The Welsh Girl
by Peter Ho Davies
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Book Summary Information
Author: Peter Ho DaviesEdition: Paperback
Published: 2008-01-14
ISBN: 0618918523
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of The Welsh Girl
Book Review: Displaced Persons
Summary: 3 Stars
I found myself liking this book chapter by chapter, but did not feel that it connected up to a successful whole. The time is 1944, in the months following D-Day. The setting is a village in Snowdonia, NW Wales, whose principally Welsh-speaking inhabitants live by quarrying and sheep farming. But the war has brought strangers into the community: young boys evacuated from bombed cities, British soldiers who build a POW camp for German prisoners, and the prisoners themelves. So most of the people in the book have been at least temporarily displaced, except for the Welsh themselves -- though even they bear a centuries-old resentment at having been thrust into this remote region by the conquering English, whom they still regard as strangers, if not actual enemies.
Peter Ho Davies is exceptionally good at portraying this quality of marginality in human terms. There have been many POW books and movies, for instance, but they have almost all focused on the escape attempts of Allied officers imprisoned in Germany, and colored by the reader's knowledge of ultimate victory. But I don't know anything quite like Davies' portrayal of the German corporal Karsten and his gradual understanding that surrender is not a once-only thing but a continuing process, robbing him of his roots and identity, and requiring him to justify himself to his captors, to his companions, to himself, and even to his own mother. Davies is equally sensitive in portraying the Welsh Girl of the title, seventeen-year-old Esther Evans, and her attempts to define herself as she comes to adulthood surrounded by so many strange influences. Davies also introduces two other displaced persons as though to make his point: Rudolf Hess, the Nazi Deputy F?hrer, who was arrested after his solo flight to Scotland in 1941, and his interrogator Rotherham, a part-Jewish German refugee who is now a captain in British Intelligence.
The trouble is that these different strands do not connect up well. The scenes between Rotherham and Hess, for example, are fine, but they amount to only three short chapters of a long book. Karsten's story is also told separately in about one chapter in three until well beyond the half-way point, when his life intersects with Esther's in a rather touching way; but even here there is little forward movement to connect individual moments. So the success of the novel really depends on the reader's interest in Esther and her world. She is certainly an attractive and sympathetic character, but her situation is by no means unique, and she spends too much time as the observer or victim of events rather than as the prime mover in them. However, her main quality is her sense of place -- she belongs to these mountains as much as the sheep do -- and here the author writes with obvious love of his native Wales.
Summary of The Welsh Girl
Following two widely praised short-story collections, Equal Love and The Ugliest House in the World, Peter Ho Davies's first novel, The Welsh Girl, deserves to be equally well received. It carefully examines two great themes, dislocation and cowardice, through the stories of a WWII POW camp built by the British in the remote mountains of northern Wales and Esther, the 17-year-old Welsh girl at the heart of the story. The POW camp, filled with Germans, is yet another national insult, as far as the Welsh are concerned, only one of many instances of prejudice between and among the novel's characters: Welshman against Brit and vice versa, Brits and Welshmen against Germans, Germans against Jews. Some of these enmities are age-old antagonisms; others are newly-minted political killing machines.Davies introduces a Welsh concept--cynefin--for which there is no English equivalent. It means a certain knowledge and sense of place that is passed down the matrilineal line in a flock of sheep. They always know where they belong and never leave their own turf. It is a perfect metaphor for much of what takes place in this carefully plotted story, and for the displacement felt by many of the characters. Esther longs to escape her village, yet is devoted to the flock and to her father. She meets Colin, an English soldier, in the pub where she works. He is a rough sort and things end very badly between them.
Another theme visited again and again is the concept of cowardice. Is it cowardly to save one's life and the lives of others by surrendering to the enemy? Is death the price that must be paid to be considered brave? The German POWs debate this endlessly, especially Karsten, an intelligent, sensitive soldier who did surrender himself and his men when it was clear that all was lost. When he and Esther find one another under impossible circumstances, Davies renders their relationship perfectly: it is star-crossed, but desperately important to both of them, setting them both "free" in the truest sense of the word. The Welsh Girl is a beautifully told story of love, war, and the accommodations we make in the midst of both. --Valerie Ryan
Set in the stunning landscape of North Wales just after D-Day, Peter Ho Davies's profoundly moving first novel traces the intersection of disparate lives in wartime. When a POW camp is established near her village, seventeen-year-old barmaid Esther Evans finds herself strangely drawn to the camp and its forlorn captives. She is exploring the camp boundary when the astonishing occurs: Karsten, a young German corporal, calls out to her from behind the fence. From that moment on, the two foster a secret relationship that will ultimately put them both at risk. Meanwhile, another foreigner, the German-Jewish interrogator Rotherham, travels to Wales to investigate Britain's most notorious Nazi prisoner, Rudolf Hess. In this richly drawn and thought-provoking work, all will come to question where they belong and where their loyalties lie.
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