Where Crows Would Die
Set in 1960s and 1970s Cwmgwrach (‘Valley of the Witch’), near Port Talbot in Wales, Griese’s novel details the coming of age of Bethan Pritchard, daughter of an eccentric headmaster, in an isolated sheep-farming community. The story is rich in period detail: ‘plastic daffodils free with Daz’, a beehive hairdo as high as a top hat, and Lindsay Anderson’s if… shown in a second-floor cinema. Bethan’s life at the Plas, where her mother rearranges wire and papier-mâché figures in conversation pieces in the untended garden, is contrasted with that of the Heathcliffian Morgan Williams, an apparently semi-feral farmworker who survived a pitifully dreadful start in life, and who obsesses about the loss of his inheritance – a field – and also about Bethan.
The book’s cover describes it as a noir, but it is rather more than that. The signs are there: a cat toying with a bird, a heap of rotting sheep carcasses, a hat and coat in a barn resembling a hanged man. There is nothing bucolic in this landscape; sheep-farming is depicted as hard, lonely, and often squalid, yet it is the life Bethan ultimately chooses. It’s a tale of the fear of being watched: there is a terrifying sequence in which Bethan scuttles into rooms and closes curtains before she turns on lights, but Griese relieves the sombre mood with hilarious moments: Bethan’s father, ‘when called for supper… took a toothbrush from his top pocket and brushed his eyebrows.’ I hope to read more of Griese’s prose.
