The Welsh Girl

Book Review

Peter Ho Davies

In 2003, Peter Ho Davies was named as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists, on the strength of the short stories he had published alone. Four years later, he published his first novel, and it was selected for the 2007 Booker Prize longlist. High praise indeed.

The Welsh Girl is set during the last months of World War II, and explores the relationships between three characters of different nationalities and differing national loyalties.

Esther, a young Welsh girl who works in the local pub, provides the emotional voice of the novel. A daughter of a fiercely nationalistic shepherd, she must work with not only the local Welshmen, but also the English soldiers stationed in the area and the BBC personnel who are in the village covering the war. It is perhaps her experience in dealing with the English “foreigners” that enables her to feel true empathy for Karsten, a young German soldier who is being detained in a prison camp constructed in Esther's village.

Karsten speaks a halting English, and begins to try to engage Esther in conversation when she visits the wire fence separating them. Failing that, he tries to win her approval by fashioning small objects as toys for young Jim, an evacuee living with Esther and her father.

Rotheram is a German Jew who surrendered to the British during a particularly harrowing trench fight. At first, his comrades implore him to surrender for them – he is the only one among them who speaks English. Following the surrender, however, they forget the fear they previously experienced, and condemn Rotheram as a coward.  Rotheram goes to work in British Intelligence, and is sent to Wales to interview Hitler's former deputy, Rudolf Hess, to judge whether or not he is sane enough to stand trial after the war is over.

The novel brings together these very different characters, who, on the surface, must naturally distrust each other on the basis of their nationality alone. Davies uses these characters to explore the validity of national identity, of siding with country over humanity in times of war.

Davies' language is gorgeous and precise, and his characterization is well-done. The reader is able to empathize with both Esther and Karsten. The one flaw lies in his ability to effectively integrate Rotheram and his relationship with Hess into the heart of the story. They both play a role in Davies' theme of alienation from country and kin, however they appear in the novel only briefly. Still, this is a remarkable debut, a well-done and engrossing story.

“It's odd, she thinks, to see the enemy like this after years or hearing their planes droning high overhead. She's seen the concrete blockhouses built as shore defenses. She's seen the ribbed wreckage of one of their bombers on the beach like a dead whale. But it wasn't like when the training aircraft from the local base went down last year and she cried for the three young crewmen burned to death who had drunk at the pub. She hadn't been able to imagine the men who'd died in the German plane. Even after Eric's death she couldn't feel anything towards the pilots who dropped the bombs; they seemed so far above her, beyond the range of her emotions. She tries to decide how she feels about Germans now. It seems important. She ought to hate them, she thinks, and she supposes she does, but she can't quite muster the heat of anger. She doesn't know them, after all; whatever they've done, it doesn't feel like they've done it to her.”

“He'd felt a perverse fondness for the Welsh ever after, so when the commandant brought up his theory again, Rotheram asked blandly, if there was any reason to think the locals and the Germans had come into contact. He knew, of course, from the prisoners that the village boys had been in the habit of hanging around the wire, but if so, it was in contravention of standing orders, and the commandant knew well enough to keep his mouth shut. Besides, within a couple more days the escapee had been brought in, at the end of a farmer's shotgun. ‘So much for the natives being friendly,' Rotheram observed.

Still, he had meant to press the prisoner about a local connection — if nothing else, he assumed the fellow guilty of petty larceny, just to keep body and soul together. Only he'd not had the chance before the man was beaten up by his own side, and afterwards, staring into his ruined face, Rotheram didn't have the heart. Besides, there was something about the fellow, something he recognized, even if the fellow swore they'd never met, something that made it possible for Rotheram to tell him he was Jewish.

At first Rotheram had taken his question as a challenge, refused to run from it, as he had with Hess. But afterwards, looking back, it was the fellow's lack of shame at having surrendered that he remembered. It had never occurred to Rotheram that he could be unashamed of fleeing, of escaping, of living. Of being Jewish — if that was what he was. And suddenly it felt not only possible but right to not be German or British, to escape all those debts and duties, the shackles of nationalism. That's what he had glimpsed at the pub, what had sent him into that fit of laughter. The Jews, he knew, had no homeland, yearned for one, and yet as much as he understood it to be a source of their victimization, it seemed at once such pure freedom to be without a country.”