A contemporary novel portraying the complex tapestry of life in the South Wales valleys in the early 1990's, as a discontented youth caught in a life of drink and drugs, sex and street fights, an angry paraglegic youth, and a teenage schoolgirl involved in a community drama project try to come to terms with their circumstances.

Nofel gyfoes yn portreadu clytwaith cymhleth bywyd yng nghymoedd De Cymru yn yr 1990au cynnar, wrth i lanc anfodlon ei fyd sydd wedi'i ddal mewn trobwll o yfed a chyffuriau, rhyw ac ymladd llanc anabl blin, a merch bedair ar ddeg oed sy'n rhan o gynllun drama cymuned geisio dod i dermau a'u hamgylchiadau.

Cynicism is a theme of Richard John Evans’s first novel, Entertainment. Solidly set in south Wales, and especially the Rhondda, in the early nineties, it’s a sharp and often very funny examination of what it’s like to find yourself growing up in the debris of the post-industrial south.

The central characters, Philip and the paraplegic Jason, test out cynicism as a stylish response to the existential dilemma as it presents itself in the post-industrial experience. The novel simultaneously portrays and sends up this adolescent condition in Philip, who is at once proud and ashamed of his callow intellectualism, and who sees his attempt at the cynical pose both validated and challenged in the, to him, heroic figure of the crippled Jason. Philip’s younger sister Claire upstages them both with her extraordinary, cool self-possession. While these three act out their dance towards adulthood, the mundane tragedies of their parents’ lives happen, as it were, off-stage.

The piece is reflexive – there are various entertainments inside Entertainment – play rehearsals, a pub singer, a poem. Some of these are painfully and hilariously accurate in their observation and some are self-parodic, exploring how art more often than not bounces off reality, which tends to reinforce the feeling that the novel itself is real.

Though the pace is tremendous and there’s plenty of booze and sex, the writing is witty and controlled. The superficial harshness some readers have remarked on plays over an underlying and understated delicacy and humaneness. Along the way we get a slightly heightened, carnivalesque picture of a place where small-time drug-dealing has replaced the old, supposedly heroic heavy industrial economy; keeping yourself entertained has become the new means of self-definition. This is a significant novel and a very fine debut.

Christopher Meredith

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.