The Babel Guide to Welsh Fiction

A nation with two literary languages but one soul that speaks passionately through its writers — here is the guide to the modern literary scene covering circa 100 works that sum up the currents and corners of Welsh life from the 1920s to the present. This little book puts the lot at your fingertips.

Sample reviews

ANTHOLOGY: New Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories

Here we can find twenty-eight stories by twenty-eight authors sourced from both the literary languages of Wales.

The anthology should be considered as an addition to rather than a substitute for the original Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories, which was based around an older generation of writers. Only one story is carried over into this more recent volume. The Penguin short story collections of this type represent a continuation of a great tradition of accessible literary culture and thought from Penguin Books, a key educational and mind-broadening instrument in its heyday. Highlights include a story by that Chekhov of the Welsh sitting-room, Kate Roberts, with her extraordinary sense for objects and places and her frequent demonstration of emotional absence or unexpressed feeling in Welsh lives dominated by practical considerations and the quest for respectability. As her ageing protagonist puts it in ‘The Condemned’: ‘...looking back at their life, what had they had? Only a cold unruffled life...’

Rhys Davies’ ‘Blodwen’ is something of a Welsh D. H. Lawrence expedition, about a girl whose ‘blood’ calls out to a rough mountain lad — ‘He was of the Welsh who have not submitted to industrialism, Nonconformity or imitation of the English. He looked as if he had issued from a cave in the mountains…’ — rather than to Oswald Vaughan, the solicitor’s boy, ever so nice, that her mother would dearly like her to marry, thereby expunging the taint of a coalminer granddad. In Gwyn Jones’ ‘A White Birthday’ two farmers struggle with ‘the unmalignant but unslacking hostility of nature’ searching for new lambs in the snow on a cliff-face as the author gives us a sense of folk with sheep-husbandry in their line for generations.

‘Oscar’ by Gwyn Thomas is a pretty ironic piece about a certain Oscar who ‘owns a mountain’ and ‘drinks a bit of it every night in the pub’. This is a good antidote to the piety of some of the older Welsh-language authors, for here appear the wastrels, the serial imbibers and the kind of young lady ‘who has been steadily preached against ever since preaching started, which was a long time ago...’. As a rich man Oscar has various employees including his charmless live-in housekeeper Meg, of whom the narrator tells us ‘around her face the time was nearly always night time’. Of novella length this story carries a convincing reek of decay and decadence in a tatty city set in a polluted landscape. Its larger-than-life characters seem also grubbier and tawdrier than life.

A standard anthology of Welsh writing has to contain some Dylan Thomas and here it is an absolute classic fittingly entitled ‘A Story’. This is elemental Dylan celebrating a joyous charabanc outing in his inimitably festive and free language, where perhaps, as in the case of a similarly gifted writer, Osip Mandelstam writing in Russian, the English language is an exciting new toy tossed about enthusiastically, vigorously and without restraint. Mandelstam, similarly influenced by another ‘background’ tongue (Yiddish) played with Russian prose with astonishing results, for example, in ‘The Music of Time’.

In Alun Lewis’ ‘The Orange Grove’ there is an utter contrast in both language and spirit to Dylan, with a report distilled ‘from the dust of a hundred villages’ of an Empire fracturing around its protagonists, a couple of Welsh servicemen, who are as war-and-empire-and-bullybeef-weary as you could wish for; a story with an ending where empire and empire-builder — Kipling’s essential indefatigable soldier — join together in the trackless immemorial rhythms of transhumance. This may be the best and most unsentimental piece about the British Empire in India you will ever come across.

Glyn Jones’ ‘Wat Pantathro’ has an astonishing picture of a town’s streets and pavements bedecked with horses as a fair proceeds.

As one soon discovers, reading Kate Roberts, in the Welsh-speaking heartland of North Wales, the quarry was the employer par excellence and Dic Tryfan’s ‘Good-for-Nothing’ is set amongst quarrymen and the harsh realities of their lives. While Caradoc Evans has a dig at Nonconformist piety in ‘A Father in Sion’, detecting a degree of callousness behind the strict moral façade, in the delicious ‘Mecca of the Nation’ by D. J. Williams we meet a wonderfully ghastly and calculating boarding house landlady awash with little tricks to increase her revenues from her hapless clients. ‘She would be at it all day...then late at night making sure that no water-tap or electric light bulb was being wasted.’ One of her boarders is the trimmer Dogwell Jones QC who, though rather fearsome on Welsh rights, is also a realist: ‘His livelihood, after all, depended on being in favour with little conservative-minded solicitors, as unimaginative as their documents; fearful, colourless jurymen; and as much as anything on being in the good books of icy English judges for whom Wales was nothing more than a place to dine and a breeding ground of liars, offenders and pheasants..’ This is a wickedly well-observed picture of some scions of a minor élite.

‘A Fine Room To Be Ill In’ is by the famous cultural critic Raymond Williams who shows himself here to be an interesting chronicler of the social atmosphere of middle-class Britain in the post-war period. Islwyn Ffowc Elis’ anthologised story is both a glimpse into a writer’s life and its struggles and a reflection on the crisis of the Welsh language in the same period. Editor Alun Richards’ ‘The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil’ invites us to witness the folkloric recreation of working-class Britain as a sentimentalised lost continent of thankless freaks, while contrasting this ‘London NW3’ art-gallery version with another view of working-class life in the persona of one of its denizens, the Former Miss herself.... Its crafty satire on cultural politics makes it one of the most thought-provoking stories in this collection. Leslie Norris’ ‘A House Divided’ is a Carmarthenshire pastorale of ‘that fertile and timeless place’ where one found ‘the round flat cakes full of currants that were baked on a thick iron plate directly above the open fire’, but this is a rural Eden with a snake in it, a lawyer amazingly enough.

B.L.Coombes’ ‘Twenty Tons of Coal’ is a moving story from ‘two miles inside the mountain’ to reveal the true price of coal measured in human lives, a price being paid these days in China’s unsafe but Party-profitable mines rather than in Wales. This is however still a valuable piece both for its well-told detail of mining practice and for setting out the reasons why the inherent danger of the industry was increased by the system of accident compensation and insurance in place before nationalisation.

Emyr Humphreys’ ‘The Suspect’ captures the mood of the 1960s very well in a story of marital infidelity and the small-town way of dealing with it. Dannie Abse’s ‘Sorry Miss Crouch’ is another atmospheric story, but a bulletin from an insouciant childhood rather than a disturbed marriage partnership.

‘November Kill’ by Ron Berry is from a harsher world where marriages don’t last beyond the birth and early years of unfortunate children who then grow up, in this version of things, into awkward and dissatisfied adults living in narrow worlds of beer, mates and dogs. But somehow Berry nevertheless finds human (and canine) heroism in all of that. Jane Edwards’ ‘Waiting for the Rain to Break’ demonstrates a sprightly kind of writing in Welsh, free of its moral-laden traditions as two young girls make their mocking, laughing way round a small town, while Penny Windsor’s ‘Jennifer’s Baby’ is a poignant bit of domestic bleakery involving an unemployed man feeling useless and also landed with a rather witless wife. ‘Do you remember Jamie?’ is by the prolific Eigra Lewis Roberts, who has also recently begun to publish in English. It very sensitively explores a marriage and a woman’s heart after a long but frigid relationship, showing insight into how rather different people can end up together. Inside this fairly short piece large themes and large emotions are hinted at as much as demonstrated, in classic short-story style.

Duncan Bush’s ‘Hopkins’ expresses a lovely bit of class/national resentment: ‘Like in the army. It’s officers and men. They use the same tone, people like him, that same, English voice. And, you can tell, they just love to hear it coming out of their mouths. They know they only got to open their mouths to put you in your place and keep them in theirs’.

Glenda Beagan’s ‘The Last Thrush’ is a poignant little piece about dying but the book ends on an entirely different note with the beautifully funny ‘Barbecue’ by Catherine Merriman, the Rabelaisian adventure of Jaz and Dai, biker boyos of Wales.

The anthology is a mixture of Welsh and English-language authors and is a significant showpiece for writing from Wales, but as it was published in 1993 there are several authors here who are not active today. On the other hand what can we understand of this nation and its writers without some historical depth? The collection also contains stories by Geraint Goodwin, Harri Pritchard Jones and Clare Morgan. RK

The Secret Room [Y Stafell Ddirgel]

Laughter fills the first few pages of this novel: the laughter of the Dolgellau Hiring Fair of 1672, as the crowds celebrate their new-found freedom to enjoy themselves. Within a few hours the crowd is a frenzied mob, drowning an old crone in the river. The horror of their cruelty, the complaisance and acquiescence of his privileged peers, and his own impotence to resist sets the novel’s protagonist, Rowland Ellis, on a dangerous course of self-discovery as he questions what lies beneath the surface of his settled life. ‘Far better leave things as they are,’ the rector tells Rowland, but change is inevitable. This is the strength of The Secret Room: it wears its historical and local knowledge lightly, yet solidly enough for us to participate in the tension and emotion experienced by the characters, faced with painful dilemmas and religious persecution.

The interaction is centred on a gathering of Quakers in the small market town of Dolgellau, north Wales, concentrating on Rowland Ellis’ journey from sceptic to believer and the inward and outward struggles that ensue. We see how suspicious society is of difference, and how threatened the authorities feel by those who question, as religious persecution increases. The narrative is driven by the choices Rowland faces: between his faith and his beloved wife, who wants no part of it; between his faith and his land, which the courts threaten to confiscate and between his faith and his first language, as the English Quakers see Welsh as a barbaric barrier to true communion.

What is the ‘Secret Room’? It is a phrase taken from the writings of Morgan Llwyd, a Puritan divine with Quaker sympathies, who wrote, ‘Go into the Secret Room, which is the light of God within you.’ But if Morgan Llwyd’s secret room is that inner spiritual experience which renders external authority null and void, the novel also teems with other subversive secrets. A teenage girl expresses her awareness of her nascent sexuality ‘as if she was half-opening a door of a strange disturbing room’, and few of the characters seem capable of emotional honesty. The dialogue is one of the novel’s strengths, but what is left unsaid between Rowland Ellis and the others holds a more destructive significance. The value of speech itself is subverted in the context of the Quaker meetings, where Ellis learns that silence can lead to meaningful communication. Marion Eames heightens the sense of secrecy and questioning uncertainty using imagery of light and dark, inviting us into the internal lives of her characters, our feelings intensified by a landscape that seems to reflect their thoughts.

The Secret Room is enjoyable and accomplished but its enduring appeal since its publication in 1969 is in its exploration of modern concerns within a credible emotional context, without being anachronistic. It raises questions about civil liberty versus social cohesion and the relation of church and state and about free speech and freedom of conscience versus political consensus; the rights of the individual and the fear of difference and dissent. These issues were relevant in the political ferment of the 1960s in Wales and in the political instability of seventeenth-century Britain, and are still relevant in the global politics of the twenty-first century. AB

Martha, Jack and Shanco [Martha, Jac a Sianco]

This is a tight, close-up little drama with rural characters, including the slow Shanco who ‘keeps his terrier under his jumper at all times’. Their farmhouse is Graig-ddu (‘Black Rock’): ‘The orchard came right up behind the house, making it dark and damp; the wallpaper’s original light blue a distant memory, since by now it was blackened by smoke’. This is no rural idyll, but Lewis’ eye for detail gives us pleasure amidst the squalor and ‘unpleasantness’ (as those who romanticise rural existence might see it).

Her eye is an eye for humour too: ‘As she put the teapot on the table, Jac pulled off his hat and gave it to the pot to wear while it brewed the tea’.

Staccato chapters envision the repetitive, uncomfortable moments of these isolated farming siblings’ lives, frying bacon and potatoes, slaughtering turkeys or training sheepdogs. But there is a grand drama unfolding here about marriage and property as in the best Jane Austen. One commentator (Diarmuid Johnson) sees the story of the three siblings in their hillside farm as a metaphor for Welsh-speaking rural life under threat from both socio-economic change and cultural and linguistic encroachment from English-speakers. If this is the case then the tragedy it outlines is of a population marginalised by the very isolation and poverty that has enabled it to preserve the Welsh language. Visiting the churchyard to lay a Christmas wreath on ‘Mami’s’ grave, Martha the daughter of the family notes ‘There were never any flowers except her flowers on the graves: the three of them were the only family left.’

Poor old Shanco is slow-witted and dependent, Jack is a miser, lured by the pragmatic glamour of (English) Judy from Leeds who would transform Graig-ddu into an acculturated dude ranch. Martha is the only one — as tradition- or, rather, memory-bearer of her ‘clan’ — in a position to combat elder brother Jack’s nihilistic vision: ‘There’s nothing here, Martha. It’s all finished. We’re all finished.’

The story of this long slow retreat of an old way on the Welsh hills is expressed in the poignancy of Martha’s ‘patrilocal’ dilemma: if she marries her patient admirer Gwynfor she must move from the old farmstead, leave it to Jack and Judy and Judy’s wasteful horses, her crass, petty-bourgeois ways.

Lewis masterfully builds up a sense of foreboding in this tight family scenario, of irreconcilable, deep-seated and long-lived conflict. We only sense that something must happen, that some spark will detonate the gunpowder.

Less obviously, there are mysterious elements in the narrative — huge threatening crows for one — that provide an essential depth, the space for the unresolved and unknown that real writing needs.

Inter alia there is plenty about other animals here too, including an amusing account of a sheepdog’s intense jealousy and protectiveness for his master: ‘Glen would also walk between Jack and Gwen…. When they started going out, Glen would bark at her and refuse to settle until she was on her way. After six months or so the dog would let them hold hands but he would walk between them under their clasped hands. He would also sit between them on the settle.’ All in all, this is a graphic and beautifully described portrayal of farm life and of place, a real confrontation with a particular kind of existence. RK