Monday, May 05, 2008


THE WELSH GIRL
Peter Ho Davies – Sceptre - $29.99

I reviewed this book on Radio New Zealand National yesterday but was rather cut short on my time so here is what I might have said had I had more time.

Ho Davies was born in 1966 to a Chinese mother and a Welsh father. He was raised in England and spent the summer holidays in Wales. He gained degrees in Physics and English and then went to Boston University where he gained an MA in creative writing. He now lives in the US.
This is his first novel and it caused a stir last year when named on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize. Prior to publication of The Welsh Girl he had two impressive, award-winning short story collections published. These short story collections received wide critical acclaim and now his novel has followed suit.

This is a very fine piece of writing, hugely impressive actually, and I believe that Ho Davies is going to become one of the finest contemporary writers of fiction in Britain. His first three books would all suggest this.

The Welsh Girl is set in the latter stages of World War Two and initially three separate stories are developed but in time the author melds them together in a way that is both skilful and plausible.

First there is Rotherham who works for the Political Intelligence Division in London and who struggles with his Germanness and Jewishness although his fluency with the German language is what makes him of such value to his commander, remember this is 1944. He is a German refugee who fled to London with his mother in the early thirties. The story opens with Rotherham being sent to interview/interrogate Rudolf Hess the former German deputy leader being held by the British since his unsuccessful flying mission three years earlier.

Then we have Esther. Her father is a poor farmer in the Snowdonian Hills in northern Wales, her mother died when Esther was young, she was the brightest kid at the local school but had to leave to look after her father. She leads a pretty humdrum sort of existence but seems well adjusted to this life with her grumpy father. Now she is 17 is old enough to get a job in the village pub as a barmaid. There she meets an English soldier to whom she is attracted. This is not a good idea as these hard core rather dour, insular & nationalistic Welsh don’t like the English at all, in fact they dislike them as intensely as they dislike the Germans.
Her soldier boyfriend is in the area building a Prisoner of War camp. He and his fellow sappers along with English evacuees have swollen the small village population so that the locals feel almost as if they are under siege.

Thirdly we have 18 year old Karsten, a handsome, intelligent, gentle and likeable German corporal who is taken prisoner at the D-Day landings and ends up in the POW camp outside the village where Esther and her father live. The German prisoners are unable to accept that they are losing the war and there is a lot of infighting among them. There are several encounters between Karsten and Esther and it is this story that becomes the main part of the novel. Karsten is a wonderfully drawn character, so much so that I really got to care for him, no easy feat considering he is a German prisoner of war.

This is a special book, a sometimes lively but mainly gentle novel, it is both totally enjoyable and at the same time thought-provoking as the author deals with moral dilemmas, cowardice and patriotism, community & individuality, love and loss and identity and roots.

Well done Peter Ho Davies. I will wait impatiently for your next.

And of course we will have the opportunity to listen and speak to Peter Ho Davies at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, May 14 – May 18, 2008 at the Aotea Centre, Auckland.

1 comment:

Jeremy said...

Hi any chance of republishing this on the Scoop Review of Books?
Jeremy