Cover: Becka Moor
‘I took them, as many books as I could carry in the back seat of my car. I drove home with the smell of paper distracting me from my anxiety, the weight of the words like a family in my back seat.’ (p 45)
Welsh wonder shared
It isn’t even the end of January and along comes the first title for my list of potential ‘Best Books of 2022’.
The Blue Book of Nebo was originally published in the Welsh language as Llyfr Glas Nebo in 2018 and won a whole clutch of awards in Wales. It has now been translated into English by the author herself and published this month by Firefly Press. Even as a non-speaker of Welsh, I fully understand and support the need for literature in the national language. However, this book most certainly deserves the widest possible readership and this translation is most welcome. It is a short novel, probably best suited to readers from early teens upwards. But be warned; short as it is, it is emotionally and intellectually devastating; its impact is huge and its hold much longer than its page count.
Manon Steffan Ros, is clearly every bit as fine writer in English as she reputedly is in Welsh. The language craft of this translation is superb. Her apparently simple, straightforward prose is richly evocative in its conjuring of people, places and situation and is woven through with verbal imagery that is tellingly fresh. It shocks like stepping under a cold shower.
Nothing familiar
These days, the prospect of yet another post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel can be as depressing as it’s likely content; so very got-the-T-shirt. However, decidedly not in this case. This tale’s background scenario may be worryingly familiar, but not so a single sentence of its telling. Cities may be contaminated, most of humanity annihilated, but this story is as alive and invigorating as the Welsh stream from which its protagonists draw their water. This is not to deny that Manon Steffan Ros’ narrative has many deeply disturbing implications. But through all the gritty, isolated existence of a young boy and his mother shines a profound humanity, expressed in a myriad acutely observed moments, complexities of character, ambivalence of relationship and exquisitely caught emotions.
Simply rich
The core premise of the novel is simple. Dylan and Rowena live an isolated and increasingly self-sufficient existence, as far as they are aware the only survivors of ‘The End’. They each record their thoughts and experiences in a found blue exercise book, jointly creating the work we read. However the result is as far from simple as the way rain falls from the sky.
A good many times whilst reading this piece, I found myself almost breathless with wonder at its perceptiveness, the ability of its author to communicate such affecting profundity through such simple choices of character action and response. For example, Dylan’s thrill at the first germination of his vegetable seeds, and his subsequent crying when faced with eating the resultant potatoes are hard indeed to forget.
‘They were happy tears, I was seven and I had created food, and somewhere, in my little boy mind, I knew who I was and who I was meant to be.’ (p 54)
The picture the author paints of the time before The End is so poignantly familiar and mundane as to be almost heartbreaking. Her depiction of the climactic moments of the apocalypse itself is truly chilling, conveyed with her usual literary brilliance through two unforgettable images of invading slugs and of departing birds. She then leaves us with a picture of life after The End which may be hard, is sometimes heartbreaking, but is more honest, more richly experienced and, ultimately, deeply loving.
Living and learning
What she displays in this book is a response to life that can only be compared to the finest writers of the past; a sensitivity to the human and natural world, to what it is, to what it has been and to what it could become.
She asks us who (or what) are or aren’t monsters. She accuses us of much, but without bitterness. She has much to teach us, but without pretension. She leaves us humbly mumbling, in her mother tongue or ours, (and with apologies to Welsh poet Aled Lewis Evans), ‘Maddau i ni ein difrwader.’ / ‘Forgive us our apathy.’
But guilt is not what I have most been left with by this book. Over and above, I take away two things: first, that Dylan and Rowena found far more than they lost; second, a thought that Dylan borrowed from another Welsh poet, T. H. Parry-Williams, that doesn’t even specifically relate to The End as such, but nevertheless speaks volumes, ‘Pieces of me are scattered across the land.’ For Dylan, and for me, it is comfort enough.
Here is a story simultaneously very Welsh and completely universal; by one person, of one people, for all people.
Covering it all
At first glance Becka Moor’s arresting, prominently blue cover is refreshingly different. However, reading the story reveals just how pertinent and potent an image it is: simple, stark, unsettling, yet strangely beautiful.The tiny figure in startlingly complementary orange, with its equally diminutive ladder, is, like the text within, unspeakably moving.
