Review by New York Times Review
THERE'S no direct English translation for cynefin, the Welsh term for a fierce attachment to a patch of land - so fierce among some sheep that land and flock must be sold together or the transplanted sheep will wander, impossible to herd. That idea acts as a kind of touchstone in "The Welsh Girl," a first novel by Peter Ho Davies, the author of two short-story collections. Set in rural Wales near the end of World War II, Davies's novel is an ambitious, layered meditation on what it means to be from a particular place. Yet he isn't interested in making tired connections between geography and destiny. Rather, "The Welsh Girl" is a kaleidoscopic study of the clash between local and national identities; between personal history and "history" as it plays out on the world stage. These contradictions are explored from such a dizzying array of angles that Davies's readers may be left wondering if terms like "ally," "enemy" or "hero" mean anything at all outside the realms of public relations and propaganda. The novel charts the wartime intersection of three lives: Esther, the "girl" of the title, a sheep farmer's daughter in northern Wales; Karsten, a German P.O.W. imprisoned in a camp outside her town; and Rotheram, a half-Jewish German who works as a British interrogator. Many of the Welsh are deeply conflicted about the fighting. On the one hand, they're "hoping for some glorious part in the English war," as Esther's crusty father puts it, and energized by the influx of soldiers and BBC broadcasters it has brought to their town. But they also loathe their English bedfellows, whom their own bloody history has led them to see as occupiers. Welsh locals and English transients drink apart at the pub where Esther works, trading occasional insults. "Don't go forgetting who the real enemy are!" one soldier yells at a local, who bellows back, "You are!" Esther's own case is even more complex. A spirited 17-year-old who longs for bigger things than a life spent raising sheep, she engages in a secret courtship with one of the English soldiers, fantasizing that she'll follow him to London. But on the evening of Churchill's broadcast announcing the D-Day invasion, the soldier rapes her, leaving Esther shaken and - it soon emerges - pregnant. Davies is generally savvy in his depictions of women, and he writes from Esther's viewpoint with perceptive authority. The word "rape," like most abstractions we meet in this novel, seems inadequate for what has actually happened to her: "The idea of being forced doesn't enter into it - hadn't she gone along willingly enough? Besides, what was it to be forced to do something she didn't want to do? She'd been forced all her life by one circumstance or another - by poverty, by her mother's death, by the needs of the flock. ... If she's been raped, she thinks, then she'd wanted it more than most things in her life, although that isn't saying much." Even more than geography, it's spoken language that preoccupies Davies - both as a battleground of influence and as an agent of change. Esther's fluent English divides her from her father, who distrusts the language, and strengthens her bond to people like Jim, a young evacuee she and her father have taken in, as well as to the British soldier. Esther has worked hard on her English, hoping it will provide a ticket out of provincial Wales, but as the gravity of her predicament becomes apparent, the language itself seems to turn on her, mocking her with the double meanings and secret knowledge contained in words like "confinement." "It's as if the language is coming to life," Davies writes, "talking back to her in its slippery English tongue. For she's the one ... who'll be in her confinement soon enough." Karsten, the German corporal, is also fluent in English, which sets him apart from his peers and largely accounts for his capture. Cornered in a bunker during the D-Day invasion, he's urged by a fellow soldier to use his English to surrender, and does so to save the life of a terrified underage boy in his unit. Afterward he's accused of cowardice by his fellow prisoners and blamed for their capture. Davies's sympathetic portrait of Karsten undermines any blanket notion of a German enemy, he's not anti-Semitic or even especially patriotic - just an empathetic 18-year-old fighting for his widowed mother, who owns a pension in the Harz Mountains. Even as Karsten guns down Allied soldiers on the beaches of Normandy, Davies writes, "it was heavy work, this slaughter. He began to feel an odd sympathy for the exhausted men slogging through the sand, envied them as they lay themselves down before his fire." The romance between Karsten and Esther feels inevitable long before they're on the same shore, but Davies inclines gradually into the novel's pivotal encounter, alternating between their points of view as he sets up the chain of events that will make their meeting possible. By the time these two finally lay eyes on each other through the prison-camp fence, the novel is half over. Such a luxuriant pace toward a foregone conclusion may make some readers edgy, particularly those accustomed to the angular economy of Davies's stories. His prose style is softer and more muted here; at times I missed the tangy snap of his short fiction. And while his characters' individual struggles are aching at times, this isn't the sweeping emotional tale its plot line might suggest. Like "The English Patient," Michael Ondaatje's World War II novel, whose themes and tone it sometimes recalls, "The Welsh Girl" engages most deeply with the mind, not the gut. STILL, ideas do more than gird the novel's absorbing world; they animate it. Davies's achievement is significant: like good social history, "The Welsh Girl" invites us to question history's master narratives, which have a way of wiping out the contradictions and complications of real life, much like the propaganda films Karsten is forced to watch in the P.O.W. camp. Those complications come into sharpest relief in the character of Rotheram, the German Jew turned Allied interrogator who questions Karsten. Rotheram is locked in his own struggle against a master narrative. Born of a gentile mother and a Jewish father, he has never identified himself as Jewish and feels guilty at having fled Germany. Assigned the job of interrogating Rudolf Hess, the enigmatic Hitler deputy who claims to remember nothing of his activities in the Fatherland, Rotheram is appalled to discover that to both Hess and the English command, his biography places him squarely in a category he has always rejected. "I used to be a German, but now I'm just a Jew," he tells Karsten. If geography is destiny, Davies suggests, it's because of the assumptions other people make about us, based on our origins. Perhaps this is why a minor character in "The Welsh Girl" (who also turns out to be Jewish) refuses to say where he was born. "Can't be the butt of a joke if they don't know where you're from," he says. Hess himself - the hapless old man who may also be a monster - articulates the novel's central question. "We have something in common, you and I," he tells Rotheram. "The same dilemma. Are we who we think we are, or who others judge us to be?" The answer, this eloquent novel suggests, is both. Davies's first novel is a meditation on what it means to be from a particular place. Jennifer Egan's most recent novel, "The Keep," was published last fall.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Half-Welsh Davies draws on his heritage and a little-known part of World War II history in this beautifully written story of life and love on the outskirts of the war. The stories of three primary characters alternate as their lives intersect: Rotherdam, a British intelligence officer, son of a Canadian mother and German father who was Jewish; Karsten, a young German corporal taken prisoner in France; and title character Esther Evans, 17, who helps her widower father with his sheep farm and works at the neighborhood pub. In mid-1944, English troops finish building a base in the Welsh hills, which--unknown to the locals--will be a POW camp, when Esther is raped by her English soldier sweetheart, with whom she had dreamed of eloping. Karsten, ashamed of surrendering even when the only recourse was death for him and his men, is an English-speaking POW at the new camp who restores his reputation and is aided by Esther when he escapes. And Rotherdam, skilled at interviewing prisoners (among then Rudolf Hess), struggles with his heritage. Dealing with issues of honor, identity, patriotism, and displacement, this centers on cynefin, a Welsh word describing a sense of place or territory for which there is no English equivalent. This first novel by Davies, author of two highly praised short story collections, has been anticipated--and, with its wonderfully drawn characters, it has been worth the wait. --Michele Leber Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Esther, a WWII-era Welsh barmaid, finds her father-a fiercely nationalistic, anti-English shepherd-provincial; she daydreams that she'll elope to London with her secret sweetheart, an English soldier. In short order, Esther is raped by her boyfriend, and her Welsh village is turned into a dumping ground for German prisoners. Meanwhile, Karsten, a German POW who is mortified that he'd ordered his men to surrender, believes that only by escaping can he find redemption. Davies (Equal Love) uses the familiar tensions of WWII Britain to nice ensemble effect: among the more nuanced secondary characters is a British captain who is the son of a German-Jewish WWI hero-the man's father had always considered himself a Lutheran until the Nazi ascension forced him to flee Germany. As Esther begins to question her own allegiances, Karsten comes into her orbit. What makes this first novel by an award-winning short-storyteller an intriguing read isn't the plot-which doesn't quite go anywhere-but the beautifully realized characters, who learn that life is a jumble of difficult compromises best confronted with eyes wide open. (Feb. 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Proclaimed one of the "Best Young Novelists" by Granta on the strength of several award-winning story collections, Davies finally gets around to his debut novel: the tale of a Welsh girl who falls for a German POW incarcerated near her village during World War II. With a national tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An unlikely World War II romance is the subject of this ambitious first novel from the Welsh-Malaysian author of the story collections The Ugliest House in the World (1997) and Unequal Love (2000). Following a prologue, in which British army officer Rotheram (son of a German Jewish war-hero-turned-pacifist) is assigned to interrogate captured Nazi officer Rudolf Hess, the scene shifts to a farming village in mountainous northern Wales. Davies gradually connects the shadow of the war to the experiences of teenaged barmaid Esther Evans, whose sheepherder father loudly proclaims his countrymen's ingrained distrust of all things English (including the war effort). Another narrative pattern emerges in the ordeal of Karsten Simmering, imprisoned in the POW camp the English army has built not far from the Evans farm, and guilt-ridden over his decision to persuade the soldiers under his command to surrender. Karsten's agonies of conscience are juxtaposed with the progress of Esther's maturing (she's raped by her boyfriend, a soldier in the British army, and shares the sufferings of the family who have lost their son Rhys--the decent man Esther might have married). The plots coalesce as Karsten escapes, hides in the Evans's barn and draws closer to Esther--with consequences that will compromise his "freedom" and alter her future. The story comes full circle as the completion of Rotheram's mission ironically confirms the likelihood that he, like so many others maimed and transformed by the war, belongs nowhere, and has no identity. The book is overlong and explains too much, but succeeds admirably in its presentation of engaging major characters, each of whom is given a complex and intriguing personal and family history. The result is a rich, moving explication of the ambiguities of duty and sacrifice, courage and perseverance. Not quite The English Patient, but a credible dramatization of a quality too seldom encountered in contemporary fiction: nobility. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
