Kith and Kin [Hardcover]

 

 

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Good novels based in Wales are few and far between. So when I stumbled across this book I very much wanted to like it: It's set around Swansea, near where I grew up, at the time I grew up. But, try as I might, I could find very little to admire or enjoy.

It's difficult to criticise rationally, because it is disorganised, inchoate. Take a paragraph at random:

"A threat to my space. Darkening of clouds over the low sun as my world faltered. There would be two of me. She'd edge me aside. She was hungry: she'd consume what was mine and mine alone. His ireful enthusiasm had already faltered..." And so on. (p58)

Still with me? It's not easy, but let me attempt a rational critique.

There's very little sense here of either time or place. The narrative darts about between decades, so you rarely know where you are. The chronology is all over the shop. A specific example: the most recent events must be set in 2003, during "our current atrocious attack on Iraq". The chief character, Mara, is stated to be forty-seven then. But she must have been at least eighteen when she and Fran went to the US in search of Janis Joplin, who died in 1970. So that would make her at least fifty-one in 2003. Similarly, Uncle Pierce is described as "a pacifist in two World Wars" which makes him at least a hundred and three - and as a metal worker he would have exempt from conscription in any case. Does the author care? Apparently not. Should we? No. If she can't get this sort of thing right then how can the reader believe in the world she purports to portray?

Nor does the writing evince much of a grip on the way the world works. Fran and Mara's cousin Aaron does not seem particularly gifted with either intellect or ambition. Yet he becomes an economist at the World Bank with six children, multiple houses and cars, and a large yacht - not a lifestyle one acquires absent-mindedly, and not one that the salary of even the best-paid international civil servant could support.

We are told that Mara is clever and an intellectual though really she seems very dim and utterly in thrall to her emotions. Her political views lack the depth or sophistication you would expect from an ex-Trot. The phantom pain clinic she runs - is someone somewhere writing a book about really clunky metaphors? - seems to have as much to do with magic as with medicine.

There are far too many minor characters who obviously mean something to the author but whom it is very difficult for the reader to differentiate. Auntie Hen? Cluck cluck cluck.

The author does little to evoke the past, or show how it was different from the present. For instance, Uncle Jack "would watch anything while enjoying elevenses of Guinness and a giant bag of crisps..." This was during Lyndon Johnson's Presidency, before weekday daytime television other than the test card, and before the giant bag of crisps had been invented. he trip to Texas is incongruous and incredible and seems only to be there to appeal to the American market or perhaps to make the film rights more attractive. There's no ring of truth about it - compare it with, for example, John Peel's autobiography which has no particular literary pretensions but does summon up the atmosphere of Texas in the 60s.

Is the writing any good? Well, there are some fizzy moments. But mostly emotion gets in the way of narrative and you have to read a passage two or three times to work out what happened. What ought to be the crucial moment of the narrative is signalled on page one, which deflates whatever tension there might have been. And some of the special effects backfire: "Creeping into the bathroom, I mooned at my own face in the mirror, its lips fat with greedy kissing, chin rasped raw from Aaron's stubble."

The book comes across as the work of a lazy writer who doesn't do much research, and lacks either the ability or the self-discipline to give shape to her narrative or conviction to her characters. Her website tells us she has two more novels in the pipeline, one focusing on a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and one on Suez. Let us hope she does her homework on these, and does better next time.

This novel is beautiful, haunting and funny. It is a modern classic. Superb.

Or as A L Kennedy puts it:

Kith and Kin is another gem from Stevie Davies -- crafted, moving and minutely well-observed. It unveils the complicated joys and burdens of family life perfectly, while psalming the irreversible progression of time, mysteries of the body, the loss and rediscovery of innocence.

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