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| The Welsh Girl | 
| Author: Peter Ho Davies
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 21322
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0618918523
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780618918522
ASIN: 0618918523
Publication Date: January 14, 2008
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Amazon.com
Following two widely praised short-story collections, Equal Love and The Ugliest House in the World, Peter Ho Davies's first novel, The Welsh Girl, deserves to be equally well received. It carefully examines two great themes, dislocation and cowardice, through the stories of a WWII POW camp built by the British in the remote mountains of northern Wales and Esther, the 17-year-old Welsh girl at the heart of the story. The POW camp, filled with Germans, is yet another national insult, as far as the Welsh are concerned, only one of many instances of prejudice between and among the novel's characters: Welshman against Brit and vice versa, Brits and Welshmen against Germans, Germans against Jews. Some of these enmities are age-old antagonisms; others are newly-minted political killing machines. Davies introduces a Welsh concept--cynefin--for which there is no English equivalent. It means a certain knowledge and sense of place that is passed down the matrilineal line in a flock of sheep. They always know where they belong and never leave their own turf. It is a perfect metaphor for much of what takes place in this carefully plotted story, and for the displacement felt by many of the characters. Esther longs to escape her village, yet is devoted to the flock and to her father. She meets Colin, an English soldier, in the pub where she works. He is a rough sort and things end very badly between them. Another theme visited again and again is the concept of cowardice. Is it cowardly to save one's life and the lives of others by surrendering to the enemy? Is death the price that must be paid to be considered brave? The German POWs debate this endlessly, especially Karsten, an intelligent, sensitive soldier who did surrender himself and his men when it was clear that all was lost. When he and Esther find one another under impossible circumstances, Davies renders their relationship perfectly: it is star-crossed, but desperately important to both of them, setting them both "free" in the truest sense of the word. The Welsh Girl is a beautifully told story of love, war, and the accommodations we make in the midst of both. --Valerie Ryan
Product Description
Set in the stunning landscape of North Wales just after D-Day, Peter Ho Davies's profoundly moving first novel traces the intersection of disparate lives in wartime. When a POW camp is established near her village, seventeen-year-old barmaid Esther Evans finds herself strangely drawn to the camp and its forlorn captives. She is exploring the camp boundary when the astonishing occurs: Karsten, a young German corporal, calls out to her from behind the fence. From that moment on, the two foster a secret relationship that will ultimately put them both at risk. Meanwhile, another foreigner, the German-Jewish interrogator Rotherham, travels to Wales to investigate Britain's most notorious Nazi prisoner, Rudolf Hess. In this richly drawn and thought-provoking work, all will come to question where they belong and where their loyalties lie.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 17 more reviews...
 Displaced Persons June 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I found myself liking this book chapter by chapter, but did not feel that it connected up to a successful whole. The time is 1944, in the months following D-Day. The setting is a village in Snowdonia, NW Wales, whose principally Welsh-speaking inhabitants live by quarrying and sheep farming. But the war has brought strangers into the community: young boys evacuated from bombed cities, British soldiers who build a POW camp for German prisoners, and the prisoners themelves. So most of the people in the book have been at least temporarily displaced, except for the Welsh themselves -- though even they bear a centuries-old resentment at having been thrust into this remote region by the conquering English, whom they still regard as strangers, if not actual enemies.
Peter Ho Davies is exceptionally good at portraying this quality of marginality in human terms. There have been many POW books and movies, for instance, but they have almost all focused on the escape attempts of Allied officers imprisoned in Germany, and colored by the reader's knowledge of ultimate victory. But I don't know anything quite like Davies' portrayal of the German corporal Karsten and his gradual understanding that surrender is not a once-only thing but a continuing process, robbing him of his roots and identity, and requiring him to justify himself to his captors, to his companions, to himself, and even to his own mother. Davies is equally sensitive in portraying the Welsh Girl of the title, seventeen-year-old Esther Evans, and her attempts to define herself as she comes to adulthood surrounded by so many strange influences. Davies also introduces two other displaced persons as though to make his point: Rudolf Hess, the Nazi Deputy Führer, who was arrested after his solo flight to Scotland in 1941, and his interrogator Rotherham, a part-Jewish German refugee who is now a captain in British Intelligence.
The trouble is that these different strands do not connect up well. The scenes between Rotherham and Hess, for example, are fine, but they amount to only three short chapters of a long book. Karsten's story is also told separately in about one chapter in three until well beyond the half-way point, when his life intersects with Esther's in a rather touching way; but even here there is little forward movement to connect individual moments. So the success of the novel really depends on the reader's interest in Esther and her world. She is certainly an attractive and sympathetic character, but her situation is by no means unique, and she spends too much time as the observer or victim of events rather than as the prime mover in them. However, her main quality is her sense of place -- she belongs to these mountains as much as the sheep do -- and here the author writes with obvious love of his native Wales.
 Haunting World War II Novel March 26, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
The Welsh Girl is a sensitive and haunting story about enemies and friends during WWII. The exotic setting allows the encounter between German prisoners of war and the "English" to have an almost legend-like quality.
Dwelling on the humanity common to all, it shows an extraordinary Welsh girl's meeting with an English speaking German prisoner. Beautiful descriptions of the countryside, believable dialogue among the German prisoners makes this book shine. But the author, known for his short stories, could have a faster pace in the middle of the book. The book is very, very good, just short of excellent.
The Welsh Girl February 21, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The Welsh Girl blends historical fact with historical fiction. A historical novel that brings in the mysterious and never-explained flight of Rudolf Hess from Nazi Germany to Scotland with the building and populating of a German prisoner-of-war camp in the rough hills of rural Wales, this is an imaginative World War II saga that does not disappoint.
The author, Peter Ho Davies conveys the spirit of the times in his understanding of the historic and cultural tensions between the local Welsh citizenry and the British laborers who construct and later, the British soldiers who garrison the prisoner-of-war camp.
But it is in the mind and thoughts of the protagonist, the seventeen year-old Welsh Girl that the reader will most often dwell. The narrative is largely told from her perspective as both insider and outsider to the events going on around her.
Two other narratives cross and juxtapose. One of these is the narrative of a young German prisoner-of-war, "captured," (but who has actually surrendered) to the British in the D-Day landings in France. Transported to Wales, haunted by his surrender, his seemingly unlikely intersection with the Welsh Girl becomes more predictable and then inevitable, as the narrative unfolds.
The third narrative is that of a German-Jewish translator/interrogator and plant/spy. He is a refugee from Nazi Germany who struggles with his identity which he sees as alternatingly German, Jewish, anti-German, anti-Jewish and ultimately, world citizen.
The author has done his homework. He writes about events in the last year of World War II in the European theatre with confidence and clarity. The author also knows Wales and the Welsh mind. He is able to make you, the reader, feel like you are in that village pub, standing at the bar or sitting at a table, listening to the chatter, nursing your glass of ale.
 Beautifully written... January 30, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This was a beautifully written book. I enjoyed the three main characters and the way the author had them eventually intersect with one another. I empathized with each of them. The secondary characters were also well-defined and interesting.
It's always a treat when you read a book you can learn something from. I never knew how the term "welcher" came about until I read this book. I look forward to more from this author.
A novel that tries really hard to be clever, but only induces sleep. January 13, 2008
13 out of 25 found this review helpful
Sometimes, when a book keeps appearing as 'recommended' to me, I give in to the urge and decide to try it on. Sometimes it fits, more often than not, it's a awkward pull, tugging and twisting to get it around the bumps and curves. So it was with Peter Ho Davies' The Welsh Girl.
Set in the waning days of World War II, nearly the entire story takes place in the Welsh village of Cilgwyn. Before the 1930's it was a mining town, men labouring and sometimes dying to hew slate for roofing tiles. But then there were strikes, then the depression, and finally the war, and now, there's only old men and women left. Even in a place as remote as this, change is coming.
The novel opens with Rotheram, a refugee from Germany, who works with the British trying to glean information and confessions from the Nazi soldiers that have fallen into British hands. He's fairly good at it, and now he has been sent to Wales to help determine if a very important prisoner is sane or not. He only has a few days to make a determination, and his encounters with the captive as just as stressful for him as it is to the man he is questioning.
On the beaches of Normandy a Wehrmacht corporal surrenders when his pillbox is attacked by a British soldier with a flamethrower. It's not much of a choice -- either give yourself up or be burnt alive. Along with his fellows, Karsten finds himself transported to England, then to the distant village of Cilgwyn.
And in Cilgwyn is Esther Evans, a local girl of seventeen serving up drinks in the local pub, trying to help her widowed father out as they struggle to keep the family sheep farm going. When a British soldier takes advantage of her, Esther starts to question her identity and as the act begins to have consequences, she finds herself in an ever decreasing trap.
How these three people intersect in their lives is the meat of this rather plotless novel. We only get to see them come together at inadvertent points, but see their innermost thoughts as they endlessly question the reality around them as Germany falls to the Allies and the war draws to a close. Mercifully for the reader, there are some very vivid descriptions of life in Wales, especially when it comes to the rearing of sheep, life in a POW camp, and some interesting bits about how much it matters if we belong to a group or not.
To say that I was bored out of my wits with this novel was an understatement. While I can appreciate Mr. Davies' use of language and metaphor -- water, sex, and language is everywhere -- this novel just meanders along, pretty much like a lone ewe on a mountainside without a shepherd or dog to keep it in line. By the end, I was just glad that it was over, and I found the use of an actual person in history to be one of the most useless plot devices I've come across in a long time.
Indeed, Mr. Davies seems to have his tongue in his cheek throughout the novel. I can almost see the smirk there, crowing See how clever I am? Ha, ha, fooled you into thinking this was going to be a real story. When I finally got the end of this one, I asked myself, that's it? That's all? and was ready to hurl the book at the wall in disgust.
Yes, I got the point of this one, and all I can say is that it's a snoozer. I tend to have this problem with books that appear on the best seller lists, or those nominated for literary awards (this was long-listed for the Booker Prize). At times they seem to be so obtuse and dense that I either fall asleep, or give up. And I suspect that quite a few people do the same -- somehow, when something comes across as 'acclaimed,' we have this fear that we'll be viewed as a knuckle-dragging Visigoth if we don't nod right along with the rest of the flock and say, Yeah, it's a great book! I didn't like this one, while I could really appreciate the setting, and some of the politics and language, it's a novel that tries to be too clever for its own good.
Me, give me a whacking good adventure or love story or something where there's a plot. Sure, it may mark me as a light reader, but at least I'll be amused. Which is what I wasn't with this dull, rather bleak, character study.
For those who really like to torture themselves, there's a list of questions in the back for reader's groups. Only for the severely masochistic reader.
Two and half stars at best.
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