Short fiction seems to be enjoying a renaissance among readers, and it is wonderful to see this selection by one of the great masters of the form brought back into print in the Library of Wales series. Rhys Davies might be seen as Wales’s answer to Ireland’s better-known William Trevor. They were both prolific, versatile writers who excelled in various forms. They both left their native countries to live in England, yet their hearts and eyes seemed ever to turn homeward, with distance perhaps providing a clearer, keener view. There is still a sense of belonging and rootedness, even in exile. There is a kindness and compassion for their people that is starkly missing from the lacerating tales of Davies’s notorious compatriot, Caradog Evans. The humour is bitter-sweet, there is a sharp eye for detail, and the storytelling is, quite simply, luminous.Davies grew up in the small mining community of Blaenclydach, and most of the stories in this selection are set in or on the outskirts of such a place. As the son of a local grocer, Davies would have had an insight into the lives of the various social groups and their inter-relationships. It is an awareness that provides the stories with a breadth and acuity of vision as they explore an array of lives, from struggling mining families to the more comfortably-off and aspiring. What is perhaps more striking, though, is Davies’s ability to capture the experience of women in a male-dominated world, ‘a man’s valley’ where men come home from the pit ‘black and bellicose’ and ‘primitive-looking’ to ‘work-driven women’ who struggle to put food on the table and whose dreams of how life might have been lie in dust and ashes.In the magnificent, but chilling, opening story, ‘Nightgown’, the female protagonist is effectively a slave to her husband and five grown sons, all of whom work at the pit. ‘So now, at fifty, still she could not sit down soft for an hour and dream of a day by the seaside with herself in a clean new dress at last and a draper’s-shop hat, fresh as a rose.’ There is nothing for her in this world but drudgery and disregard, and yet a part of her still dreams nonetheless. Megan in ‘The Last Struggle’ is younger and childless and has retained her youthful zest, but she can see her life with a bullying husband heading in the same direction. Davies captures the power dynamics, the plight of women trapped in such marriages. He captures the simmering, subterranean energy. The men are like dormant volcanoes, ready to erupt at any moment.Other women are less oppressed, though still subject to the rules they might wish to flaunt. There is Mrs Mitchell, the fashion plate, whose ‘all fur coat’ approach to life breeds gossip and envy; and young Blodwen, who is set to make good for the whole family by marrying the local solicitor’s son, but who can’t quite resist the dark, Lawrentian appeal of the vegetable seller; and poor Catherine Fuschias, whose shenanigans with a married man lead to even more shenanigans when he inconveniently dies in her bed. This, and several other stories here, have a gloriously dark humour. None more perhaps than ‘Resurrection’, in which a woman, much to her sisters' dismay, comes back to life in her coffin. Though ‘Canute’ and ‘A Spot of Bother’ are strong contenders.Like the miners so many of them depict, Davies’s stories simmer with energy. Like his people, they are bitter-sweet. And utterly absorbing. They are the work of a true master of the form.
