The Welsh Girl
Peter Ho Davies Sceptre, 352pp, £12.99
ISBN 0340938250
In the dying days of the Second World War, an asylum in a sleepy South Walian market town held a secret celebrity inmate: Rudolf Hess. After his surrender, Hitler's former deputy (like much of the contents of the National Gallery) had been bundled away into hiding in the Welsh hills. Though he was interrogated and psychoanalysed, in an attempt to verify his purported schizophrenia, his incarceration was largely to keep him safe and well, so that he might eventually stand trial for war crimes.
Hess is one of the supporting cast in Peter Ho Davies's long-awaited, lyrical new novel, The Welsh Girl. We first encounter him in a private, smoke-filled room at the hospital, surrounded by British intelligence officers, being forced to watch footage of himself ranting at a Nazi rally. Among the group is Rotherham, a bitter Anglicised German Jew, who scours Hess's impassive face, in the light refracted from the film screen, for a trace of guilt. It's an appropriate entrée into a novel whose focus is unstintingly microscopic, whose prevailing preoccupation is the way in which obligations to family, community and country shape one's sense of identity, honour, destiny and personal purpose.
Rotherham is the most shadowy of the novel's three protagonists. Sent to investigate a prisoner of war camp in Snowdonia, he comes into contact with another of the trio: Karsten Simmering, a physically imposing but sensitive young German soldier. Tormented by the shame of having surrendered to British troops, Simmering finds respite in memories of his innocent Bavarian childhood; in the construction of toy aeroplanes and ships in bottles for the local youths who come to the camp gates every night to jeer; and in the arms of the novel's eponymous heroine.
Ho Davies charts his characters' feelings with a mesmeric precision that demands slow reading, but creates a sometimes startling level of intimacy between reader and character. Though we are seldom ever in a major key (this is Wales, after all - and I speak as a Welshman), the novel has a deceptive depth and power.
The Welsh girl of the title is 17-year-old Esther Evans, a modest young woman who lives on a sheep farm with her jingoistic father and a truculent, troubled young evacuee. In the evenings, Esther works in the village pub, a job that brings her into contact with people from across the border for the first time - colourful characters that fan the flames of her small-town frustrations and her dreams of leaving. But the new vistas opening up in her mind are obscured by her innate sense of duty to her family, her culture and her past: emotional borders she dare not cross. It's a fate shared by all three protagonists - when their destinies eventually collide, the encounters spark more questions than answers, more confusions than understandings.
Ho Davies's evocations of disenchantment and disappointment underscore his novel's most touching and luminous moments: Esther's first experience of lovemaking, under the tarpaulin of an empty swimming pool at night - a scene that moves into tragedy in a mid-coital gasp; a journey to Liverpool - where her initial excitement at seeing a brave new world slowly melts into a numbing homesickness in a sunlit afternoon pub; or Simmering's escape to Ireland that ends with a fresh surrender - he is washed ashore at the same place he began, realising he was probably safer back in the POW camp after all.
On the subject of sheltered Welsh childhoods, I was brought up near the asylum where Rudolf Hess was interred - something that never really interested me at the time. To my everlasting shame, the reason was that I used to think he was a ballet dancer.
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