Tagged: owen sheers
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First impression, a Wizard of Wales, a storyteller with a subtle pen for a wand, 'White Ravens' is a must read. Owen Sheers has a rare talent. Like the Florida gator, he is both ancient and today. The Second Branch of the Mabinogion contains the story of Brnwen, Daughter of Llyr. Sheers requested this tale because of its impact upon his own life. If you have not read The Mabinogion, I urge you to read this novella first. It will deepen your appreciation and widen your view of the art and skill of the Bards of old, as well as Owen Sheers. The author begins by drawing the reader into a modern day Welsh tale of tragedy and high adventure involving a family who raise sheep. Rhian is watching the sunrise as it turns the Thames gold. On a bench by the Tower of London, she recalls her life, at age six her father abandons the family. Ten years later her mother dies leaving her to run the household with Dewi and Sion her brothers to do the sheep farming. The third tragedy comes about six years later. Due to a Foot and Mouth breakout, the sheep are shot. Dewi and Sion get involved in sheep napping (pun intended), steeling a hundred head at a time and butchering them while on the way to London to sell on the black market. All goes well until the driver comes down sick. This book should become a N.Y. Times bestseller, Seren publishing house of Wales and author Owen Sheers gets a big thumbs up. Seren publishers commissioned ten Welsh writers to do some retelling of the national treasure 'The Mabinogion'. Theme: keep these old tales at the heart of a new story. The tale of Rhian and her brothers is complex and compelling. However, when she meets an old man with a cane on the park bench he tells her another tale. This is a tale about a WWII Irish soldier named Matthew OConnell. Wounded in Italy Matthew is given an assignment to go to a remote farm in Wales to pick up six raven chicks. The mission is Top Secret as ordered by Prime Minister Churchill. While waiting for the chicks to mature for traveling Matthew falls in love with Brnwen, sister of the farmer Ben. A whirlwind affair ending with a wedding two weeks later, a returning brother Evan from the war casts a black cloud on the couple that night. After returning the chicks to London Matthew and his bride leave for Ireland and his farm home on the coast below Dublin. Farm life is terrible for both as Matthews family hate the British and his Welsh wife. Matthew turns sullen and Brnwen sends a message to Ben about how terrible life is. Ben and Evan show up one night to rescue Brnwen. Evan shoots Matthew and knocks their two year old son into the fire. Later Matthew recovers from the shot, saved by his pocket watch. By the time he contacts Ben in Wales Brnwen has died of a broken heart. But with a stroke of genius, Sheers redeems both the young woman and the old man in a surprise ending. In addition to these tales, Seren includes a synopsis of the original tale from The Mabinogion. Also an afterword by the author at the back of the book is inspiring.
Review by Bill Tillman |
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Not read 'Resistance' yet? You should...a minor masterpiece imho. Here is the AmeriCymru review:-
http://welsh-american-bookstore.com/index.php/BookLibrary/Novels/Contemporary-Welsh-Fiction/Resistance.html
The good news is that it has been made into a film. DO NOT MISS!!
This novel is set in an alternative universe. One in which the Nazis succeed in conquering Russia and invading Britain after the failure of the D-Day landings in 1944. Such literary contrivances can seem very intrusive in a work of 'mainstream' literature but to Owen Sheers' credit the conceit is rendered with a masterful touch and seems almost essential in order to intensify the focus of the books' main theme. In the depths of a freezing winter in a remote corner of the Black Mountains in South Wales two people consider whether it is possible to 'cheat' history; leave the past behind and assert their shared humanity in the midst of bloody conflict. This is no pastoral idyll, nor is it history writ large in the manner of Raymond Williams' - "People of The Black Mountains", but the landscape and its history do figure prominently in the narrative. At one point during her childhood, Sarah, the heroine of this tale meets David Jones, the Welsh poet and artist who stayed with Eric Gill at Capel-y-Ffin in the 1920's. Her meetings with him are recounted thus:-
"And that was when the poet began to tell Sarah his stories, recasting the land and hills she'd known all her life as the backdrop for his Celtic myths, for tales of saints and soldiers, of kings and bards. His stories worked upon the valleys around them like his paintings. he spoke of places she knew or that she'd hard of before, St Peter's well, The Abbey, The Cat's Back, St Davids Cell, but the lens of his stories made them all new again. Some of the stories she'd even heard before, but never like this, never growing from the very hills of her birthplace."
Sheers here hints at the perhaps unique relationship which the Welsh people have with their landscape. The hills of Wales are indeed magnificent but they pale into insignificance, at least in topographical terms, when compared with the European Alps or the North American Cascades. Their special gravity and power lies in the fact that every nook and cranny, every fold and crevice, is invested with some human significance. The sum of history and legend which the landscape reveals is almost an externalization of Welsh identity itself. As R.S. Thomas puts it:-
"You cannot live in the present, At least not in Wales,"
Sarah, however, is bound to the valley she lives in by far more tangible ties. There is the instinct for survival which impels her to observe the cycle of the rural calendar and her loyalty to her husband, who goes missing early on in the book when he is called upon to participate in the resistance to the German occupation. By contrast, Albrecht, the German officer sent into the Olchon valley on a secret mission, is suffering from a severe case of 'hiraeth', or longing, both for his home and for his past destroyed by war. Unfortunately, he has no home to go back to. It was destroyed by Allied bombing. His war-weariness manifests itself in a desire to prolong his mission and in the uneasy truce which he and his men establish with the valleys' inhabitants.
The precarious situation which develops can only prove temporary. The climactic moments of the novel are reached as both characters have to decide how they will react when the cataclysmic events in the outside world threaten to come crashing in on them. The distant rumbles of war are heard from beyond the Olchon throughout the book. Owen Sheers handles these interruptions skilfully. His references to these events are subtle and sparing... just sufficient to preserve the tension of the main theme.
The preparation and training of the the Auxiliary Units of the British Resistance Organization are also woven into the fabric of the narrative; as is their ultimate fate. The book ends with both protagonists facing a stark choice which is really no choice at all. In order to survive they must turn their backs on everything they have known and attempt to find personal salvation in a future that is as uncertain as it is dangerous. Do they succeed? I leave it to you to discover how this final act of 'resistance' plays out .
Buy 'Resistance' HERE.
Owen Sheers Biography: BBC Wales Amazon: Owen Sheers
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Review by Ann Dierikz:
Having seen Mametz with a bus load of fellow friends, I feel completely compelled to write and tell you all about the most amazing piece of production, for I fear 'Theatre' does not do it justice, I have ever witnessed.
Theatre implies sitting in rows and watching a play. Mametz is not that. From arriving in a field and seeing fleetingly a young lad run by in WW1 uniform, you are engrossed and engaged. The walk through the trenches, the casual uniformed men laying on benches writing letters home, Skyping … it was surreal ..yet real….. The onslaught of your senses followed swiftly with a bombardment of prose, play, imagery and smells…. smells of dust and well… I was, for 2 and a quarter hours transported to a trench, near Mametz Wood with a group of young men who waited to venture to certain death.
