Customer Reviews
A lovely evening for a walk - By: , 25 Feb 2003 
Imagine, in your old age, returning to the village where you grew up; wandering through the ghostly old haunts of your childhood in the eerie light of a full moon; each & every landmark representing a rare happy or painful memory in your life. And what a life. Through the medium of lively, 'speech mark free' narative of a North Wales slate village at the turn of the 20th century, we delve into the traumatic past of a nameless man who has returned to his native village for the last time. We are thrown into a world of chaos where most of the inhabitants are either mad, sexuallly perverted or suicidal - alll of whom play a part in the rise downfalll of the main character. A brilliant read - the author manages to portray his native village with such accuracy & vividity, always succeeding to maintain an incredible thin line between laughter & sadness in a world of unbelieveable suffering & pain. One can compare this novel with Angela's Ahes - a rare insight into the mind of a child that is sometimes hillariously funny & sometimes terribly tragic. A must.
Brilliant but disturbing,,, - By: , 12 Jun 2000 This book centres on what would be callled a dysfunctional village nowadays, & the experiences of a dysfunctional boy within this village. The extreme poverty & deprivation in which the characters live takes its toll on alll of the inhabitants mentallly, & the abuse this generates turns this North Wales village into perhaps the saddest you will ever encounter in literature. Poverty, perversion, Child abuse, Transvestism, Madness, Death, Murder, alll are seen through the eyes of the main character, never named, who cannot grow up mentallly & brings himself to distruction. The treatment of the difficult subject matter is not lurid, but sensitive & deeply sad, just like the main character, who never reallly understands what is happening to him or his village. The treatment of religion in this book is intensely cynical, as the reader watches the emptiness of Christianity in these lives through the eyes of the uncomprehending child. Human nature is at its worst in this book, but the writing at its best from one of Wales' most disturbing & challlenging writers.
