A novel about the friendship of three boys from differing backgrounds growing up in north-east Wales in the 1930s, together with an introduction by M. Wynn Thomas, textual notes and a fragment from an earlier version of the novel. First published in 1958.

Nofel am gyfeillgarwch tri bachgen o gefndiroedd gwahanol yn tyfu i fyny yng ngogledd-ddwyrain Cymru yn yr 1930au, ynghyd â chyflwyniad gan M. Wynn Thomas, nodiadau testunol a dryll o fersiwn gynharach o'r nofel. Cyhoeddwyd gyntaf yn 1958.

I have long considered Emyr Humphreys our greatest prose-writer. His septet of novels, which goes under the title Land of the Living, is the most important work of fiction produced in English in Wales since the second world war.

We have been slow in coming to a full appreciation of Emyr Humphreys, now in his eighties, and in England he is still virtually ignored, perhaps because he is 'difficult' and not given to the lurid lifestyle now expected of 'celebrity' writers. Nor does he purvey a Wales that appeals much to those looking for the stereotypes and grotesquerie with which so many Welsh novels teem.

The novel A Toy Epic, written as early as 1942 but not published until 1958, won the Hawthornden Prize in the following year, and appeared in a revised Welsh version, Y Tri Llais. For Emyr Humphreys is a Welsh speaker who has written prose in the language, including a number of plays for television as well as essays dealing with the cultural situation in Wales.

The novel is about leadership, ambition and betrayal, constant themes in all his writing, set in the context of a Wales emerging from its Nonconformist past but trying to decide what should be retained and what abandoned. This seems to me a major theme for any novelist and he tackles it with great insight and power. What is there, he asks, in the last two hundered years of our history, that can be used and carried forward into the future? What is the Good, what are the claims of conscience, who is our neighbour?

The story concerns three boys growing up during the 1930s in the north-east - Flintshire, to be precise - in a society where the linguistic divide and sense of the Border ruan through not only villages but throught the minds of its inhabitants. One lad, Albie, is a bus-driver's son, and attracted to Communism; the second, the religious Iorwerth, is the son of a farmer, and the third, Michael, becomes a Welsh Nationalist. All three may be seen as facets of the author's own character. The novel follows the boys through school and ends as they go out into a harsher world.

This reprint in the Seren Classics series is introduced by M. Wynn Thomas, a friend of the author's who has done a great deal as a literary critic to demonstrate the qualities and range of his writing. The novel can be read with pleasure as a straightforward work with its own lyrical charm, but Wynn Thomas brings a critic's acumen to bear on its finer points which is bound to enrich our appreciation of it.

Meic Stephens

It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.

Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.