The Welsh Girl

The Welsh Girl - Peter Ho Davies
4 stars

World War 2 brings changes to a small Welsh village. Some of the young men leave to fight and do not return. Undisciplined, evacuated London children are billeted to area sheep farms. And towards the end of the war, the hated British invade to build a ‘secret’ base. Following the D-day invasion the secret is out. It’s to be a prisoner of war camp. There is a second invasion of German prisoners. The day to day troubles of the Welsh girl, Esther; Karsten, the German POW; and Jim, the London evacuee are weighed against the fate of another more infamous prisoner, in a different part of Wales, Rudolf Hess.

All of the characters in this story are struggling to come to terms with issues of honor, show more loyalty, guilt, and national identity. The pack behavior of village schoolboys who taunt the prisoners from outside the fence is contrasted with more lethal pack behavior inside the fence. Esther’s desire for a wider world than her small village forces her to some difficult decisions and a contemplation of honor from a woman’s perspective. Karstan is forced to reexamine everything he thought he was fighting for.

This story was slow, wandering, and inconclusive in many ways. I liked it because it did not provide easy answers or a tidy ending. It made me think.

Some quotes:

“The Jews, he knew, had no homeland, yearned for one, and yet as he understood it to be the source of their victimization, it seemed at once to be such pure freedom to be without a country”.

”This is what men will never understand , she realizes, …...Their dishonor, men’s dishonor, can always be redeemed, defeat followed by victory, capture by escape, escape by capture. …
But women are dishonored once and for all. Their only hope is to hide it. To keep it to themselves”.

“Sometimes it feels like they’re all linked somehow, the losses, like a chain, one death coupled to the next, and the next, whichever side they’re on.” show less

It took me over a month to read “The Welsh Girl” – and I’m not sure why. I know I am in the minority in my lukewarm reception of this book (please see “Long-listed for Man Booker Prize”). It’s certainly not as if the characters were not well drawn, the time and place carefully crafted, the story less than compelling…and yet…and yet.

I suppose the best way to describe my hesitation with this book is that I always felt as arms length. Even when inside the thoughts and hearts of Esther, Karsten and Rotherham…I felt as if the essence of what they were thinking and feeling were closed off. I didn’t FEEL their feelings, didn’t SEE what they were seeing…

That being said, it is undeniable that this novel, set during show more World War II in North Wales, is beautifully crafted. The descriptions of time and place were excellent; the characters seem ones transported in time for the reader to meet.

There were parts that I couldn’t help but read twice – parts that broke through the fourth wall for me.

“…his progress reminds Esther of how the dogs part a flock. Sheepish, she thinks. The villagers feel sheepish. The word appears before her in her own flowing copperplate. She’s been having these spells lately when words, English words, seem newly coined, as if they’re speaking to her alone, as if she’s seeing the meanings behind them. She’s conscious of her lips, her tongue, forming them.”

And there are moments when I can see the village so clearly that I feel I am truly there. “Within the fence, the faces of the Germans and MPs turn up to the slope to where the villagers stand. Hands are angled to shield eyes against the sun; arms are lifted, pointing. Esther finds herself blushing, embarrassed to be caught staring, but even as she turns away, Mott, at her feet, lifts his head and offers a long howl of replay to the snapping dogs below.”

I’ve gone over and over that paragraph and I can’t put my finger on it…but something about those words take me there – I can feel the sun on my face, making me squint…I can see the prisoners pointing up, I can hear the dog and I can smell grass and animals nearby.

And there are some small moments when the thin wall cracks and I can feel the emotions of the characters.

“He was serious, Karsten saw, the answer deeply important to him. For just a moment, he wanted to cry yes! and have done with it. For just a moment, he could feel the cool relief of admitting it, even to this child. He was almost certain the boy would rather have his friend alive and a coward than brave and dead. All he had to do was say it. Yet something inside him recoiled. Some pride, some recollection of those dreadful steps down the passage out of the bunker.”

There I am able to feel those tightly wound emotions straining to explode – I can feel the pulse of the story. And once more with Esther:

“Esther looks at her through her tears and nods slowly. She does have hope, she realizes. All this time she’s thought Rhys dead, and now she hopes, prays, that he is.”

Maybe because these characters, in the short period of time when their lives intersect, live in circumstances where they cannot give reign to their emotions, cannot let their guard down for even a moment – maybe that is the distance I feel from their story.

This tale of bravery and defeat, of cowardice and unacknowledged heroism, is one I wanted to appreciate more. But maybe, this is one of those books where when read again, at a different point in my life, will have a greater impact. show less

For Esther Evans, seventeen, June 1944 in Cilgwyn, her village in North Wales, brings sights and sounds of the wider world she dreams of: BBC broadcasts, radio performers from London, English soldiers building an encampment. Living with her sheep-farmer father, who’s a Welsh nationalist, and an ill-tempered young evacuee, Esther has little to excite her except her job at the pub, where she rubs elbows with “foreigners,” including the English corporal with whom she’s stepping out. Don’t tell Dad.

Meanwhile, Karsten Simmering is taken prisoner defending a Normandy beachhead on D-Day. He doesn’t know what to think of himself for surrendering; his fellow prisoners, neck-deep in admiration for the Führer and certain of final show more victory, shame him for it, conveniently forgetting that they too put their hands up.

You know that Esther and Karsten are destined to cross paths, so you can guess that the encampment being built is for prisoners of war. Their relationship is an intriguing premise, and Davies shapes it well, conveying alliances and resentments with subtlety and aplomb, whether in Cilgwyn or the prison camp. He also colors his narrative with wistfulness, desire for escape, and search for a comfortable, fitting definition for the word “nation,” which several of his characters seem to lack.

I do question how Karsten speaks such fluent English. I also dislike the unmentionable trope that changes Esther’s path, both for itself and its predictability and borrowed from a humorless Victorian novelist (the offending work even rates a mention). But at least Davies makes it his own, and his prose renders the village and POW camp in unforgettable detail.

Unfortunately, he buries the Esther-Karsten narrative under a subplot connected to it only vaguely through the nation-belonging theme, an infelicitous addition at best. The novel begins with Joseph Rotheram, a British intelligence officer of German birth, assigned to observe and question the infamous Rudolf Hess. Hess, Hitler’s righthand man until 1940, when he flew an airplane to England, has spent four years under heavy guard. The Allies contemplate war-crimes trials, at which Hess would be a star defendant. Yet he claims amnesia, and no questioner can penetrate that mask.

Rotheram hates his assignment, especially for the reason he’s there: he’s considered Jewish, an identity he hotly (and accurately) denies, since his mother is Christian. But his superiors insist on saying he is, and they suppose that Hess will detect his “race” and react, whereupon they’ll have their prisoner in a bind. What an anti-Semitic trope, heightened when Rotheram’s officer comrades speak as if he has no country, only a tribe.

Davies knows how to set a scene, and he’s imagined a couple notable confrontations between Rotheram and Hess, especially during a screening of Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous propaganda film. It’s like Hamlet’s play within a play, hoping to catch the conscience of the king.

But to wade into anti-Semitic tropes requires insight, and Davies’s narrative suggests he knows little or nothing about Jews or Judaism. Rotheram’s Jewish only to the extent that others think he is and scorn him for it; he has no thoughts about that identity or his family’s past, other than rejecting it. You might as well say the Welsh characters are Welsh only because the English make bigoted jokes about them.

Toward the novel’s end, Rotheram starts thinking like his anti-Semitic superiors: “The Jews, he knew, had no homeland, yearned for one, and yet as much as he understood it to be a source of their victimization, it seemed at once such pure freedom to be without a country.” I suspect Davies has no idea his character appears to find liberation in thousands of years of expulsion, enforced statelessness, expropriation, and murder, justified by the slander that Jews owe allegiance to no country.

A critic quoted on the jacket flap praises Davies’s “all-encompassing empathy.” Not quite.

To my fellow historical novelists, please: If you must write about the Holocaust, make sure you treat your Jewish characters as full people. Please don’t deploy them like paperweights to keep themes or plot points from blowing away. Tropes and stereotypes hurt. show less

Historical fiction set in northern Wales near the end of WWII involving three primary characters. Esther is a seventeen-year-old whose mother died when she was young. She helps her father run her family’s sheep farm and also works in a local pub. Karsten is a German soldier who speaks English. He is being held in a nearby POW camp and is haunted by his decision to surrender. Rotheram is a half-Jewish German who has fled to England and works as an interrogator of German prisoners, specifically assigned to interview Rudolf Hess. At first, his story seems unrelated, but as the book progresses, we begin to see the impact of his story on the other two.

This is a subtle, slowly developing, character-driven book. The characters are ordinary show more people brought together during extraordinary times. Each character is faced with moral quandaries and the author keeps the reader’s interest in wondering how these issues will be resolved. The three main characters are very different, yet they are similar in that each is an outcast and each character struggles with doubt, guilt, and fear. They evolve over time, learning through their experiences.

Though this story eventually involves a relationship, it does not sink into sentimentality, and it is not the primary focus of the book. Instead, it is oriented around symbols, such as the Welsh concept of cynefin, a Welsh term connoting the intimate connection between the sheep and the land they occupy. It is not difficult to extrapolate this idea to the people in the story. Themes include nationalism, identity, belonging, freedom, secrecy, honor, courage, and loyalty.

I have always been interested in reading about different parts of the world during the second World War to get a feel for what life was like and how people coped. It is like putting together an enormous jigsaw puzzle, filling in portions at a time to eventually reveal the bigger picture. This book fills in the pieces related to life in the rural Welsh countryside, which is an integral part of the story. I learned a great deal about the history and culture of Wales. I found it extremely well-written, meaningful, and thought-provoking. show less

"Maybe it's a kind of freedom too. To stay home."

Set in a Welsh village during World War II, this novel is centred around a trio of very differing characters. A half-Jewish British military interrogator, who left Germany as a child, a young village girl, raped and impregnated by an English soldier stationed near her village in her first sexual encounter and lastly a German soldier taken prisoner by the Allies during the D-Day landings in Normandy. Each character start off in far-removed worlds but their worlds come together like leaves drifting in the wind, seemingly randomly, the victims of the vagaries of chance.

Rotheram, the interrogator, is ordered to Wales to try and debrief Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who had mysteriously show more flown to Britain at the start of the war in an attempt to discern whether the latter is sane enough to stand trial should the Allies’ prove victorious. Hess is generally uncooperative and instead tries to needle Rotheram over his ancestry. Only very briefly does Rotheram cross paths with Esther Evans.

Esther Evans is shepherd’s daughter, working as barmaid in the local pub where she acts as a peacemaker between the pub’s Welsh-speaking regulars and the detested English soldiers stationed nearby. Esther craves escape to something or somewhere larger but feels confined by her tight knit community ties. For a while she envisages an English soldier who courts her as her means of escape but when he rapes and leaves her pregnant, her confinement has doubled.

It is Karsten, the German prisoner who ultimately gives Esther some sense of freedom. We meet Karsten initially manning a Normandy coastal defence bunker. Initially he and his three comrades put up a manful defence against the Allies landing on their stretch of beach but when one of their guns jams and one of their number is killed the Allies are able to bring up flame-throwers leaving them with little choice but to surrender or die. Karsten, the only English-speaker, is the one sent out to lay down their arms. In doing so Karsten finds himself hated by his captors and treated with bitter suspicion by his fellow captives, partly because he can speak English but also because to them he symbolizes defeat. Finding himself sent to a POW camp set in Wales Karsten briefly escapes from the camp finding some succour on Esther's father's farm but when he realises that freedom wasn't what he had imagined he lets himself be recaptured, only in turn to be severely beaten by his fellow in-mates.

Karsten's escape attempt was not an act of military defiance but rather based on the need for freedom. Thus he and his fellow prisoners are used to represent the dehumanization of war. The villagers all gather to look through the fences at the captives as much as the prisoners look out of them at the hills. Karsten comes to see beyond the confines of his cage and in doing so allows the reader to look beyond the boundaries of our own fences. In giving himself up, Karsten realizes that freedom can come with surrender as well as escape.

Thankfully the author didn't try and have some neat romantic ending as that would have IMHO completely ruined this book. This isn't a conventional war story with winners and losers, instead its message is anti-war, so don't let the time frame put you off. Rather this is a book about identity, belonging and alienation set in war-time. This apparently is the author's first novel making it an all the more remarkable and very enjoyable read. show less

Historical fiction set in northern Wales near the end of WWII involving three primary characters. Esther is a seventeen-year-old whose mother died when she was young. She helps her father run her family’s sheep farm and also works in a local pub. Karsten is a German soldier who speaks English. He is being held in a nearby POW camp and is haunted by his decision to surrender. Rotheram is a half-Jewish German who has fled to England and works as an interrogator of German prisoners, specifically assigned to interview Rudolf Hess. At first, his story seems unrelated, but as the book progresses, we begin to see the impact of his story on the other two.

This is a subtle, slowly developing, character-driven book. The characters are ordinary show more people brought together during extraordinary times. Each character is faced with moral quandaries and the author keeps the reader’s interest in wondering how these issues will be resolved. The three main characters are very different, yet they are similar in that each is an outcast and each character struggles with doubt, guilt, and fear. They evolve over time, learning through their experiences.

Though this story eventually involves a relationship, it does not sink into sentimentality, and it is not the primary focus of the book. Instead, it is oriented around symbols, such as the Welsh concept of cynefin, a Welsh term connoting the intimate connection between the sheep and the land they occupy. It is not difficult to extrapolate this idea to the people in the story. Themes include nationalism, identity, belonging, freedom, secrecy, honor, courage, and loyalty.

I have always been interested in reading about different parts of the world during the second World War to get a feel for what life was like and how people coped. It is like putting together an enormous jigsaw puzzle, filling in portions at a time to eventually reveal the bigger picture. This book fills in the pieces related to life in the rural Welsh countryside, which is an integral part of the story. I learned a great deal about the history and culture of Wales. I found it extremely well-written, meaningful, and thought-provoking. show less

This was a lovely story set in the Welsh countryside during the end stages of WWII. The story centers around two main characters, 17 year old Esther and German soldier Karsten, and gradually and beautifully shows how their lives intersect.

The story alternates between Esther's and Karsten's points of view. Each little section gives us more and more insight into the characters and their lives and their hopes and dreams. Esther is a miner/sheep farmer's daughter, so her life isn't exactly luxurious. She works hard, and bears a great deal of responsibility after the death of her mother. Karsten, who is my favorite character, is a fatherless German who, being raised by his mother in their inn, is very naive and innocent when it comes to show more men. He doesn't understand the way that men think or act, although he is among them and one of them. I loved the inverted perspective that we get from Karsten, and his sense of honor and virtue and truth, even when it causes him pain at the derision of his peers.

There was a running theme in this book of courage and cowardice, and what those things actually mean to us. How they make us who we are. Also, a theme of home, nationality and indentity, and that who we think we are isn't necessarily who we REALLY are.

I very much enjoyed this book, even though the war itself and the Nazi atrocities were far in the background, which isn't the usual WWII book I go for. I loved that this was a story about people, and felt personal and intimate and real. There were some unrealistic things, to me, but those come down to the behavior of people, and nothing in that is ever unrealistic, as people are unpredictable and strange, sometimes.

I enjoyed the ending as well, and the openness that it left us with, so that we can end it in the way that the reader finds appropriate, whatever will give the reader closure. :) show less