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Book Reviewed by:Peter Ho Davies's short stories have appeared in a variety of
magazines and newspapers and have been widely anthologized. His first
collection of stories was The Ugliest House in the World
(1998), which contains tales set in Malaysia, South Africa and Patagonia.
It won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Mail on Sunday/John
Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His second collection, Equal Love, was published in 2000.
He was inspired to write The Welsh Girl by one of his earliest memories
of the small brass trinkets he used to play with when staying at his
grandmother's house in North Wales, which she told him had been made from old
shell casings by German prisoners of war held in camps in
Snowdonia (the
area local to The Welsh Girl, named after the highest mountain in Wales).
He was fascinated at how these objects had passed from hand to hand to reach
his.
As the son of a Welsh father and Chinese mother, raised in England, who spent
his summers in Wales and now lives in the USA (where he directs the MFA Program
in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan), Peter Ho Davies's initial
concern was that he wasn't "Welsh enough" to write this story; but in fact this
doubt became the impetus to writing it - to explore what it means to be Welsh
and to explore the wider concept of nationalism in its varied forms.
The setting is North Wales, just after the Normandy landings of 1944. A
crew of English sappers (regarded by the nationalist-orientated locals as
virtual invaders themselves) are building a secret camp, which brings a certain
pride to the local people. However, pride turns to national insult when it
transpires that the camp is for German prisoners of war.
The primary story is told from the point of view of 17-year-old Esther, a local
farm girl who has never been outside the immediate vicinity of the area, and
Karsten, one of the German prisoners, who speaks passable English because he
grew up helping his mother run their small inn.
A secondary story, effectively a short story in its own right, tops and tails
this central tale. Rotheram, a German Jew who has worked as an
interrogator for the British since early in the war, is in Wales to interview
Rudolf Hess*. Rotheram's sense of estrangement is overwhelming. In
the first instance he is a self-exiled German Jew who feels guilt at having left
while others stayed; secondly, despite being fluent in English and able to move
freely between the British officers and the German prisoners (sometimes passing
himself off as a prisoner), he feels at home in neither camp.
Rotheram's dislocation contrasts against the provincial isolationism of the
Welsh villagers to limn the two extremes of nationalism - the effectively
clawless nationalism of the local Welsh, usually limited to grumblings in the pub, and
the extreme aggression of German National Socialism.
The Welsh Girl portrays the lives of ordinary people with empathy and
insight via a simple plot that leaves ample room to explore its powerful themes.
The first of which are the related concepts of nationalism, prejudice and
dislocation. The sheep are likely the happiest characters in the book
because they are bound by cynefin, a word that apparently has no English
equivalent but means a sense of place. From one generation to the next,
the sheep know the boundaries of their own land and never stray. Not so
the humans. Esther longs to escape the village, but feels a loyalty to the
flock and her father; Rotheram is caught between two worlds; Karsten is an
outcast from his fellow soldiers; and most of the locals that we meet cannot
decide who they are more aggrieved with, the English or the Germans. A
secondary theme is that of cowardice and shame - from the shame of an unwanted
pregnancy through to the corporate shame of an entire prisoner of war camp
believing themselves cowards for having been captured.
*Hess flew himself to Scotland in 1941 apparently with the intent of negotiating peace. Hitler dismissed him as insane, and Churchill, having concluded that Hess was acting in isolation, had him locked up for the duration of the war in various secret locations in Wales. He was later tried at Nuremburg. For a brief bio of Hess see historyplace.com.
Interesting Link: Short stories by Peter Ho Davis at Ploughshares.
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in March 2007, and has been updated for the
January 2008 edition.
Click here to go to this issue.
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