The Welsh author vividly captures the solitude, hard labour, dramas and dangers of rural life
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n these six stories of human frailty and responsibility, Welsh writer Cynan Jones explores the imperatives of love and the labour of making and sustaining lives. Each is told with a compelling immediacy and intensity, and with the quality of returning to a memory.
In the story Reindeer a man is seeking a bear, which has been woken by hunger from hibernation and is now raiding livestock from the farms of a small isolated community. “There was no true sunshine. There was no gleam in the snow, but the lateness of the left daylight put a cold faint blue through the slopes.” The story’s world is one in which skill, endurance, even stubbornness might be insufficient to succeed, but are just enough to persist.
Jones’s austere world of rural settings is a working countryside of risk, hard labour and isolation. In an interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books Jones said: “Much rural fiction I’ve read by contemporary writers often feels quite fake, written from the point of view of a visitor, rather than a native.” His powers of noticing are native yet neutral, bringing precise, vivid life to his stories without dictating moral responses to the reader. Jones makes the reader see and feel the scene: the “happy shock” of the just-fed lamb in Cow, or in the same story: “The calf’s upward-facing eye opened. A dark globe endlessly deep in the pure white surround.”
