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language: Welsh
country: United Kingdom
year: 1971
form: novel
genre(s): horror, fantasy
dates read: 12.12.22-15.12.22, 13.4.24
I had a lot of fun with Islwyn Ffowc Elis’s Y Gromlech yn yr Haidd! I only gave it 3.75 stars on Storygraph, but that’s mainly because of one thing at the end — and a little about its handling of gender — and doesn’t reflect my overall enjoyment of the novel.
essentially, an English farmer, Bill Henderson, has moved to Wales with his wife, and he finally gets fed up with machines breaking on the three standing stones in the middle of one of his fields and decides to take them down. he’s warned by a local historian that this is a bad idea, and everyone in town seems to be generally opposed to the idea, but he presses on anyway. what follows is a series of accidents and incidents — his wife miscarries, his animals get foot-and-mouth disease, his farmhand is terror-stricken while working on the stones and flees the village, and finally he himself is possessed by the spirit of a prehistoric mammoth-hunter.
the pacing overall is great, and the choice to have it told through a mix of perspectives, changing (though with repetitions) every chapter, was a good one: you get a sense of the personality of the community through the different kind of archetypal figures. there’s the Methodist elder, there’s the scholarly amateur historian (and part-time pagan), there’s the scientifically-minded vet, there’s the practical contractor, there’s the farmhand and his girlfriend. the mix of perspectives lets Elis toy with the reader: is it coincidence, or are Cerrig Mawr yr Hendre really haunted? this is also my own critique of the novel in terms of what it’s trying to do, though: I think the attempt to maintain the ambiguity kind of makes the end fall flat; I wish he’d committed earlier to the possession, instead.
I also — and this is the thing at the end — wish that he’d just taken the easy nationalist route and had the angry spirit that possesses Henderson be the ancient Brythonic chieftain that I was led to believe. this would be an improvement for two reasons: thematically, it would pick up the anti-English thread that’s present early in the novel but then kind of disappears; and, more importantly, it would avoid the uncomfortably borderline-racist physical transformation that accompanies the possession, where we’re told that Henderson looks “[y]n debyg i […] anwariad cyntefig” (“like a primitive barbarian”) and, most egregiously, “yn debycach i epa bob dydd” (“more like an ape every day”) — one marker of which is that “mae fel petai’i groen yn mynd yn dywyllach bob munud” (“it’s as if his skin were getting darker every minute”).
this, Islwyn, is a very bad vibe, and you didn’t need to do it! as much as I do actually think it’s conceptually interesting to treat the standing stones as a record of older inhabitants that the Welsh have learned to accept and live among without disturbing while the English (and more generally the forces of modernization) destroy them and so bring about their own destruction, it ends up way too close to racist caricatures of Black people (especially) as “primitive” and “ape-like”. it might (might) be different if the spirit were in continuity with contemporary Welsh people, but also just…leave out the physical transformation. thanks.
the other thing that troubled(? perplexed?) me was the handling of gender, particularly in the Gareth-Marian interactions. when Gareth, Henderson’s farmhand, has his crisis, the first person he goes to talk to is Marian, his girlfriend, but she’s — essentially — disgusted by his show of emotions (how dare a man cry?) and the revelation that he might need her support from time to time, instead of always being the one supporting her. it’s clear that Elis wants us to recognize that this is bad, but the solution seems to be that Marian should learn that her real job as a woman is to unconditionally support the man she loves. it’s all just…a little weird.
moods: dark, mysterious, tense