A couple of really interesting books have come in over the last couple of days - the Welsh bildungsromans I hadn't read on Rachel Trezise's list. I've received Catrin Dafydd's Random Deaths and Custard, which looks like fun, Aneurin Gareth Thomas's Luggage from Elsewhere, and Joe Dunthorne's Submarine. They're all set in urban south Wales (or South Wales - there's a heated argument about that): on the edge of Welsh but not fully included or totally excluded. Being Welsh hovers around the edges as a possibility, a mirage, or a position which makes all the ordinary teen horrors ever so slightly different (the narrator of Submarine, for instance, hides his part-Englishness, having been bullied for being Welsh when he lived in England: difference = weakness in the playground).
I read Submarine in one go the other night, even though I was exhausted from 12 hours of marking. The beautiful dustjacket helped, as did the narrator. It's the teenage boy to whom all the events happen, so there's a lovely gap between what he thinks he knows and what we know is actually going on, between his cleverness and how clever he thinks he is. The usual stuff happens: sex, parental marital problems, bullying (he's a guilt-ridden perp, not a victim) and meditation. It's comic, sad and knowing - well worth reading.
*How am I helping? Well, 'Afforestation' is an RS Thomas poem about the commercial forests imposed on historic Welsh locations in the 1950s and 1960s by the British Forestry Commission - historic villages and working farms were wiped out, covered in sterile, alien trees which supported neither animals nor workers, in pursuit of money in a way that wouldn't have happened in England. Every Welsh book is a blow FOR FREEDOM! Etc.
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