My Year of Reading Welshly published today

This is almost certainly your best opportunity to discover Wales in 52 books

My latest book - My Year of Reading Welshly - is officially published today. Like many of my books it’s been a while in the making. I first pitched the idea to the publishers Calon back in March 2022, they said yes in the May, and then I had a year reading all the books, and a similar length of time writing it and editing it. Thanks to some very fine folk at Calon I think it’s come out pretty decently.

Although wonderfully easy to read, it’s quite hard to pick out a representative chapter to give you a flavour of the whole pie, but here’s one of my favourite books during that year, what turned out to be #14, One Moonlit Night (Un Nos Ola Leuad) by Caradog Prichard which came out in 1961:

In 2014, the Wales Arts Review’s contest to settle, once and for all, what is the ‘greatest Welsh novel’ ended with a win on points rather than a clear knockout. The winner was the short-ish One Moonlit Night (Un Nos Ola Leaud) by Caradog Prichard. So it would have been contrary of me to leave it off the Welshly reading list. It would also have been a big mistake. Because it’s outstanding.

It’s also very odd.

‘I’ll go and ask Huw’s Mam if he can come out to play,’ is the inviting and fairly straightforward opening line. After that, we’re catapulted immediately into the life of an unnamed little boy who is the narrator of the ups and downs (mostly downs and often right-downs) of life in the slate quarrying village of Bethesda in the early twentieth century. This is not the sunlit uplands; it’s a story which makes Barry Hines’s Kestrel for a Knave look like Cider with Rosie. Think Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy in Wales.

In the next dozen or so pages, we’re confronted with child abuse; a suicide in a toilet; domestic violence; a flasher; a man suffering an epileptic fit in the street; and a couple having sex in the woods. It doesn’t let up after that either, really. As we hop around meeting the village’s other residents in an episodic Under Milk Wood-style, the main story arc is the worsening of the boy’s mother’s mental illness.

Adding to the turmoil is that, after a while, it’s obvious that the boy is actually only narrating part of the story once he has grown up. There is a second narrator – a kind of presence called alternately the Queen of the Black Lake or the Queen of Snowdon or the self-styled Bride of the Beautiful One, who may or may not be connected to the village’s history of Christian revival. As Jan Morris says in her brief afterword, ‘it all feels rather like a dream’. Indeed, Prichard himself described the book as ‘an unreal picture, seen in the twilight and in the light of the moon.’

I had no idea how the story was going to finish and found myself thinking if it was going to end something like Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. It doesn’t, but it is a very odd ending indeed, which leaves you wondering what on earth you’ve just read. There’s an excellent translator’s note by Philip Mitchell in my 2015 Canongate edition that explains how he went about his work. It must have been quite an experience to spend so much time living with this book.

In fact, it’s not a dream, more of an experimental autobiographical exorcism. Like Border Country it is a personal portrait of childhood but just much, much darker. Prichard lived in extreme poverty in Bethesda as a child and saw his mother committed to Denbigh Mental Hospital for her ongoing issues. There’s one particularly heartbreaking scene near the end of the book when the boy has to deal with his mother’s deteriorating condition and it feels like it was drawn from terrible personal experience.

Prichard became a journalist and then a very successful poet, but One Moonlit Night was, like To Kill a Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights, and Gone With The Wind, a one-hit wonder. It’s almost like it provided him with a means of coming to terms with his childhood and that, once complete, he had no need to write further fiction.

I realise that all this is unlikely to encourage you to pick this book up. But while almost every page could carry a trigger warning, it’s not bleak misery-lit. The boy narrator guides us in a remarkably robust, perky, almost detached manner around his world and recounts what’s going on around him as just normal everyday events. There are some very funny scenes including one at a local football match. There are also touching scenes and the boy’s relationship with his friends is beautifully observed. Throughout, the writing is mesmerising. If Max Porter had written his engaging 2019 folk prose-poem-novel Lanny sixty years ago, I suspect it might have looked a little like this.

One Moonlit Night is a great book, certainly, but I’m not sure it’s the greatest Welsh novel. And, while I enjoyed it immensely, I can certainly say that, fourteen books into the Welshly list, I’m starting to yearn for something that isn’t about a little Welsh village.

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Next week we’re back to A Dance to the Music of Time and episode 7, A Valley of Bones. There’s still time to catch up over the summer if you haven’t started yet!