This is a book found through it's review in Planet magazine and it has as a backdrop the link between Wales and Spain forged by a miner who went to fight for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. This might seem to be a little off putting - the worry that this is an 'issue' based plot with all the creaking wooden characters that generally come along with it. However this is not to any real extent a book 'about' the Civil War - the Civil War is a backdrop and like the eldery matriarch around which it revolves its time is passing. The question is whether that passing will be a peaceful or a tormented one.
The main theme of the book is in fact the corrupting effect of silence - that central matriarch is a Nun who was raped during the war, she has no one to share the pain of that event and so is eaten up by it and the shame she feels. This shame not only effects her, but her daughter conceived during the rape and on to her grandson. The bitterness prevents them from blossoming until those final days of her live when daughter and grandson break free and live without the shame.
The 'Welsh' part to the plot, a granddaughter looking for the miner grandfather who went to fight and was lost is a far less interesting side of the book - there is little of the intensity of the Spanish side. Compared with the struggle of the Spanish characters to reconcile themselves with real crimes our Welsh heroine seems self-indulgent. If this was a deliberate feature of the book, to contrast the national histories and question if the amount of term Welsh commentators spend soul searching, this would have been an elegant and enriching twist. However I think this reading is entirely accidental and so it becomes a weakness.
Despite this last criticism the book as a whole remains engaging with the essence of believability about the characterisation that allows you to become a part of a story which draws you forward as a thriller would turning the page to find out just how things will work themselves out.
No comments:
Post a Comment