Book Review: The Welsh Girl

There is a passage two-thirds of the way into Peter Ho Davies’ new novel, The Welsh Girl, in which Rudolf Hess – Adolf Hitler’s deputy in Nazi Germany, claiming to be an amnesiac – says to his interrogator, “We have something in common, you and I. The same dilemma. Are we who we think we are, or who others judge us to be? A question of will, perhaps.”

Hess is speaking to Joseph Rotheram, a German Jew who is working during World War II as an interrogator for the British army – a man who is conflicted over his identity, having fled Germany and his Jewishness in 1937. Yet Hess could just as well be speaking of the central characters in this novel: Esther Evans, the 17-year-old Welsh girl of the title; and Karsten Simmering, a German POW being held at a camp just over the hill from Evans’s home.

The majority of the novel is told from the alternating perspectives of Esther and Karsten (the prologue, epilogue, and one chapter in-between are from Rotheram’s point of view), and once it is discovered that a German POW camp is coming to this small village in Wales just after D-Day, it is clear that these two characters’ fortunes are linked.

They are both sympathetic characters, though each is loathe to ever ask for sympathy. Esther is raped early in the novel by an English soldier, an event which leads to pregnancy and a crisis of identity for her. Karsten, meanwhile, surrendered himself and his men – saving their lives, yes, but leaving them as men who would not die for the fatherland. It seems from the present-day perspective to be a non-issue, but Davies does an excellent job capturing the fervent nationalism of the time. Most compelling is the conflict between the Welsh and the English; Esther works as a barmaid at an establishment that only occasionally – and begrudgingly – serves drinks to Englishmen, for instance.

Esther is also a farmer’s daughter, and a shepherdess to the sheep herself; it is through this connection that Davies introduces the Welsh concept of cynefin, “the flock’s sense of place, of territory.” In the novel, cynefin not only relates to the sheep, but to the people and their sense of nationalism, and to Esther, the way in which she is inextricably tied to this land, her home.

The Welsh Girl is Davies’ first novel, following two highly-regarded short story collections, The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His style translates well to the longer form; every thread of the story is tied up neatly by the end – hardly a character enters who does not serve a larger purpose than imagined in the novel, and not once does the plot feel forced or contrived. The only questionable step taken by Davies involves the insertion of the Rotheram-Hess sections. The question of identity is evident here as well, and Rotheram does make a brief cameo at Karsten’s camp, but in some ways it seems to overtly distract from the main storyline.

That storyline picks up pace from the moment Esther and Karsten first interact along the gates of his camp, leading to a conclusion which never seems inevitable. It is to Davies’s credit that every character seems cared for graciously, even the sheep, as the cynefin is maintained via a surprising and touching twist at the end.

Reviewer Jeff Janssens is working on a collection of short stories.