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language: Welsh
country: UK
year: 2018
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 15.2.21-17.2.21, 29.3.24-2.4.24
Manon Steffan Ros’s Llyfr Glas Nebo is a postapocalyptic novel set some ten years after a nuclear war and set of other apocalyptic disasters, in (or actually just outside) the town of Nebo in Gwynedd, in northwest Wales. it is narrated by a mother and son — Rowenna and Siôn — who are taking turns writing in a blue notebook, which Siôn calls “Llyfr Glas Nebo” (the Blue Book of Nebo) on the model of the Black Book of Carmarthen, the Red Book of Hergest, etc.
Rowenna’s narration reflects on the differences between their life now and the world before “Y Terfyn” (The End); Siôn’s does, too, in a way, but he was only about six when it happened, so he is comparing his life now first and foremost to the books he reads: when the first bomb fell, Rowenna brought all the Welsh-language books from the public library back to the house, and Siôn has grown up immersed in the classics of Welsh literature. with them, also, is Siôn’s two-year-old sister Dwynwen, born under mysterious circumstances.
the novel reads as, first and foremost, a dark meditation on what would be necessary for the Welsh language to flourish again. its answer is, essentially: the end of the world. only in this isolated life can Siôn grow up unquestioningly speaking and reading Welsh, without the cultural and historical baggage surrounding the language and the social and economic pressures to give up and speak English instead, in a world where Ceiriog, T.H. Parry-Williams, and Kate Roberts are automatic, easy literary references. this is reflected in both its style and content, as Rowenna (writing in a more formal, though not strictly literary, register) reflects on her formerly ambivalent relationship to Welsh and the shame she once felt about her language use, while Siôn muses on the differences between his spoken and (very informal) written style and the literary language of the books he’s grown up with.
this is both the most interesting aspect of the novel and, I think, its greatest weakness: I’ve seen it described as a “cosy apocalypse”, but this raises the question — cosy for whom? for two able-bodied people with an isolated house, helpful neighbors (in the early days, anyway), and land to immediately been growing food on. certainly not cosy for someone who needs medication, regular medical treatment, or other assistance or accessibility measures. Rowenna, in a moment of deeply unsettling honesty, finally admits partway through the book that she’s grateful for the end of the world: “Fûm i erioed mor fodlon fy myd,” she says, and when, at long last, the lights on Anglesey turn back on across the Menai, her reaction is somewhere between panic and grief.
Siôn is the novel’s saving grace here: would it be so bad, he asks, if the world began to move again? it’s because of Siôn’s perspective that I’m not willing to give up on the novel altogether, because it opens the door to questioning Rowenna’s perspective. perhaps she isn’t simply the strong survivor she first seemed; perhaps what looked like survival is in fact something desperate and, ultimately, cruel. perhaps what looked like a future is the foreclosure of one. I am thinking both about Le Guin’s question — “from what is one escaping, and to what?”— and about Negarestani’s observation that survival is the antithesis of life, what you do when life is trying to choke you to death.
an extremely unsettling book.
moods: dark, reflective