The Coward's Tale

It's not often I stick my neck out. Especially on the internet. The back-lash can be pretty unpleasant. However, I broke my own rule towards the end of last year by tweeting that if Vanessa Gebbie's The Coward's Tale didn't win an award (Booker, Costa etc) in 2012 then I would leave the planet. It didn't get much of a reaction at the time except from Vanessa herself who, in her typical self-deprecating way, told me to start building my rocket.

Undeterred and unashamed, I am repeating it here. Okay, I hear you say: you're a fan of her writing so you would say that anyway. (And indeed I have blogged about her work many times before, including  here and again here.) This is all true as is the fact that I remain hugely proud to have 'discovered' her huge talent years ago when I was submissions editor for QWF. But before you turn away from what you think is "another author puffs fellow author" what you don't know is that before I read the novel I was very very wary indeed. For a start, I wasn't sure whether this doyenne of the short story could hack it as a novelist. I also have to admit I found her story collection, Storm Warning, although brilliantly written  a little too bleak for my tastes, although having said that, I did read it at a low ebb in my life. I am also a cynical person and am always suspicious of anything on which praises are heaped.

So I started reading A Coward's Tale with a certain trepidation. Uh-oh... present tense; a gloomy Welsh village, a tramp and a rather unattractive boy (both respectively self-confessed coward and cry-baby.) But I read on and by the second page I was totally captivated. Slowly but surely, Vanessa adds layer after layer to create a story of humour, pathos and not a little bit of myth and magic. This novel grows and grows.

The town is dominated by a statue of a miner who commemorates a pit disaster many years before that no-one can remember, except the tramp, Ianto Evans who tells his strange tales for the price of a toffee and sweet coffee to the people queuing outside the cinema. Every tale tells the story of how the disaster affected the lives of the people, their children and their children's children.

To me, the very best novels are those that work on so many levels and the more you think about the characters, the themes, the colours and shapes that an author builds up, the deeper and wider the world created in that book grows. It's what I have called The Tardis Effect, in which the inside is infinitely more vast than what is seen on the outside. Within this novel is a tale of redemption where Ianto is a Christ-like figure. He carries the burden for the disaster. he is both light and darkness. He is the scapegoat, shunned by others and standing alone . It is surely not a coincidence that the pit, a dark and forbidding place is called Kindly Light. This a story of darkness into light; a collection of myths in which magical things happen such as a simple soul who was a born twice and catches a huge fish that has eluded the best fishermen; the man who carves feathers out of wood but cannot make them as light as real feathers--until, well, he does; the man who likes to walk in a straight line; the librarian who was brought up to hate books; the baker who throws bread away in the river. The events are unplaceable in time, although to me it feels like the 1950s or 1960s. But it doesn't matter a jot.

If that makes it sound heavy, I apologise. The Coward's Tale is novel brimming with humour. Vanessa is adept at looking at peoples faults and foibles and wants to know what made them that way. She is not judgemental. She does not write about good people or bad people. To her, people are endlessly fascinating even in their cruelties and follies and every one of us deserves our stories to be told. The best novelists are humanitarians and Vanessa is one to her fingertips.

And I haven't begun to talk about the writing--which is usually what I bang on about. I was sighing with envy. Here's just one small sample in which you'll find what I mean when I write my blog posts about the importance of the writing when seeking publication. This where we learn how the woodwork teacher grew to love wood:

The boy Icarus learned to crawl among the sawdust and the curls of wood under the plane bench in the workshop, and he learned to love in the very same place. First, he loved the softness and the scent of the sawdust, he loved it for its colours, how they flickered away from the colours of the sawn wood. he grew, and saw how mahogany unreds itself, how beech whitens in its own dust. he learned how walnut and apple smell of their own fruits. How oak lifts its ribs in the pews and chairs of the chapel, and how beech wood feels as soft as the fine powder his mam used on Sundays."


These are simple words, used effectively with an eye for close detail. Did you spot unreds itself? It's bold without calling undue attention to itself. It's just perfect.  The lilting cadence of Welsh is caught in  the English which has made others liken her writing here to Dylan Thomas, me included, but on reflection, Vanessa's tone is more modulated and warm rather than mocking.

A Coward's Tale is one of those novels you want to read again and again. And don't take my word for it. Take a look at this and this. And when in the Financial Times, A N Wilson names it his novel of 2011 then it's worth noting and I quote: an extraordinarily lyrical, moving, funny evocation of a Welsh mining town and its inhabitants as seen through the eyes of “the coward”, who witnessed the collapse of the Kindly Light pit. A poet’s novel, really..

So I shall say it again. If A Cowards' Tale does not win a major literary award in 2012, then I'm leaving the planet for we are surely doomed.