About the Author-
Peter Ho Davies was born in 1996 in Coventry to Welsh and Malay-Chinese parents. He studied physics at Cambridge and English at Manchester. In 1992 moved to the USA where he now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. He previously published two short story collections in 1998 and 2000. The Welsh Girl is his first novel.
Review
Set in North Wales in the Second World War the novel mixes fact and fiction. It opens in 1944 as Captain Rotherham (a German Jewish refugee) is sent to a safe house in Snowdonia to interrogate Rudolf Hess. The majority of the book then intertwines the lives of Esther a Welsh farm girl, Karsten a German POW and Jim an evacuee from Liverpool. The book then returns to the opening participants with Hess and Rotherham meeting for the last time. Hess is returned to Germany .Rotherham subsequently returns to North Wales where touring the work camps he meets Esther, where he is reminded of their mutual connection to Karsten before the story ends leaving him still an outsider.
The general consensus of the writer’s style was that although the scenes could be visualised, there was much anticipation in the story line which did not develop, however a couple of members felt that this was the intrigue in the novel. The writer wrote in a style which did not grasp the readers’ attention, and one member described each chapter as being a story in its own right. Indeed some considered that as this was Ho-Davies’s first novel that much of his technique was still rooted in that of a short story. The inclusion of Rudolph Hess as character was puzzling, but as one of the members commented no one was quite sure of his relevance except to allow the introduction of Rotherham- a German Jewish refugee working for British Intelligence. Some members felt the pub scenes were long-winded and found the characters un-engaging emotionally – two dimensional.
One of the group members, who enjoyed the book, commented that for them there were a lot of reminiscences, not least regarding the naivety of youth and felt it echoed the period accurately.
The author goes to some length to explain ‘cynefin’ a flock’s sense of place or territory, passed down from mother to daughter. It was considered by some members that the author had attempted to draw parallels by linking the ‘cynefin’ to the concepts of identity as told through stories of the main characters featured in the book - German, English, Welsh, Jewish. The issue of identity may have reflected an autobiographical account of the author, indeed a review in the Guardian suggests that Ho-Davies is a doppelganger for Rotherham a German Jewish refugee, - perceived as an Englishman in a Welsh pub. Ho Davies agrees; - “the way he is caught between these various cultures and the struggle he has with people assigning him his identity- these things feel very personal to me.”
Next Book: Dissolution by C J Sansom
