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cornmaven 's review for:
How Green Was My Valley
by Richard Llewellyn
Incredibly well crafted novel about a Welsh mining town and the changes it undergoes as progress, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism take hold. I became interested in reading this after hearing all about it from a dear friend, and then seeing the episode of The Crown which features the 1966 Aberfan disaster, the portrayal of the abject poverty, and QE2's horrible response to it.
Huw Morgan's family have always been in mining, and the story is his coming of age, told by Huw himself, in the late 19th/early 20th century. There is a distinct reverence for tradition and family. The women are incredibly strong and outspoken. But also lurking in the story are the issues of worker and environmental exploitation, as the mine owners physically destroy the countryside and the lives of the families by squeezing them economically. Llewellyn includes two very important events in the history of the area: the fight for decent wages that ended in a sliding scale payment structure that could be manipulated to the detriment of the workers (1898), and the massive strike that brought violence when Winston Churchill sent the military to quell it (1910). More than one of Huw's older brothers are union organizers, and Huw feels caught between their desire for action and progress, and the "go slowly" approach of his father and his mentor, Rev Mr Gruffydd.
The young Morgan is one of 10, brilliant, and the one destined for academia, so he is sent to a more "proper" school, and then must contend with the British treatment of the Welsh, featuring the prohibition of speaking Welsh while in school, much like the US did to native children. He must learn to fight physically and save himself as the outsider. The contrast between that world, and his world at home could never be more stark.
I loved the use of traditional Welsh names, the spare but interesting use of Welsh terms in the story; it was not too overwhelming. Llewellyn's depiction of the area and his writing are so poetic, that you can just savor the words. There is heart in the sentences, and his wistful rememberances. If I hadn't had a library copy, I might have underlined a few key ones. It rightly won the National Book Award for 1940.
We all have a longing for an idyllic world that either existed or didn't in our childhoods. Llewellyn's story reminds us that no matter how green our valleys were, there was struggle, loss, and suffering, too, and those things must always remain part of the narrative.
Huw Morgan's family have always been in mining, and the story is his coming of age, told by Huw himself, in the late 19th/early 20th century. There is a distinct reverence for tradition and family. The women are incredibly strong and outspoken. But also lurking in the story are the issues of worker and environmental exploitation, as the mine owners physically destroy the countryside and the lives of the families by squeezing them economically. Llewellyn includes two very important events in the history of the area: the fight for decent wages that ended in a sliding scale payment structure that could be manipulated to the detriment of the workers (1898), and the massive strike that brought violence when Winston Churchill sent the military to quell it (1910). More than one of Huw's older brothers are union organizers, and Huw feels caught between their desire for action and progress, and the "go slowly" approach of his father and his mentor, Rev Mr Gruffydd.
The young Morgan is one of 10, brilliant, and the one destined for academia, so he is sent to a more "proper" school, and then must contend with the British treatment of the Welsh, featuring the prohibition of speaking Welsh while in school, much like the US did to native children. He must learn to fight physically and save himself as the outsider. The contrast between that world, and his world at home could never be more stark.
I loved the use of traditional Welsh names, the spare but interesting use of Welsh terms in the story; it was not too overwhelming. Llewellyn's depiction of the area and his writing are so poetic, that you can just savor the words. There is heart in the sentences, and his wistful rememberances. If I hadn't had a library copy, I might have underlined a few key ones. It rightly won the National Book Award for 1940.
We all have a longing for an idyllic world that either existed or didn't in our childhoods. Llewellyn's story reminds us that no matter how green our valleys were, there was struggle, loss, and suffering, too, and those things must always remain part of the narrative.