oliver but fiction in general. Dunthorne Tate is one of the most believable experiences a roller coaster of explores character in the same way Welsh protagonists I have come emotions which all contribute to his Stephen King does, and despite what across; full of flaws and full of himself.

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 5 Shifts by Christopher Meredith

by Dylan Moore

he title of Christopher is to evoke universal themes in a Meredith’s 1985 debut novel believably rendered microcosmic refers to both the reality. When Jack talks of his former monotonous patterns of life in Accrington, it seems to Keith like working class life and the changes to ‘the ends of the earth’. He and Judith such routines that remain forever cannot afford to heat the house; some beyond the control of the people of the central storyline’s persistent whose lives come to be defined by sexual tension arises from their getting them. In a country famous for changed in front of the two-bar electric coalmining, and a Heads of the Valleys heater in the living room. Meredith region more famous in the literary captures perfectly the reality of life in world for the romances of Alexander what many might be tempted to call late Cordell, Shifts is the novel of the 1970s working class Britain. But his declining steel industry. Moreover, the canvas is not nearly so wide. It year of its setting – 1977 - confirms its stretches, geographically, from the ostensibly undramatic events as a kind steelworks to the unheated house, from of full stop, the last dregs of the the town’s pubs up onto ‘the tops’ industrial South Wales that had existed where the long-dead victims of cholera for at least a century and a half, about and poverty lie undisturbed by time or to turn into something else. memory; timewise, it lasts a single Focusing on four characters season: as the plant closes down, the bound together by the closure of the winter thaws. steel plant in the town – unnamed but Shifts perfectly approximates the quite possibly Meredith’s native precise sub-dialect of Blaneau Gwent. Tredegar – Shifts is a study in how It is all ‘en’ for ‘isn’t’, the redundant men and women are forced by circumstance to take control auxiliary ‘do’ and frequent use of ‘bastard’ as an adjective. of their own destinies, even if sometimes it seems they are In addition to accent, and the mercilessly cruel and determined to let life pass them by. Jack Priday is the foulmouthed banter of the workplace (‘bastard’, I can assure protagonist; recently returned to Wales after some years you, is mild), Meredith draws on his own experiences as a spent in Norfolk and Lancashire, he is attempting to rebuild steelworker to deliver a strikingly realistic picture of a world his life a couple of valleys over from his original home, like we rarely see in fiction: a ‘salmon coming home to spawn.’ Jack lodges first with Connie, a middle-aged widow, but then settles with his … the blast furnaces, the open hearth, the scrap bay, workmate and former school friend Keith, a local history the coke ovens, all recently shut and decaying, and enthusiast now married to Judith, herself seeking a new then the parts still working; the hot mill, slabyard, galv, way forward when familiar routines are dislocated. And then pickler, cold mill, tinning lines, and all the other there is Rob – known mysteriously as ‘O’ – bullied at work departments servicing these; boiler shop, sling shop, and seeming to symbolise the great emptiness in all of the shoe shop, medical centre, garages, offices, railway characters’ lives; it is O who both opens and closes the lines, bridges… novel, forcing us to consider issues of circularity and time, life and death, being and nothingness. But Shifts isn’t simply a work of gritty realism, nor is it Meredith’s achievement is a significant one – easily a kitchen sink drama (although there is plenty of careful ranking as a Great Welsh Novel – not only because of the detail that paints a picture of the everyday); there is a thread skilful way that he combines these grand themes with of symbolism running through the novel that lifts it, humour and pathos. An unshowy understated quality marks wholesale, out of the read-once-and-always-remember the prose throughout and despite its depth and complexity, category of classic to the lofty position I am claiming for it Shifts is a down-to-earth book in keeping with its humble today. As Richard Poole points out in his ‘Afterword’ to the environs, great also because of Meredith’s fine ear for Seren Classics edition, beneath the text’s ‘seemingly plain dialect and the basic ingredients of character, setting and skin beats an ambitious symbolist heart’; it is a novel ripe plot. Keith’s interest in local history is just one way in which for academic interrogation not only because of its historical, the author subtly layers the humdrum events of the actual cultural, psychological and linguistic specificities – its story with resonance and complexity; here too is Meredith’s brilliantly evoked microcosm of time and place at a chance to explore the shifts at the beginning of the industrial (dis)juncture in the region’s, and the nation’s history – but age and with a deftness of touch play the birth of the town also because of its rich, highly patterned, subtext. Apart out against what seem to be its death throes. from all of that, it’s a great, engrossing, read. It is no wonder that The New York Times Book Review So, if as a nation we seek to venerate a book that helps said of Shifts that ‘the prose is spare and poetic, at once us understand ourselves and our circumstances, and that plain and rich, musical in its rhythm of speech and clear uses the novel’s power to investigate the psychological description.’ It is a perfect critical encapsulation of fallout of socio-historical trauma while at the same time Meredith’s style that also belies the essential Welshness at being skip-along readable and viciously funny, let’s stop the the book’s core. Like very great novels, the power of Shifts search here. The book is Shifts.

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 6 Un Nos Ola Leuad by Caradog Prichard

by Jon Gower

drawn people such as Anti Elin, Guto, Elwyn Pen Rhes and Jini Bach Pen Cae, not to mention some mythical figures such as Brenhines y Llyn Du, the Queen of the Black Lake and Brenhines yr Wyddfa, the Queen of Snowdon, mental apparitions or aberrations made corporeal and true. The prevalence of nicknames is typical of the area, and indeed of mining regions in general. So, some are named after their jobs or vocations, such as the barber Joni Wilias Barbwr and gamekeeper Dafydd Jos Cipar. Others are named after the place they live in such as Defi Difas Snowdon View and Arthur Tan Bryn, whilst the names of some reflect their relatives, so that you have Tad Wil Bach Plisman, Little Wil the Policeman’s Dad. These monikers are tender and telling, making everyone seem familiar, and serving to make the community in which they live fully known and close-knit, even to the interloping reader. Written in the first person singular, Un Nos Ola Leuad is an experimental, at times almost formless account of a boy’s own life, with ribbons of childhood narrative brightly braided and plaited with dark seams of madness. The boy is never named and at times one glimpses, rather, that this is a story told from the seemingly glaucomal perspective of an elderly narrator, seemingly telling the story of his own childhood. Because of his age – the years are there – the redactor is far from a reliable narrator, as he seems himself a little bit nuts. Nevertheless, in essence Un Nos Ola Leuad is the story of his walk, or pilgrimage through the place he grew up, on the way to Pen Llyn Du, an ominous peak above a pool of black, standing water. The peak seems both grail and terminus, drawing the central character to an inevitable and grim conclusion. It is conventional to refer to this novel’s narrative flow his tale of a young man’s growing-up and as ‘stream of consciousness’ and it is just that, a bright, education in the slate fields of the north-west, in hyper-oxygenated spume of twisting and coruscating words. Caernarfonshire as was, is a Bethesda The Prichardian prose-stream is mellifluous and uplifting, bildungsroman, if you like. It is a rich confection, but it hides great horrors, like submarine pike, haunting the both accessible and abstruse, lyrical and shallows. So Un Nos Ola Leuad mixes violence with workaday in the same breath. It takes the Welsh language, tenderness, just as it leavens the first person account with if not for a heavy workout, then for a very, very brisk walk snatches and bright shards of dialogue. The First World in the high air of Snowdonia. The prose tumbles with life War, too, casts a dread shadow over events, with many and the village community described therein is etched in deaths (the village cenotaph lists no fewer than 50 young tender and affectionate detail. Though it is also shot through men who have fallen in the trenches) and multiple suicides, with violence and abuse, darkness contesting the light, some of which are witnessed by the young lad, despite his wrestling with it. tender years. Centrally, the narrator’s mother is mad, and destined The resulting fiction is remarkable beyond. Part of its for the insane asylum and her hallucinations and visitations appeal is the spirited vernacular in which it is written, with meld with the quotidian tales to great effect. The terrors of the jaggedness of the slate terrain mixed with the uplift of the old woman, stranded among the flotsam of her a buzzard’s wing. The language is poetic, poised, shipwrecked mind, are all the more powerful when one abundantly energetic and brilliantly engineered too. considers that all this material is autobiographically derived. Although the book’s structure may at times be inchoate, the Prichard’s own mad mother went to Denbigh Hospital, and language is consistently deeply considered and brilliant, stayed there for no fewer than thirty years, a long and and well, it sings. Yes, this book sings, like an ousel on the testing episode in his life which haunted and troubled him high tops, telling tall and telling tales of humanity bustling for the rest of his mortals. They had been punishingly poor in the workers’ terraces below. I will go this far: this is the before that, so his upbringing was full of tests and one Welsh novel that can stand proud on the bookshelf travails. Little wonder that the author is able to mix up Laurie marked ‘World’s Literary Treasury’, alongside works by Italo Lee type nostalgia with sexual and other violences, to Calvino, Elias Canetti, Patrick White, Annie Proulx – think describe mundane characters alongside Gwynedd of your own names – and Prichard’s brilliant book easily transsexuals, who also live in the village, and like their frocks. passes muster and fully bears comparison. In prose it does The novel is a populous affair, with a relatively large not have a Welsh language competitor that comes within a cast of characters for its size, and we encounter sharply league, so it is veritably within a league of its own. The fact

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 7 that is was Prichard’s first novel only serves to underline my own work. In that Prichard is for many of us a benchmark the wonder of it. for achievement and a hallmark of quality, like those One writer whose name might be usefully invoked in jewellers’ symbols that attest to the purity of gold. And this discussing it is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as Un Nos Ola novel, moonlight-drenched and pulsingly alive, has all the Leuad has many characteristics of magical realism. energy, vividness and variety of humanity – raw, venal, Marquez’s extraordinarily influential novel One Hundred duplicitous and vital – and is pure gold. Gold found, Years of Solitude seems as if it might have been an unexpectedly, in great measure among the seams of grey influence on Prichard, until one remembers that the slate and the forbidding landscapes of the quarried land of Colombian’s work came out in 1967, while Prichard’s novel Gwynedd. was first published in 1961. In this, Un Nos Ola Leuad We may have slightly overused and devalued the seems to adumbrate and anticipate the major arrivals of word ‘classic’ when applied to books, but not in this case. magical realism, just as did the fictions of Borges. It certainly It is a bona fide classic, both enduring and enlightening, a has that groundbreaking feel to it, and in Welsh writing it volume yearning to be read and re-read and shared with not only shattered the literary models of the past but also future generations, which will surely be enthralled by it, for served as a pathfinder for the future, not least for the hugely as long as there is a language called Welsh in the engaging and inventive novels of Robin Llywelyn, but also scalped high hills. Awakening by Stevie Davies

by John Lavin

avies’ subject matter is the poetry and emotion of and illness is in many ways brought about by Beatrice (and oft ignored historical facts, in the minutiae of real by Anna’s own built-in reactivity to her) that the novel really experiences. She is interested in examining how starts to get its hooks into you. things genuinely were in the past, not how we are To begin with it appears as though we are in Wilkie told they were in school. And the best tool, with which to go Collins territory and that Beatrice is a kind of Sir Percival about this, besides, of course, determined historical Glyde-type figure, trying to drive the Laura Fairlie-like Anna research, is empathy. What would it feel like to be a woman into an asylum, but as the novel progresses we see that given burns and enemas to flush out psychological ‘poisons’ the two sisters are each caught in a pattern of self- simply because you speak your own opinions? To be destruction that seemingly neither of them can escape from. sexually molested by doctors under the auspices of your Because this is far from a pastiche of a Victorian novel, own sister, a woman who burns your books and calls you Davies is too acute a psychologist for that. There are times hysterical if you tell the truth? These are the real histories: when the reader will hate Beatrice in this novel, times the histories of those people who have been not so much indeed, when you will feel that in Beatrice, Davies has forgotten by history as deliberately written out of it. And, in created one of the great literary monsters. However, Awakening, Davies wants to tell us what it was like to be a because Davies is interested in the complexity of truth woman at a time when to be a woman was to have almost rather than historical falsification, there are times when we no public voice at all: the mid-Nineteenth Century. In order feel deep sorrow and even affection for Beatrice, thus to do this, she examines the lives of two women in enabling the creation of an extraordinarily well-realised particular. Two sisters, entwined in a damaging, symbiotic character. Beatrice herself describes the technique Davies relationship, that go by the name of Beatrice and Anna uses to achieve this, as she reflects on her own perception Pentecost. of Anna’s behaviour when their stepmother died in childbirth Davies lets the reader know right from the very (the baby dying soon after): beginning that this relationship is trouble: There are times when you see into a soul. Quite The motherless sisters would strive silently, wielding nakedly. The core of a person is revealed, terrible as different weapons. Beatrice, who remembered a time the pink, nude heart of a field mouse Dr Quarles before Anna, would start it. From the first she’d exposed in vivisection. cherished the dream of sending the usurper back where she came from, especially once she’d heard it It is Davies’ own epiphanic realisation of this nakedness whispered that the baby had killed Mrs Pentecost. She and her knowledge of how to find it in her characters which banged Mama’s murderer’s forehead against a window marks out her quality as an artist (although, no doubt she clasp, accidentally on purpose, and the tell-tale sign would not use that word ‘terrible’ as emotionally thwarted remains to this day, a curved scar between Anna’s Beatrice tellingly does). It is also this realisation which eyebrows. Beatrice, wincing, smooths it with her serves as the driving force behind the novel. Because this fingertips. Other attacks have left further marks. Early is what history rarely, if ever, shows: what it feels like to be in her life Anna mastered a knack of turning blue and alive, and how events and actions can warp and diminish toppling backwards, eyes wide but the pupils sliding and expand and do all sorts of complicated things to an upwards, mouth squared in a silent scream, not individual’s consciousness. breathing. Davies is particularly good at looking into the abused mind, first at Anna, and then at Beatrice. Anna suffers And so their relationship repeats itself into adulthood. abuse from at least three different sources; from her dead The Anna we meet in the first stages of the novel is the step-mother Lorne Ritter, by whom, from all we can gather, typical, sickly heroine of a Victorian novel, always weak and she was sexually abused as a child; by the local doctor, having to be in bed. It is as we realise that this weakness Quarles, and his accomplice, Dr Palfrey, who manhandle

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 8 her to her bedroom and poke about inside her vagina in child, and she subsequently tries to kill herself. This most order to release ‘the blood flow’ and bring about something forbidden of acts contributes towards Beatrice’s judgment called ‘hysterical paroxysm’; and of course, by her sister of her sister as hysterical and morally weak, although it (who in her most chilling act, arranges for those doctors to increasingly becomes clear that Beatrice’s attitude towards visit Anna while she herself is away on honeymoon). her sister is predominantly that of someone who is In turn Beatrice’s abuse is more subtle. From an early frightened by the truthful mirror that Anna represents. age, Lorne’s brother, Christian, a preacher, takes a shine Meanwhile the child Beatrice has by Christian also dies to her and asks her father, also a preacher, if he may marry after a few weeks. This is particularly harsh as Beatrice her when she is old enough. Her father assents and from adores the boy and is so filled by love for him that she then on Beatrice feels that her childhood is stolen away begins to change as a person. When he dies Christian from her because he counsels that they is constantly trying to should be happy mould her into his because he has idea of how a gone to Jesus and Christian (in both Beatrice thinks senses) wife should again, ‘Beattie hates, be. She also Beattie loathes.’ It is remembers an almost as though incident when he had there is something bounced her up and warped and down on his knee in malignant about Lore a way, which while and Christian, almost not ostensibly as though they are a inappropriate, in virus or a poison terms of emotional caught up in each atmosphere felt Pentecost sister’s deeply inappropriate bloodstream. This is (Anna corroborates something which is this by remembering underlined when we it separately and by finally (not until page remembering how 274) hear Beatrice’s disturbing she found opinion of Lore, and it to witness.) ‘Beattie learn that she thinks hates, Beattie of her as a ‘demon’. loathes’ is what she It is a mark of used to say to herself both Davies’ cunning about Christian as a novelist and of whenever she had her psychological spent time with him, acuity that up until a mantra made all this moment we have the more unsettling largely only heard when she picks it up nice things about again after they Lore because we eventually marry. have only really (Something which heard about her from Christian, a master of Anna. Anna who, of manipulation, tricks course, would have her into doing by been conditioned to telling her that she think well of Lore by accepted him when Lore herself, her he unexpectedly abuser. It is then that embraced her. we realise that both Beatrice meanwhile sisters’ childhoods is sure she never have been stolen agreed to any such away by the Ritters. thing.) As this There is a conclusion may strange duality at the attest, Awakening, is heart of what happens to both Anna and Beatrice and in a sad work but it is also a deeply moving and profound one. both cases it is caused by the Ritter siblings. Lore, having It is also a novel which embodies its title; a title which, as had a sexual relationship with the child Anna, dies in well as reflecting the book’s setting, (the time of Darwin, the childbirth, leaving a baby which, before it dies, Anna takes beginnings of feminism, the time of variously oddball as her own, nursing and even trying to breastfeed it. It is as religious ‘awakenings’), also reflects this writer’s deep though it is a product of their relationship rather than of concern with personal awakenings. Indeed, you leave these Lore’s relationship with Anna’s father. And as such it is only pages feeling more fully conscious of yourself and the world a phantom and can never live. When it inevitably dies, around you than you did when you began them. What more something in Anna does so too, much as if it were her own can you ask for from a book?

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 9 So Long, Hector Bebb by Ron Berry

by Craig Austin

his Wales of ours is going to rack and ruin. I tell wanting men and duplicitous, disillusioned women. you, brawd, what’s wanted is a bloody revolution. Masterfully, Berry utilises fourteen different interior Wipe the slate clean; start all over again as if monologues to cumulatively plot the preordained destiny of we’d just lost our bloody tails. Hector Bebb, a mercurial Valleys prize-fighter who punches, Ron Berry’s 1970 Valleys masterwork So Long, Hector and inadvertently kills, the man who has been openly having Bebb is a great Welsh novel, maybe the great Welsh novel, an affair with his sexually frustrated wife, a woman long- because much like its ultimately doomed pugilist of a since resigned to her warrior of a husband never being able protagonist, it defiantly refuses to play by the antiquated to replicate his athletic prowess within the conjugal bed: rules of its predecessors. This is no work of dewy-eyed, verdant-valleyed whimsy; there are no heroes here, no You’d think him terrific. Ramping-tamping for a husband bleeding hearts of solid Welsh gold, no ultimate redemption, is what I mean. The shock came first and no or hackneyed working class valour. It is a work ultimately improvement ever since. Dead loss very nigh. Hardly defined by fatalism and claustrophobic conditions, and any resemblance to himself inside the ring when he’s given that it was written in the raw aftermath of the Aberfan up against some fella trying to knock lumps off his face. disaster, by a former coalminer no less, one wholly devoid of the voices of children; an entire generation erased in a The all-pervading influence of sex is writ large single moment of unfathomable catastrophe. throughout the Rhondda village of Cymmer (its suggestive Though ostensibly a story about a boxer, and boxing pronunciation not lost on the author), aggressive, ugly, itself, Berry’s novel nobly resists the trite notion of ‘triumph mechanical sex. Sex as the pre-emptive weapon of choice, over adversity’ that besmirches so many of its oeuvre; if the principal currency of a community that – boxing, ‘oeuvre’ is even an appropriate term – this is no sports book, excepted – has long since ceased to dare to dream. despite its contemporary marketing. If anything, Bebb I’m not selling this to you, am I? It’s OK, I can tell. And endures, defiantly and assuredly, as the anti-‘Rocky’, a given exposure to the brutally industrial language that granite-hard thriller entirely bereft of romance; a story punctuates Berry’s prose like ’80s hedgerow pornography, underpinned by an unholy ragbag collective of lumpen, you may grow to like it even less. But what language! Berry’s dialogue – the sound of the English language having gone 12 brutal rounds with the Rhondda valley – is the real thrill here. Words mangled and disfigured by razor-sharp tongues and broken teeth to create a brutal beauty of indeterminate virtue. Even the swearing, and there is plenty of swearing, has its own deliciously delightful appeal, its vulgarity achieving an almost Chaucerian level of ingenious creativity. The ‘faaqen’ phonetics of the White Hart pub imbued with a vibrant authenticity that positively reeks of stale beer and cheap perfume. Here’s Bump Tanner on the untimely death of Emlyn Winton:

What Millie Bebb does is fling her what’s-it at him for Em to touch up her clout. Em sticks his hand there in open public! Like I say, God stone me cold, the man isn’t born who’ll take such. He was always on about Mel Carpenter’s bad luck. Luck, by Christ. They reckon you could hear Emlyn’s head smacking the counter from outside the Transport Café. LUCK! Em’s mouth spilling the old tomato sauce.

Berry is no interloper, no opportunistic cultural tourist. He refuses to sit in judgment or to cloak his characters in mawkish sentiment. Though left-wing by nature, these characters are far more driven by hedonism and self- gratification than they are by either politics or religion. Here is a writer embedded at the core of his community and one not shy about airing its seismic imperfections alongside its admittedly fleeting moments of kindness. These voices ring true, and the fact that they don’t conform to clichéd museum-piece images of rolling hills, kindly hearts, and earnest noble toil only adds to their aggregated impact upon the reader. Or as the author’s Tommy Wills would have it;

I suggest it’s time we members of the general public came to realize that life isn’t a monastery garden with

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 10 nightingales hopping about in the bushes. It’s us as we disappeared from view. So Long, Hector Bebb, in common are. It’s you and me. It’s one and all. with its author, could, and should, have been a contender, and over forty years after its initial publication it is once It has been said that So Long, Hector Bebb is the Welsh again. Back up off the canvas, its jaw jutting defiantly Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and whilst this book outward, inviting you to give it your best shot. Berry’s book shares a number of common themes and tropes with stands resolutely as Welsh literature’s ‘Bill Grundy’ moment, Sillitoe’s significantly more famous work, this is where the its artistic year zero and a clarion call to those who sought comparison between books and authors should ultimately to follow in its gritty, uncompromising path; a pair of end. Whilst Sillitoe’s landmark work acted as a springboard nicotine-stained fingers flicked defiantly in the face of for a lengthy and highly successful career, Berry’s output Richard Llewellyn’s sugar-coated fabrication: How Mean ultimately waned after the release of his artistic triumph and Was My Valley. – much like Bebb, alone and on the run – he simply Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl

by Gary Raymond

childhood must be hardly worth having if it is one sometimes surreal, hallucinogenic, and dappled with the protected from the dark. The universal success mood altering stuffs of the adult experience. Sometimes his of the children’s books are so bleak, his books of Llandaff villains so dark, you wonder author Roald Dahl has a lot if Dahl was not writing out of to do with his a hatred of children rather Mephistophelean delight in than an affection for them. the darkness. His Despite all this, Fantastic cantankerous refusal to pull Mr Fox is a bit of an anomaly back to either save the small in Dahl’s oeuvre, in that there reader their nightmares or is no telekinetic schoolgirl, no the larger reader their giant airborne fruit, no blushes is what makes his humungous bumpkin work so irresistible, so dispensing dreams through necessary. His kids’ windows – just a wily fox masterpieces, from The and his three-pronged BFG, Charlie and the nemesis. It could be argued Chocolate Factory and that Fantastic Mr Fox is less Matilda, to his lesser (but just a novel and more an as puckishly wonderful) Aesopean fable, and this works, such as The Twits would be true, but it contains and George’s Marvellous the stuff of novels, the Medicine, are stories that themes and characters, and revel in the gloopy, sticky has the potential to linger just nastiness of faery tale villainy as long. Structurally it has and phantasmagorical little interest in the precepts threat, and they are, quite of ‘the novel’, and is set out rightly, an integral part of the in very clear patterns of three; formative literary landscape something often powerfully of most people of my adhered to in faery tales. The generation. story hangs wonderfully on Dahl’s work now, on the mocking nursery rhyme close inspection, sits rather the local kids have invented awkwardly with for the three farmers, the contemporary children’s despicable villains, books with their conventional family issues, flatulence and Boggis, Bunce and Bean sassy protagonists. Dahl’s One Short, one fat, one lean, work is from a more adult These horrible crooks, place, a place where death is the colour of the peril, where So different in looks, the villains truly are the stuff of nightmare, where cruelty is Were nonetheless equally mean. often a motive in itself, and protagonists are usually bright-eyed (and sometimes bushy-tailed). Dahl’s worlds So here we begin to understand the basis for the are ones often where the dangers of a supernatural attraction of the story – kids eyeing up the grotesque old undercurrent pierce the mundanity of the world we know, mean person who lives in the community – in this case the and it is a place that interweaves with the fabric of the world three farmers. Mr Fox, the complicated protagonist, is all that adults know. His books are not easily classified as set to outwit them, to run circles around them as the children ‘Fantasy’, although they are certainly fantastical, and who made up the rhyme whoop and holler in approval. That

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 11 this is not quite how it works out is just one of the reasons the Fox family begins to starve, and the reader is not entirely why Fantastic Mr Fox stands out as a dark and rather odd sure that Mrs Fox is going to make it. Dahl has no issues romantic fable, with real moments of sadness and elation. with putting this awful scenario right up front. One chapter That it is so short, and prosaically aimed at young children, is even titled ‘The Foxes Begin to Starve’. The language of and yet manages to draw characters of real insinuated the book is quite uncompromising throughout. depth, is testament to Dahl’s craft and intellectualism. That, taken as a rural tale, Fantastic Mr Fox contains many of the ‘How will they kill us, mummy?’ said one of the small themes, analogously, that smatters much of great Welsh foxes. His round black eyes were huge with fright. ‘Will literature (and more than a few are on the Greatest Welsh there be dogs?’ Novel list), makes it a serious contender for this main prize. Mr Fox’s ongoing battle with the ugly farmers – who are At one point, early on, Bunce declares of Mr Fox, ‘I’d made almost demonic in their depiction – is an interesting like to rip out his guts!’ The action is as earthy as the digging. take on the literature that looks at humankind’s relationship In many ways I imagine that Dahl’s phenomenal sales to the landscape. There are flashes of Richard Adams’ figures meant that he was able to write pretty much Watership Down, but also of writers like Chatwin and the whatever he wanted – no editor was going to mess with more nervous poetry of Edward Thomas, who forever shook such a formula as this. But he never strayed from what at the thought of the iron blade of modernism cutting through children like in a good story – adventure. Here his hero is his beloved countryside. Boggis, Bunce and Bean are not extremely charismatic, and although flawed, wins out in the old fashioned farmers, leaning on fence posts and tilling the end. His villains are truly awful. His partnership with Quentin soil – they are industrial employers, who, when hunting Blake is positively harmonious throughout the pages, Mr down Mr Fox, circle his hilltop home with the combined Fox appearing nimble, dandyish in actual fact, in his forces of their 108 employees, armed to the teeth with a waistcoat and cravat – like a furry Stewart Granger. The Fox-obliterating arsenal. Mr Fox, you see, has been feeding mechanical diggers are pushed back by Blake to an his family with the farmers’ wares, most likely a fraction of ominous and demonic silhouette as they carve up the one percent of what they have in their gulag-like store hillside, the scenery literally filling with inky blackness. rooms. He pinches a chicken from one, a goose from Fantastic Mr Fox is a fable that is just as Welsh as any another, and a bottle of cider from Bean, the meanest and of our nation’s lauded rural novels – stories of the heartland, most terrifying of the lot. When the farmers have finally had of the people of the earth, of the working man doing what enough, their retribution is so overblown – that dark he must to provide for his family. Dahl, with just a few careful psychotic comedy that Dahl was so good at – that you sentences, sidesteps one-dimensional characterisation, wonder for the mental health of the three. and brings the horror of man’s dominant relationship with the countryside to the fore. It is very easy to forget that this A sort of madness had taken hold of the three men. The is a children’s story. That he can be as wincingly dark as tall skinny Bean and dwarfish pot-bellied Bunce were he is here and get away with it, means that generations driving their machines like maniacs, racing the motors more children will be allowed to experience a classic tale and making their shovels dig at terrific speed. The fat of countryside conflict. Boggis was hopping about like a dervish and shouting, ‘Faster! Faster!’

Boggis Bunce and Bean, unable to find Mr Fox with shovels, bring in the heavy mechanical diggers and dig into the hill where Mr Fox and his family live until it looks like a ‘volcanic crater’. But Mr Fox, perhaps surprisingly, is a flawed hero. Not only is it his arrogance that has endangered his family in the first place, but when the shovels come, he panics. It is one of his cubs who slaps the panic out of him and tells him he needs to man-up and quickly devise a plan. This he does, and they dig down, further and further away from their pursuers, but at the same time further and further away from food. There are many interesting allegories you can draw out from the conflict between Mr Fox and the farmers. There is some fun to be had reading the farmers as Lords of the Manor and Mr Fox as the Robin Hood character living up in the woods. In Wes Anderson’s marvellous animated film version of the book, Boggis, Bunce and Bean are dressed in gentlemanly tweed rather than the rags Quentin Blake illustrates them in the book; they are given a sinister air of human respectability. Anderson takes the Robin Hood idea further, with Mr Fox becoming leader of a band of animals who are all seeking to outsmart their oppressors up on the surface. In the book, however, the Foxes are alone for much of the adventure (apart from Badger who joins, and acts as a moral barometer to Mr Fox’s devil-may-care philosophy). Dahl is a lot more stark in his depiction of their predicament than Wes Anderson is. In their deep subterranean hideaway

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 12 Gold by Dan Rhodes

by Jaime Woods

an Rhodes’ third novel, Gold Japan and Japanese culture. This quizmaster with his Mark E. Smith (2007), may well prove to be knowledge not only stands her in good inflections; and the story of the stuffed one of the more contentious stead for making small talk, but also for pike, under whose gaze Miyuki sits nominees in our search for participation in the weekly pub quiz in each night. The Greatest Welsh Novel. Not only is The Anchor. There is something wonderfully Dan Rhodes English, but the novel has Throughout his oeuvre, Rhodes poetic about Gold. Rhodes uses already won the Aye Write! / Clare has proved himself a master of concise repetition, and variations on ideas Maclean Prize for Scottish Fiction in character building. He has written two throughout, and this rhetorical 2008 – it qualified due to the technique allows the reader to author’s time living in recognise the commonplace Edinburgh. It should also be events from the bursts of noted that Rhodes studied at adventure and excitement, and the University of Glamorgan. to engage with the cyclical However, I do not believe that nature of the novel. Each the nationality of the author chapter is one day of her really should be of fortnight’s holiday; and each consideration here. Gold is a night Miyuki throws her contact Welsh novel, and is an lenses onto the hot stove where exceptional book, and that’s they ‘hissed and danced the what this type of accolade mambo’, ‘danced a two-step’, or should be based upon. ‘a lacklustre fandango’. The underlying theme of the Just as the sun was a novel – permanence – is also thumb’s width from the reflected in Rhodes’ clever use horizon, she felt a shiver as of repetition. Miyuki, in the she saw what she had central moment, spray paints a come to see. She had rock in gold paint, so it would be stumbled upon this sight on gold at all times, not just in the her first visit to the village, few minutes referred to in the and had found herself quotation at the start of this returning to it year after essay. But it does not last, it year. Whenever the sky washes off. This is matched by was clear at the end of the the flecks of gold paint she day, one of the rocks in the sneezes out, the beautiful cove below looked, for just golden haired barmaid who a few minutes, as if it had doesn’t stick around, the flashes turned to gold. of gold she desperately looks for to tell her she’s with the right Set in Pembrokeshire, Gold person, and the golden light that manages to evince the beauty shines on her partner, and the of this stretch of ragged village on her last day there. coastline through the eyes of The people remain though, the Miyuki Woodward, a woman from a collections of micro-fiction, idiosyncratic locals, the regular visitors, small town in the Valleys who visits the Anthropology (2000) and Marry Me normality. Despite the comedy – and it same coastal village each winter. (2013), in which real lucidity and really is a funny book – there is a strong Leaving her girlfriend at home, she emotion are presented in stories as footing in reality, in human nature, and spends two weeks walking and short as 101 words; and in his début in belonging, all weaved within its reading, and most of her evenings in novel, 2003’s Timoleon Vieta Come pages. This degree of rationality, to the lounge bar of The Anchor, along Home, where entire lives are played engage with and to find joy in the small with tall Mr Hughes, short Mr Hughes, out in small chapters as a travelling dog moments of daily life, is so far removed Mr Puw, and Septic Barry & the passes through their respective worlds. from the aspiration of so many novels, Children from Previous Relationships. Miyuki’s status as an outsider, albeit a that it resounds for long after reading. Miyuki’s mother is Welsh, her father – warmly welcomed one, allows Rhodes Gold is the perfect antidote to the who she has never met – is Japanese. the opportunity to examine the village jaded cynicism and misanthropy of The Miyuki, we are told, described herself residents with both a bar-room Old Devils. It is a wonderful comical as ‘about as Japanese as laverbread’ familiarity and a real sense of curiosity portrayal of Welsh life, and it is never until she discovered there was a and intrigue. In Gold we read of the patronizing, the humour comes from Japanese food-stuff that was ‘more or holiday romances of Septic Barry, the entirely the right place. It’s beautiful less identical’ to the Welsh delicacy, at lead singer of a band who have never and lovely and a little bit heart- which point she attempted to learn all as much as played a gig; the strange breaking, and worthy of its place in the the important facts and figures about disappearance of tall Mr Hughes; the Welsh literary canon.

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 13 The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis

by John Lavin

an the Greatest Welsh Novel be written by a writer Seek and Jake’s Thing – works that offered the reader little who is not technically, er, Welsh? Generally I more than grim evidence of a brilliant mind lost to drink. Not would say not, perhaps even very obviously not only, in fact, did Amis’ return end this dismayingly last but in the case of Kingsley Amis and The Old orders-like sinking of his talent but it also resulted in his Devils things are different. Quite especially different. The greatest single creative achievement. A book about regret twelve years Amis spent in Swansea (and his corresponding and the implacability of time. A book, certainly, about drink. tenure at the University there) is one thing. The fact that he But a book, also, which examines South Wales with forensic described himself as being most at home and at his skill and a great deal of humour and affection. happiest anywhere The South Wales when in South Wales Amis shows us is seen another. However, the through the eyes of his two most obvious and characters. Recently incontrovertible facts retired academics and are Lucky Jim and The professionals, who like Old Devils Amis himself appear to themselves. Two of have grown the greatest novels of increasingly the twentieth century conservative with age, without doubt, and these people are – Amis’ only two even if not specifically unequivocally great – the characters from books to boot. Both of Lucky Jim grown old. them inspired by, Perhaps, in fact, this is written about and a reason for the books largely written in South success. Returning to Wales. Swansea appears to Lucky Jim was have reacquainted forged within the Amis with the mainline corridors of Swansea to his generation. University, where Amis Because the sparkling, worked as assistant pretension-stripping English lecturer when humour which so he and his young characterised his family were living first debut novel is back in a series of rented with considerable rooms and eventually force. When a novel, ‘in a house within a and a novel that stone’s throw of that speaks to and for a Cwmdonkin Drive that different generation Dylan Thomas had than your own, makes been the Rimbaud of’ you laugh out loud on (The Old Devils, upwards of ten incidentally, contains occasions, then that an amusing and novel is surely somewhat unflattering something very portrait of a Dylan special indeed. When Thomas-like poet it also does this in an named Brydan). The elegiac tone that Old Devils was written appears to suggest after the demise of that all of the wit, rage Amis’ marriage to and brilliance that so Elizabeth Jane defined Lucky Jim was Howard (who had a terrible, vain waste apparently never of time, then you also taken to Swansea), know that you are in when the author began to return to Wales regularly to very complicated company indeed. reconnect with old friends. And somehow, just as that initial Because The Old Devils is Shakespearean is scope. It time in Swansea had produced Amis’ first period of intense is funny, yes, but also complex and philosophical and at its creative productivity, so too did this return to South Wales core, swollen with tears. ‘Swing low in your weep ship,’ call to a halt what had had been a long fallow period for began The Information, the novel Amis’ son Martin wrote Amis, populated by dismal books like Russian Hide and in his father’s final years and in the aftermath of his own

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 14 divorce. ‘With your tear scans and your sob probes.’ His Indeed for all of its Conservative overtones (which are, own novel also deals with male regret and male emotional in any case pretty self-knowledgeably crabby), this is a book constipation (‘Cities at night contain men who cry in their written in homage to women, art and to Wales itself: three sleep and then say Nothing’) but he could just as easily subjects which are, or should be at least, the very antithesis have been speaking about his father’s deeply of conservatism. In fact, asides from the ever-prevailing autobiographical, The Old Devils. Amis-ian influences of Waugh, Wodehouse, Larkin and Indeed sadness and regret watermark these pages but Shakespeare, this book even admits modernism (if most they do so especially in Amis’ handling of the relationship decisively not post-modernism – no author-as-character between the kind, beautiful Rhiannon and both her husband incidents here, as in Money, his son’s most famous novel Alun and her former lover, Peter. For Rhiannon read Hilly, and the one he felt impelled to fling across a room) into the Kingsley’s first wife, whom he left to marry the novelist conversation – calling to mind, as it almost bizarrely does, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Here is the final verse from the The Waves by Virginia Woolf. An outlandish comparison poem he wrote to her, ‘Instead of an Epilogue’, at the end you might at first say, and one I had not noticed before the of his Memoirs, (published six years after The Old Devils recent re-reading occasioned by this piece. However, it’s and four years before his death in 1995): influence is there nevertheless, from the way that Amis goes into the heads of several different characters throughout In ’46 I met someone harmless, someone defenceless, the book (look at those chapter titles, ‘Alun’, ‘Charlie’, But till then whole, unadapted within; ‘Malcolm, Muriel, Peter, Gwen, Alun, Rhiannon’) to the way Awkward, gentle, healthy, straight-backed, that he lets his characters slip into stream of consciousness Who spoke to say something, laughed when amused; when talking (he hardly ever allows this when they are If things went wrong, feared she might be at fault, thinking, but then that would have surely been too overtly Whose eye I could have met for ever then, modernist for Amis). Oh yes, and who was also beautiful. But it is most prominently there in terms of subject Well, that was much as women were meant to be, matter. In its dissection of the ageing process of a group of I thought, and set about looking further. friends, as well as in its reflections on their youth, The Old How can we tell, with nothing to compare? Devils summons to mind the swiftness, sadness and beauty of the life cycle. But most, of all, like The Waves, it summons There are elements of Amis in both Alun – in his to mind its implacability and inexorability. When shortly philandering and his love of being brilliantly rude but not, of before Alun’s dramatic, fittingly hilarious death, Peter relates course, in his literary charlatanry – and Peter, who gives up to Charlie how he came to leave Rhiannon for another Rhiannon for a short fling with the stunningly beautiful woman and is rendered more or less immobile by the Angharad: memory, the reader feels such an enormous sweep of lost, squandered time – of time squandered so easily and of life Well a girl like that, you can understand it in a way, and come and gone – that it really is difficult not to cry (or at the understand it even better if you allow for the bloke being very least hard not to be stimulated into moments of both a selfish shit who’s rather thrilled to be the object of it. inner and outer reflection, which is surely the purpose of art): Meanwhile Charlie’s fear of being on his own in the dark mirrors more or less exactly the night terrors Amis himself Not swallowing the pill, keeping it under his tongue, encountered in the latter stages of his life (leading Peter held himself rigid in his seat with his eyes shut. eventually, and rather sweetly it has to be said, to Hilly and Now and then he winced sharply, once so sharply and her husband Lord Kilmarnock allowing him to become their with such a screwing-up of his face that Charlie thought lodger). It is both the handling and the implicit he was going to die the next moment. Charlie also acknowledgement of these vulnerabilities, self-deceptions stayed still, with his hand ready in case Peter should and betrayals that make this novel the remarkable want to hold it…. It was not really so long before Peter’s achievement that it is. colour improved and he began to breathe more Amis is justly famous for writing about drink (his normally. After another minute he opened his eyes, collection of essays on the subject, On Drink, is supremely smiled a little without parting his lips, as he always did funny) and one of the things The Old Devils is likewise justly now to keep his teeth out of sight, and sipped his drink. famous for is drinking on an epic scale. Here is Alun and Charlie’s lunch while holidaying in Birdarthur (a thinly Just as in the poem to Hilly, Amis seems to be saying, disguised Laugharne): ‘How can we tell, with nothing to compare?’ In other words: we only have one life and so how can we be expected to He continued satisfactory through the pub session, get it right at the first time of asking? But what he is also another couple back at the cottage, and lunch off the saying, and what The Old Devils is saying with great poetic pickled fish and chopped onion, the whole firmly intensity, is that these mistakes hurt and that they are even washed down with aquavit and Special Brew and a kind of suicide. Which is to say that when we hurt those tamped in place with Irish Cream. By a step of doubtful that we love we hurt ourselves too, lessening our capacity legitimacy the men thinned their glasses of the heavy for brilliance, wit, rage and above all, love. liqueur with Scotch. Amis once famously said that, ‘Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than Amis was, as we know, a notorious drinker but while one without music’. Well, The Old Devils, which ends, the writing on drink throughout The Old Devils is carried out pointedly, to the strands of Amis’ beloved jazz, takes its with a good deal of zest and affection, it is also shot through readers into a place that terrible. It is a world, he says, that with the inescapable knowledge that drinking on this scale we can only make ourselves, and a world that he maps is a coping mechanism. A way not so much of forgetting the without flinching. For this and for many other reasons, it is reality of one’s actions as of anaesthetising oneself to them. a very worthy contender for the title of Greatest Welsh Novel.

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 15 Downriver by Iain Sinclair

by Steve Hitchins

ownriver is a novel about move out of Hackney: ‘Milditch, up to juxtaposes poetry and prose, including London. The author, Iain now, had kept his life in separate discussions of churches, sculpture, film Sinclair, is not usually compartments. But, with the move out and hay fever alongside descriptions thought of as a Welsh writer; of Hackney, everything was coming to of Sinclair’s home-life and his job as a though born in Cardiff and brought up pieces’. Sinclair, by contrast, is one of council grass-cutter. While Downriver in Maesteg, he has lived in London those who ‘cling so stubbornly to the sticks more consistently to the novel since the late-1960s and become cities’, possessed with ‘the bloody- form, its chapters are often only known as a London writer. But I want mindedness of hanging on’. There is a tenuously connected, allowing the book to suggest that Sinclair and his novel sense of rooting in. to move between realism, satire, Downriver demonstrate a Welshness But unlike many of his Anglo- history, fantasy, documentary, dream, that is nomadic and not fixed by Welsh peers, Sinclair’s interest in place letters and even an interview. national boundaries. ‘My father was is not concerned with a nostalgic return Like much conceptual art, the Scottish,’ Sinclair writes, ‘– which is not to roots. His exploration of place, from novel is process-based; like the walks to say that he didn’t feel at home in his early poetry onwards, has been of Richard Long or Vito Acconci’s Wales. Scottishness is the condition of closer to the psychogeographical ‘Following Piece’, for example, it is a feeling comfortable everywhere, except dérive of the Situationists. The dérive, process that develops overtime. Rather within the borders of Scotland.’ Sinclair meaning ‘drift’, was recommended by than beginning with a plan or synopsis apparently had his Welsh accent Guy Debord as the practice of before writing the novel, Sinclair sets teased out of him when he attended navigating the city without purpose. It himself a task, a certain geographical Cheltenham College in the 1950s. ‘I enables the walker to step out of the area to cover, a certain time frame. He had a comic Welsh accent,’ he said in familiarity and complacency bred by doesn’t know what will happen in the an interview, ‘so I was aware of a routine, to defamiliarise their locality in novel when he begins. The meeting double life – of subverting what I was.’ order to recognise it as a historical with the book-dealer Milditch in the first Sinclair’s Welshness is characterised construct rather than something natural chapter ends with the narrator deciding by this duality; it is something he and eternal. to follow up the tip-off about a book subverts. Welshness is defined in its Downriver is relentlessly shop in Tilbury, only because ‘I had the relation to the other, often depicted as peripatetic, taking place almost entirely queasy sensation there ought to be a the enemy. Sinclair’s double identity on foot, on public transport or in public story in it’. From then on, Sinclair gives makes him his own ‘other’, a stranger spaces. The novel’s geography himself up to the process, allowing the to himself. Sinclair is ‘on the move from gravitates around the area of Hackney, novel to be steered by chance one other to another other,’ as Pierre Homerton, Spitalfields and Bow, encounters. By the third book, he has Joris puts it in A Nomad Poetics. moving towards the river through abandoned the idea of a ‘Spitalfields’ Downriver might then be thought of as Wapping and Shadwell across to novel to pursue a fantastical story what Joris refers to as ‘The practice of Rotherhithe, then following the river about a dancer-nurse-prostitute named outside’: the Welsh novel outside East past the Isle of Dogs, Silvertown Edith Cadiz: Wales. and Tilbury, out into the estuary and Sinclair’s baroque, grotesque style the Isle of Sheppey. This is We no longer believed in absorbs Welsh literature by a nomadic complicated by a couple of excursions ‘Spitalfields’ as a concept… We route: tapping into Dylan Thomas via into the suburbs, one North to Leyton had something much better: a story Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Welsh and another South to Orpington. It we didn’t understand. It is always writing filtered back through America. does not follow this route in a linear more enjoyable to play at ‘Ginsberg was very drawn to the trajectory but jumps back and forth. As detectives than at ‘researchers’, apocalyptic, deep rumbling resonance readers we conduct our own dérive, who gather the evidence to justify of Dylan Thomas,’ he says, ‘and I knew mapping and remapping the book as the synopsis they have already its relationship to chapel sermonising we attempt to navigate its shifting sold. and natural Welsh speech rhythms. I terrain. We too give ourselves up to the could feel how Thomas’s work had drift. What makes the novel equally been appropriated by the Beats, while As well as psychogeography, baffling and compelling seems to be knowing the thing itself. And so I took Downriver adapts the methods of that Sinclair is a detective who gathers on both.’ Thomas himself drew on modernist poetry and conceptual art to evidence without knowing exactly what Rimbaud and Joyce for his anglo- the novel. It might be thought of as an the crime is yet. Though a process- cynghanedd and found fame in the US. ‘open field’ novel. Sinclair’s early poetry based way of working is acceptable in This nomadic Welsh lineage offers an works from the 1970s, such as Lud modern art, and to some extent poetry, alternative to the usual static nation- Heat, are composed in the open field it is incomprehensible to the TV based notions of literary heritage. style promoted by Black Mountain producers and book publishers to While the novel can be seen as poets like Charles Olson. Often taking whom Sinclair pitches his ideas: ‘how nomadic, there is a sense that, as Joris place as its subject, open field poetry could we write anything down before might say, the deterritorialised re- allows the poem to incorporate any we knew what was going to happen? territorialise: Sinclair makes East material with which it comes into And if we didn’t write it down, so that it London his territory. The novel begins contact. Lud Heat, for example, takes could be approved by three producers with the character Milditch about to East London as its focus and and a finance watchdog, then nothing

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 16 would happen… ever’; and later in a dark places of the earth,’ Sinclair English. As Jeremy Hooker writes of rejection letter from Granta, ‘Pencilled quotes as he looks out over Essex. And Tony Conran, ‘it is clear that he thinks comments speared the margins: … it still is, Downriver suggests, as the it is better for a writer to respond to the “Who is ‘I’?”’. It satirises the deep- colonialist ransacking of Thatcherite pain inflicted by living on the March rooted belief in the hierarchical top- neoliberal capitalism continues to [border, frontier] than to rest in down approach to art, where the writer displace communities in its fervour for complacency on either side of it’. is expected to know what will happen development opportunities and Rather than trying to return to some before it happens, so that it can be enterprise ventures. original sense of roots, as if the colonial approved, so that accidents don’t Sinclair himself might be thought displacement had not happened, happen. Sinclair’s work, by contrast, of as a product of colonialism. The Sinclair explores the nomadic situation relies on accidents: of the postcolonial you set something up subject, a permanent and something will exile, always outside happen. While his or between. practice is about letting This is reflected in go of the ego, control, the style of Downriver: conscious intentions, rather than think of the the culture industry is author as a single, concerned to maintain coherent identity who static models of plans what will happen identity. in the novel and then I would suggest, writes it, Sinclair writes however, that as an outsider with Sinclair’s methods of unstable, plural identity process, dérive and who gives himself up open field juxtaposition to the always moving are entirely drift of nomadism, so appropriate for the that the drifting nomadic Welsh novel. becomes the novel. It is a Welsh novel that This is why I want is not bound by to propose Downriver borders, whether of as a great Welsh nation, identity or form. novel. On the back A synopsis, like cover of my Penguin national identity, is a edition there is a quote way of fixing from Don Anderson something in place, from The Sydney rather than allowing it Morning Herald: ‘Not to be ongoing and just a great novel, it’s always in process. the first novel of the Sinclair walks to lose twenty-first century.’ himself, to break the Written at the end of bonds of territory and the Thatcher era and identity, to be, as Joris published in the last puts it, ‘everywhere decade of the previous estranged’. century, Downriver Notions of points a way for the displaced identity are Welsh novel in the not simply promoted current century. as desirable, however. Though set in London, Many of the novel’s it is in a sense about characters are exiled Wales: within the figures experiencing a capital it conducts a breakdown of identity: psychogeographical there are stories of colonial subjects Welsh-language writer Bobi Jones interrogation of the neo-colonial forces like Prince Lee Boo and King Cole, and once referred to Anglo-Welsh writing that had torn apart communities in contemporary characters like the as the ‘colonialist predicament’, calling Wales and throughout the UK. In this Nigerian antiques dealer Iddo Okali, it ‘a perversion of normality… a grunt sense Downriver can be called a Welsh the Canadian Edith Cadiz and the or a cry or an odour rising from a novel, the Welsh novel outside Wales, Polish Jew David Rodinsky. cultural wound of a special kind’. writing about Wales by a ‘practice of Colonialism is a theme that runs Whereas Jones feels that Welsh outside’. And in its methods of process, through the novel: in the dilapidated people speaking English is a colonial dérive and open field, it offers a mobile imperial nostalgia of the Tilbury perversion and advocates a return to model for the Welsh novel of the docklands where the novel begins and the ‘normality’ of the native Welsh, twenty-first century, the tools for a ends, and in there current references Sinclair is more interested in exploring nomadic Welsh novel that can deal with to Joseph Conrad and his Heart of the nomadic situation between Welsh a globalised world. Darkness. ‘And this too was one of the and English, of being both Welsh and

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 17 Cwmardy & We Live by Lewis Jones

by Jon Gower

inemascope. Technicolor. Panavision. Full Dolby. lifted off the stanchions that held it to the pit-head, and If you want movie technique and scope in a novel in another second the breath was torn from his lungs here’s the place to come. Buy some popcorn, then by the sudden drop as the cage plunged its way into settle back to enjoy Jones’s fantastically filmic the depths of the pit. novels. The former collier who went underground for the first time at the age of twelve, then became a full time worker The novel’s main focus is Len and his brawling, Boer for the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement – now War veteran father Big Jim and tough-because-she-has-to- there’s an irony – penned books which seemed to say watch be-mother Sian, although there are plenty of other principal this, this is life, pulsing, passionate and problematic. He characters walking across the Cinemascope screen of the writes with uncommon brio and panache, although there’s book. There’s miners’ leader, Ezra, whose ideology finds always an undertow of itself at loggerheads with anger as he rails against Communist Len, as he is unfairness, inequality and increasingly drawn into a exploitation. Ok, so it’s a bit public roles and speech of a cheat to argue for two making on makeshift novels as one, but that is stages. There’s Ezra’s the way they are packaged daughter Mary, who loves in the Library of Wales her father so much that she series, so that’s my excuse. finds herself conflicted Talking to my academic when Len courts her and friend Claire Connolly one eventually marries her. time we found ourselves There’s the dastardly Mr. discussing Lewis Jones’s Hicks, overseer of the novels and she introduced misery at the pit. And me to the term ‘sensational there’s the Strike itself, a realism’ and I thought how huge dark character, who perfect, how extraordinarily can drain the marrow of apt. your bones through nothing Cwmardy is nothing if more sophisticated than the not sensational: it’s like one act of starvation. of those Brazilian Hywel Francis, in his telenovelas where one introduction to the books, action-packed, or maintains that Jones, a emotionally-soaked ‘people’s remembrancer’ incident follows on from who had also contributed another and all at a actively to the people’s breathless lick. In Jones’s chronicle’ was ‘unique in blockbuster (the first of two the political culture of vivid works showing the Wales in the twentieth vibrant, testing lives of century, standing alongside people in the coal mining only Saunders Lewis (and communities around and what an intriguing contrast) during the General Strike of in combining political 1926) there is hardly a page activism with literary without something aspirations and, indeed, happening, which makes it with literary achievement.’ a page turner comparable Lewis Jones’s novels to any airport thriller. There are not without their flaws are accidents underground, but they are pre-eminently heedless coal barons, thwarted love, militancy, police readable, often grippingly so, keeping you up at night when truncheon charges – and when those don’t work soldiers good sense is telling you to sleep. The energy that kept him with bayonets – not to mention explosions, unexplained addressing audiences all over the place as he drummed up murders and almost nightly fist-fights. It’s a tough world, support for the Spanish Republic, and which probably and even a first day at work is not without its terrors. Strike contributed to his early death at the age of forty-three from that: it’s full of terrors for young Len, the young hero at the a heart attack, is the same energy that galvanizes his books. heart of the book: They are huge slices of life, lived with dignity through so much despair. In that they are DIY manuals, showing us Once inside the cage, Len held his breath and waited. how to live, by telling us how others lived theirs. He heard the knocker clang three times, and the tinkling If its predecessor volume Cwmardy is an example of of a bell far away in the engine-house. Then suddenly sensational realism then Lewis Jones’s follow-up novel We he felt the floor of the cage press against his feet as it Live dollops out plenty more of the same. Our hero, Len, is

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 18 by now a fully committed Communist, and the book, if devastatingly exemplified than in the the tale of shopkeeper anything, is about collective struggle, of the workers, the John and Maggie who find out their son – well educated unemployed and their families against the iniquities of the despite his parents’ poverty – is getting involved with the class system, where the coal owners seemingly own the ‘Bolsheviks’ and take their own lives: he taking a razor to police and the army and also control the justice system. his wife’s throat before hanging himself. Yet this domestic Furthermore, men such as Lord Cwmardy and dastardly bloodbath, albeit being very affecting, is also an example mine manager Mr. Higgs are bent on destroying the of one of the book’s weaknesses as the consequences of Federation of Miners, replacing it with a non-political union, these desperate acts on their son Ron, and on the wider and beyond that they are doing their utmost to reduce community are barely touched upon. wages. Individually a worker could feel insignificant, We Live was not finished by Lewis Jones, but rather, it powerless, an ant to be crushed under heel. But standing is believed, by his partner Mavis Llewellyn, so that the final together, as Len finds out during a mass demonstration, chapters are tenderer and the action switched to the killing quite the opposite is true: fields of the Spanish Civil War. It also details the love between Len and his wife Mary, a relationship based on Len momentarily felt himself like a weak straw drifting that between Lewis and Mavis. The change of register and in and out with the surge of bodies. Then something novelistic terrain does not mar the novel, and after so much powerful swept through his being as the mass soaked brutality and suffering, news of Len’s death, conveyed in a its strength into him, and he realized that the strength letter, is delivered with compassion. of them all was the measure of his own, that his His story, and that of his companions and family, is one existence and power as an individual was buried in that of light and dark, nowhere more so than when the miners of the mass now pregnant with motion behind him. The orchestrate a lock-down strike, refusing to come to the momentous thought made him inhale deeply and his surface at the end of a shift. There the darkness is terrifying, chest expanded, throwing his head erect and his ‘more dense and heavy than black ink.’ The strikers have shoulders square to the breeze that blew the banners to fight in the dark, when fellow miners come down to take into red rippling slogans of defiance and action. Time over, they have to sleep in the blackness and go without and distance were obliterated by the cavalcade of food and water. But their indomitable spirit, individually and people, whose feet made the roads invisible. collectively, eventually wins the day. It is the same indefatigable spirit that imbues Lewis Jones’s titanic Despite the strength offered by such solidarity it is not achievement in shaping the tumultuous, teeming cinematic enough to dispel the general poverty and suffering which canvasses of Cwmardy and We Live. has the whole community in its grip, nowhere more On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin

by Gary Raymond

he story of the Jones boys is the moment of a notion of Welshness, of rural isolated living, of an almost beautiful poignant subtlety and poignancy from Druidic connection to the breathing earth. Although an a writer who always liked to go big and bold, who Englishman, Chatwin is a mighty specimen in the pantheon was a showman, a bon vivant. When Chatwin of outsiders who have taught a culture more than a thing or died in 1989, his funeral was, as someone two about itself. Chatwin looked in and saw a great deal. cheekily noted, the literary equivalent of the Charles and Di On the Black Hill is a marvellous novel, but it is also a very wedding. It was ‘an event’, and Chatwin was a figure who important one. lived to be at the centre of events. There is, of course, the We are here in a land full of sharply drawn memorable ‘scandals’ around Chatwin’s most famous non-fiction works. characters, often of an identifiable Welsh picture of a How much of his non-fiction writing was authentic and how bygone era. But forget the flashes of Under Milk Wood; this much was fabricated for effect? His books about Patagonia is a fully formed narrative that has equally weight and depth, and Australia, though regarded as highpoints of their form not a series of frivolously compiled snapshots are also looked at with a sideways glance. There are clearly masquerading as a dynamic portrait gallery. There is more than blurred lines here, and Chatwin’s reputation has perhaps the influence of the Cwmdonkin boy in On the Black always been somewhat dependent on whether you can Hill, but Chatwin’s novel is unified and enriched with such admire a writer who employed fiction in his non-fiction. We greater purpose, such towering maturity, compared to the could argue all day about Chatwin’s worth as a eventual radio play. Here Chatwin is drawing on a grander documentarian, but one thing will be left when the dust tradition of World literature – the works of the Russian settles, and that is his vital prose, his dauntless authorial folkists like Gorky and Turgenev, but also of classic rural voice, and, well, his character. Chatwin is a writer like few English literature. Hannah Jones, the boys’ grandmother, others, whether you like him or not. not ‘an agreeable woman’, has a mouth as sharp and And so it is a relief that he managed to contain in his twisted as ‘a leaf of holly’; Sam the Waggon with the face life cut short a moment of his considerable irresistible talent of a sad clown, ‘fifty years of fisticuffs had flattened his into a book that courts none of that controversy. On the nose’; the Reverend Thomas Tuke – ‘A tall bony man with Black Hill is the finespun, still novel of a man who had soul a mass of curls, he had a habit of fixing his parishioners at the centre of his bluster and theatrics, who had real heart with an amber stare before offering them the glory of his beneath the Italian silk and Parisian moleskines. It is the profile.’ Such incisive writing is typical of a book that doesn’t life story of Lewis and Benjamin Jones, twins who are born, like to linger. Chatwin draws characters often with the one live and die on their farm, ‘The Vision’, on the borderlands Tolstoyan essence and then allows them their weighty of Wales and England. In the book Chatwin cuts deep into presence in the room.

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 19 On the Black Hill carries its forefathers extremely well, other, not by what they solely encompass. Apart from those and the unlikely humility of Chatwin in its composition instances they are the same, they move as one and even makes for a warm but still weighty read. The prose share dreams and wounds. Benjamin and Lewis are like resonates out from the pages. In here is Lawrence and earth-myth versions of Vonnegut’s Wilbur and Eliza, the Hardy, the watermarks of great rural English literature, and giant genius twins who live in the ruins of the Empire State also flashes of the gods, Tolstoy and Eliot. But the Building in Slapstick (1976). But whereas Wilbur and Eliza, framework of the novel is cinematic as well as literary. who share a brain but use separate sides, represent a Chatwin creates a masterpiece of temporal flow, giving over garish satire on science and art, Lewis and Benjamin are entire chapters to snits of time, whereas whole years will the push and pull of nation neighbours who may spend a pass within a subclause great deal of time of a trailing sentence. resenting one another, Structurally, the novel is but are too tightly quite simply perfect. entwined to ever be Emotionally wrought apart. engaging, structurally All around the static perfect, and prosaically journey of the Jones endearing and boys are fascinating impressive – what of its cameos – other Welshness? The book characters and the has pre-Raphaelite potential of their own mysticism to it – a stories splay outward Holman Hunt engraving from the pages – hangs in the farmhouse Chatwin observes his and watches over much characters as the astute of the action – that do the passing of enhances Chatwin’s strangers in life. And ideas on Welshness. with just a swift swish of On the Black Hill is a his brush a wider world, book about people to a wider Wales, is on whom the ‘world of men’ show. When Hannah is at most an and Amos first irrelevance. There is a purchase the farm, for crackling sense of the example, Chatwin notes old world – the old world the previous ‘tenant had the Romantics looked died in 1896, leaving an to, as well as the one old unmarried sister nostalgia gives to us. who had carried on Wars go on away from alone until they fetched here – after the boys her to the madhouse.’ bury their mother, her Here we have a glimpse memory unites them, at the dangers of removed as they are seclusion, and also at a from the fact that moment in time, a ‘Europe was in flames’. suggestion of a story One of the final images perhaps even more of the book is of Meg interesting than the one the Rock, neighbour to we are presented with. the Jones boys, a But Lewis and Benjamin demented figure to the will never be left alone encroaching civilised to go mad. They have world, as, tattered and each other. caked in mud, she There are countless whispers to the creatures of the wood. There is more heart other moments. Professor Gethyn-Jones, with his bad in the observation of Meg than there is in the new video breath, coming to get a good price on the books of a dead game that has appeared in the local pub, there is more friend – but does he also have a passing interest in heart, essentially, in what is being lost. Of course, Meg, like Hannah? Whatever, getting a deal on the books is the the Jones boys, will never be won over, they will be built priority. around. And if you’d like to read one of the dichotomies of Chatwin, over and over, reminds us that communities the novel as of that between Wales and England, then are built up of stories, of characters: a communal identity, Chatwin’s message becomes even more interesting. a national identity, used to be about the sum of its parts, That Wales and England come up against each other not its television output nor its economy. It was a thing apart here is obvious – The Vision, the farm where the Jones from that. The reason why On the Black Hill should be Boys live for their eighty-odd years, is bisected by the border considered for the accolade of the Greatest Welsh Novel is of Hereford and Radnorshire. Lewis and Benjamin, because it separates our notions of national identity from connected almost telepathically at times, are also to an crude modernist ideas of commerce, and the crude extent mirror opposites. They come to be defined as modernist ideas of commodified tradition. In On the Black individuals entirely on what differentiates them from each Hill you will find Wales in all its complexity and colour.

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 20 The Valley, The City, The Village by Glyn Jones

by Jon Gower

remember the novelist the wide valley rose convulsively Euron Griffith raving about into the sunshine; as I watched Glyn Jones’s The Valley, the I saw it constantly sloughing the City, the Village over a pint teeming cloud-shadows off its in Chapter but I didn’t get round head and shoulders. to reading it despite his paean of praise. More fool me. I had no Jones is not scared of using idea I was missing out on such a arcane words and there are fabulous treat, a book which passages which carry a fair sings, which soars, written in burden such as ‘conventicle’, prose that compares easily with ‘vedette’ and ‘eleutheromania’, Annie Proulx, James Salter, Wells which can bring to mind the Tower and the like, and scales the language-scapes of Anthony same dizzy and dizzying heights. Burgess at his most showy. The extravagant, poetic passages come as bravura flourishes, as if Trystan’s time at university the novel – which first appeared finds him introduced to all in 1956 – has itself been painted manner of undergrad nonsense and the author had just and clubbery, and he finds discovered a palette of colours escape from the ministrations of and pigments that are new to the the likes of academics such as world. Which is thoroughly Professor Ailradd, Dr Di Enaid appropriate as the main character and Professor Anfoesgar in in this dense, Dickensian and extra-mural art lessons. There memorably populated novel – with he learns to paint pictures with its Anna Ninety-Houses, its Dai all the heightened sense of the Fan and its big-nosed Auntie colour as that employed in full Tilda – is Trystan Morgan. He is a and rich measure by Glyn Jones, wannabe painter who is steered who can weave a tapestry of down a more rigid and less landscape that is so rich and rewarding academic path than the textured, detailing ‘the glowing one his heart desires. pastures of suede-smooth The novel charts the course of his The grandmother is just one of the emerald; the furzy wool of gold-flecked, life, starting with Trystan’s early days characters extravagantly and vividly gorse-fleeced heathlands; and the in his gran’s cottage in a mining village drawn in the book, an old lady who can chocolate acres under plough, formally in south east Wales. Here he comes appear almost god-like, ‘a tall black embossed with lime in white studs under a lot of pressure to become a figure’ which ‘seemed to float out of that arranged in rows along the tillage.’ preacher, when what he really wants bonfire as though riding a raft of Trystan fails his exams, falls in love to do is paint people rather than save illumination.’ The language employed with the wrong woman and brings twin their souls. They say that painters, in creating the vignette of her owes disappointments in their train. He is an even the great ones, can never paint more than a hint of debt to Dylan artist, and his place in the world is an hands, but in luminous and tender Thomas, for ‘she was my radiant awkward one. But we are on his side, prose Glyn Jones compares Trystan’s granny, my glossy one, whose harsh wanting him to be allowed to create hands with those of his grandmother: fingers lay gently and sweet as a harp more beauty, find expression. hand upon the curls.’ But this is not to The Valley, the City, the Village is They were red and rugged, the suggest that Glyn Jones is in any way quite simply an astonishing hands of a labourer, their knotted derivative of the boozy bard: in fact achievement, moving deftly between a erubescence evidenced familiarity quite the opposite is true as Glyn Jones myriad registers of language, offering with the roughest work, they writes radiant prose that fair shimmers some breathtakingly bravura passages seemed as though the coarse with epiphany and carries an often of prose, and plentiful evidence of a substances at which she had superior melody. Take this painterly deeply sensitive, organizing laboured had become an element description of a skyscape: intelligence at work. of their conformation. Often, when It is, for me, the discovery of the I was older, and knew the meaning Over our heads as we cooked, Library of Wales series. It is a stunning of those bony and inflexible fingers, large masses of lathery clouds work of art by a gentle, unassuming I turned my gaze from them with were blown through the blue like man I had the good fortune to know. shame and pity and watched my frondent soap, silvered and Read it and weep, weeping at the own painter’s hand, culpable, convolved, sloshing vast sheer beauty Glyn Jones marshals and indulged and epicene, as it moved bucketfuls of brilliant light over our arranges, as he fills with luxuriant life adroitly in the perfect glove of its whole mountain. The majestic every inch of his lush and lovely novel- skin. swimming ridge on the far side of canvas.

Great Welsh Novel - Part One 21