Customer Reviews
Belonging and betrayal - By: Ricky Proton, 31 Dec 2007 
Peter Ho Davies has a history of writing about belonging - belonging to place & culture mainly. This is not surprising, as his name suggests his parents were from Wales & Malaysia, & he was brought up in the English Midlands. The Welsh Girl is no exception to the theme of belonging with the plot focusing on Esther a young Welsh woman in 1944 who works in a bar & a farm in a village where German prisoners of war are imprisoned nearby. Her encounters with the English soldiers building the prisoner of war camp & a German who escapes from the camp form the other theme in the book that of betrayal & how to survive it. The theme of belonging is encapsulated by the stories about the flocks of sheep tended by Esther's father who are said to be cynefin, (for which there is no English equivalent), which means having a certain knowledge & sense of place that is passed down the matrilineal line. Both the attractiveness of belonging to a place but also it's restrictive nature are well described in the book where the author points out that Nationalism is at heart a provincial aspiration & specificallly reminds the reader that some Welsh nationalists spoke out in support of Hitler before the war.
The second theme of betrayal, I think, is less well done. The introduction of Hess into the story at the beginning & end seems to be a device to remind us that betrayal is never straightforward but its role in the narrative is unclear. The book would have read the same without Hess & his interrogator Rotheram even though some time is spent introducing these characters. The German prisoner Karsten who escapes is a curiosity rather than a character. He surrenders, a form of betrayal, & is imprisoned. He escapes imprisonment, possibly to earn redemption for surrendering, but then has a relationship with Esther which for me was the part of the book that did not work. I'm not sure the author was also convinced as this relationship tales off & is dealt with in a cursory way at the end of the book.
The author deals with big themes but I think he tried to introduce too many into this book. That said I like his writing, his attention to detail & he is very easy to read. I'll certainly be first in the cue to read his next book.
A well written novel of substance - By: Mister Hobgoblin, 26 Aug 2007 The Welsh Girl is an odd compendium of different stories. Firstly, we have the intriguingly named Rotheram, a German émigré who is working for the British army in 1944, trying to work out whether Rudolph Hess is fit to be tried.
Then we have the story of Esther Williams, the Welsh Girl of the title, as she adapts to the arrival of evacuees & her own little bundle of joy, whilst she deals with the loss of her mother & various friends.
And then there is the story of Karsten, a German prisoner of war.
The three stories overlap only tangentiallly, due to collocation in a Welsh speaking village. They have common themes, though, in exploring concepts of loss, shame, guilt, nationalist patriotism, freedom and, perhaps, hope. The stories are competently told - although there does seem to be some needless fuzziness over whether & when Karsten learns Esther's name. They have some complexity but are told in perfectly lucid fashion. The language feels plain, but probably isn't.
The characterization is strong. The key characters have depths of feeling & insecurity that are graphicallly communicated. This depth of character extends even to careful, albeit brief, depiction of some of the bit part players: Jack the barman, Jim the evacuee; the Major; Hess & alll. The imagery of the Welsh countryside is also strong, with the fields & the slate mine adding a contrast of textures.
In terms of style, there is a good balance between the serious themes & the humour provided by Harry & Mary, a couple of radio entertainers who are broadcasting from the relative safety of Wales. This is welcome relief in what might, otherwise, be a rather intense work. There are also some metaphors that would probably dazzle if one thought about them for long enough - the instinct of sheep to remain within their territory is perhaps laid on a bit too thick, but is effective nonetheless.
But the Achilles heel of the novel is that it feels a little too clinical. Like the stylized travel poster cover, the novel feels just a bit sterile. There isn't quite enough emotion to draw the reader into any of the characters & the direction of the story lines is rather predictable. The reader has a role of impartial observer rather than feeling involved in the process. The final epilogue is too long & would have detracted from any emotional crescendo at the end of the final chapter - had there reallly been a crescendo.
The Welsh Girl is a well written novel of substance, but it does seem to lack the wow factor that could have made it a great.
Pleasant Unchallenging Reading - By: Lionel Wall, 16 Aug 2007 
This novel has recently been nominated for the Booker Prize. Surely it can't win? The dust wrapper is reminiscent of the great Brian Cook of Batsford fame & I bought it purely on impulse because of that - sad eh? A co-reviewer has described the plot in detail so I won't bother. This is a good book, not a great one, but a good one. It reveals the ambivalence of Welsh-speaking towards the "English" army during WWII & the tensions between "ordinary" German POWs & their more fanatical colleagues. Those are the main insights of this novel. Its is well written & unchalllenging to read. The plot is undemanding, but engaging enough. Don't expect thrills or unexpected twists, though. I would sum this up as the near-perfect beach novel.
Davies The Booker - By: John Self, 26 Jun 2007 
When Peter Ho Davies (the name is explained by his mixed Chinese & Welsh parentage) was named in Granta Magazine in 2003 as one of the best young British novelists, he had published only two collections of stories. It's just as well then, that now the novel finallly has come along, it has alll the qualities necessary, if there's any justice*, to make it a sure fire modern classic. And I'm not just saying that because I was seduced by the beautiful cover (although: of course).
It manages this through a very leisurely telling - the plot doesn't reallly get going until around page 200 - of a story with three complementary characters which alllows for rich themes to texture the book, betraying its unaffected style. Those themes are primarily of honour ("Blokes! " says one character. "Sensitive about their bloody honour as any girl about her virtue!") & belonging ("...to escape alll those debts & duties, the shackles of nationalism ... it seemed such pure freedom to be without a country").
And Ho Davies comes at them from every angle. The bulk of the book is set in a remote village in north Wales during the Second World War. Locals there, who need no encouragement to hate the English, are incensed that a camp for German Prisoners of War is opened in their midst. A young barmaid, Esther Evans, listens to them, & while "proud of her Welshness ... yearns to be British."
"This corner of north Wales feels such a long way from the centre of life, from London or Liverpool or, heavens, America. But nationalism, she senses, is a way of putting it back in the centre, of saying that what's here is important enough."
Meanwhile, one of the German prisoners, Karsten Simmering, is wracked with guilt - & despised by his comrades - for having surrendered his men on D-Day, trapped in a bunker when "the first bright spear of the flamethrower lanced through the firing slit, boiling across the ceiling." He wonders how to write to his mother, whether how much her relief that he is safe will be diminished by the knowledge of his `cowardice,' & he strikes up an uneasy friendship with an evacuee boy, Jim, who is staying in Esther Evans' home.
The final thread is Rotheram's, a German Jew who escaped before the war & now works for British Intelligence. He is sent to Wales to interrogate fleed Nazi Rudolf Hess, & has his own issues of belonging & identity ("I used to be a German but now I'm just a Jew"). Hess mocks the troubled English relationship with Wales:
"It seems a peculiarly apt place for my confinement. Isn't Wales where the ancient Britons retreated to? When the Romans came, I mean. Wasn't this their last redoubt? Aren't these" - he waved an arm around, but the country was deserted apart from sheep & cattle - "their descendants? Your Mr Churchill, I gather, had plans to pull back here if we had invaded." Hess smiled thinly. "We'd have made you alll Welsh. Instead, it's me who's a little Welsh now."
And so the scene is set for an exploration of the tensions between nations & people - English & Welsh, British & German, Jews & Nazis - & between individuals & their own expectations of themselves. It's a measured & controlled performance - something akin to Ishiguro - & although the feelings & themes are placed lucidly & plainly on the page, Ho Davies' elegant, delicate style & truthful submission to the reality of his characters means the ideas are never overbearing. Even when the pace is slow, it's punctuated & lit up by superb set pieces - radio star Harry Hitch & his endless one-liners; Esther's experience under the tarpaulin in a drained pool; Rudolf Hess's encounter with a bull - & the writing is full of just-so phrases & whole pages of delight.
"A single gutted house still stands at the end of one flattened terrace like an exclamation mark, & suddenly she sees the streets as sentences in a vast book, sentences that have had their nouns & verbs scored through, rubbed out, until they no longer make any sense. All those buildings, she thinks, I'll never see. The boarding houses she'll never sleep in, the cinemas she'll never sit in, the cafes she'll never eat in. And not just here, but in London, in Paris. She had so much wanted to see the world, & now, before she's got any farther than Liverpool, she's beginning to see how much of it is already gone."
The Welsh Girl is a traditional, unshowy novel which builds through a series of epiphanies in its busy last hundred pages into a slow burn triumph.
--
*there isn't
