FictionIt is well travelled territory; the story of the hapless maiden soon to become a maid no more. Admittedly Esther Evans, one of the several unusually passive central characters in Peter Ho Davies's gentle and extensively researched first novel, with its ambiance of an earlier time, is a capable 17-year-old, native Welsh-speaking girl who also speaks English, works in the local pub and keeps house for her widower father.
Yet again, here is a British writer drawing on the legacy of the second World War. The girl's story is sympathetic, if predictable. The strength of her tale is in the telling, particularly the atmospheric evocation of a small Welsh community in which the war becomes part of daily life in the shape of German prisoners of war held in a nearby camp.
The story begins with the screening of a film, footage featuring Hitler being driven through the streets of Nuremberg in an open car. Seated in the audience is a man whose younger self is present on the screen. His name is Rudolf Hess. "The film had been Rotheram's idea. He'd seen it first in 1936 in Berlin, taking a tram across town to a cinema in a district where he didn't think anyone would know him, not telling his mother where he was going."
On paper, Rotheram is a German Jew working for British intelligence.
It is bit more complicated than that, though: "his mother was the daughter of German Lutherans who'd settled in Canada and made a fortune in timber. They'd sent her back to the motherland to study in Göttingen, where she'd met his father in 1912."
The amount of background detail helps explain Rotheram's beleagured outsider status. "In the eyes of Jews - the eyes of his father's family, say, who had spurned his marriage and supported his son and widow only from a distance - Rotheram wasn't one of them. Yet in the eyes of the Nazis he was. A mischling, at least: a half-Jew." By now readers of the Granta Best of Young British Novelists (2003) will have recognised these quotes from Leading Men, the extract from a then work-in-progress by Peter Ho Davies, one of the class of 2003. It is interesting to note that at that time the novel was due to be entitled The Bad Shepherd, and that it was due to be published in 2004. Well, he missed that deadline, but it is fascinating to observe both the rewriting and editing processes at work by comparing that Granta extract with the sequence as it is now published with its array of changes and additions.
Admittedly, much of the Hess material is too well-known to assert itself anew here and he does become caught between explaining the history and shaping a convincing, cohesive fiction. Davies, who has also published two collections of short stories, The Ugliest House in the World (1997) and Equal Love (2000), is more convincing when dealing with Esther and her father as well as in the passages in which he explores the tensions between the local Welsh and the visiting British soldiers, and later the townspeople and the German prisoners. He is a writer capable of creating cohesive scenes in which characters interact.
The dialogue is often good, and for a writer who tends to fill in most of the spaces, he also knows when to step back. Written in the present tense, the narrative has a gentle urgency, it insists to be told. The scenes in which the young local boys taunt the German prisoners are well handled. Yet his prose at times appears to have a mind of its own and shifts between a relaxed, near conversational tone and a formal eloquence.
What makes the novel individual is its sense of parallel worlds. On the wider stage, a world war is going on and local men - such as the unfortunate Rhys, who loves Esther - are involved in it. But old conflicts persist, such as the one between the Welsh and the English. The pub showcases that rivalry.
"The nationalist view of the war is that it's an English war, imperialist, capitalist, like the Great War that Jack [the pub owner] fought in and from which he still carries a limp (not that you'd know it to see him behind the bar; he's never spilled a drop)." For Esther, pulling pints for the locals and the soldiers, it is exciting.
Davies evokes the world as seen through the eyes of a young girl. She can understand the remarks the English soldiers make about the locals, the Welsh in general and also whatever females they see. "She has her own dreams of escape, modest ones mostly - of a spell in service in Liverpool like her mother before her, eating cream horns at the Lyons Corner House on her days off - and occasionally more thrilling ones, fuelled by the pictures she sees at the Gaumont in Penygroes."
She is a sympathetic character, and aside from her romances, Davies gives her real life in her dealings with her father and their farm animals. Yet the heart of the book belongs to a young German soldier, Karsten. To his enduring shame, he and his comrades are not captured - they surrender. He worries about his mother, who runs a small guest house in Germany. "Karsten has write more letters than anyone - has begged the stationery ration of men who don't want to write - and yet day after day he turns away from mail call empty-handed. He keeps it up, though, writing almost daily now, as if it's his duty."
As the narrative progresses, it is as if Rotheram, the German Jew, is forgotten by Davies, who appears to engage more with Esther and Karsten. The Hess sequences are the most openly researched and, probably because of this, the most stilted. When Rotheram reappears, it is as if Davies has suddenly remembered him. The Welsh Girlsits somewhat uneasily amid its mood and tone shifts. The closing scenes receive an overly neat cinematic, "credits rolling", wrap-up treatment. Still, this is an attractive, at times dramatic, traditional exercise in storytelling, sustained by crowd scenes and effective minor characters. In this era of trend, polemic and stylistic brashness, what's wrong with a simple, old-fashioned novel? Absolutely nothing.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Welsh Girl By Peter Ho Davies Sceptre, 344pp. £12.99
