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Product Description
Review
A poignant, moving portrayal of life in a small Welsh village in the immediate aftermath of WW II, by a prizewinning poet, short-story writer, and novelist (A Toy Epic, Outside the House of Baal, not reviewed, etc.). Beginning in the spring of 1945 and ending just as the news of the bombing of Hiroshima arrives, this spare, almost gnomic novel concentrates with penetrating intensity on a series of relationships, including that between the Reverend Edwin Pritchard and his wife Olwen, and the involvement of their idealistic daughter Meg with a muscular young pacifist (Griff Kenyon) who loves her, and a German prisoner-of-war, Klaus Wilhelm Rist, whose introversion and loneliness attract Meg's abundant sympathies. Also crucially present is the former Countess Cecilia von Leiten, a displaced person whose aristocratic German roots rouse the suspicion, and eventual outright enmity, of the townspeople, and whose presence as a guest in the rectory unsettles and changes the Pritchards far beyond their expectations. The war bleeds into every aspect of what would otherwise pass for ordinary life - an election in which Edwin finds himself embarrassingly in sympathy with "an impassioned and impossible idealist" whose pacifism outrages their neighbors; Edwin's contemplation of writing a history of his parish, made to seem trivial in the context of the horrors about which he is almost daily learning - incarnated in one particularly memorable (and stunningly ironic) scene: a musical afternoon at which Bach is played on the piano by a German virtuoso while the Countess is humbled into admitting the "monstrosity" of her culture. Humphreys doesn't deal in stereotypes or sermons: His characters are quite credibly complicated and flawed (the supposedly sensitive Klaus, for example, is a stupid misogynist), and their transformations under the pressure of history are expressed in crisp, believable, vivid dialogue. A superb work of fiction from a writer virtually unknown over here. (Kirkus Reviews)
