Let’s start the discussion, shall we?  I’m intrigued by what Ann wrote about the ending—about being disheartened that it was Roger and not Gwyn who saved Alison.  I agree—I was surprised and a little unsettled at the end.  I expected Gwyn to be able to get over his anger for Alison’s sake.  Other thoughts?

The ending first angered me, then depressed me. Yes, I can understand now that I’ve read the myth why Garner kept Gwyn from being the hero, but oh, how I wish he’d broken free from its constraints there at the end.

The female must have a male to tell her what she is.

The intelligent lower class male must be kept in his place.

Prigs rule.

It’s just wrong not matter how mythologically correct it may be.

Yay, thanks Dorothy for starting the thread.

That ending. I didn’t feel as if Roger earned that save at all but I suppose it was part of Garner’s “realistic” character portrayals. If I were in Gwyn’s place I don’t know that I’d have acted any differently after that git Alison told Roger his secret and he came up with that mincey apology with her at death’s door. What with his crazy mother, Alison throwing him over for choir & tennis (although I do understand it was more complicated for her), Roger’s callous disregard (after they started out so well) and Clive’s lording—he really would have been a “hero” if he managed to get over all that to help her, in the end.

Roger had less to deal with in relation to all concerned which is why it was so anti-climatic. Not only for that but because all it took was for him to stroke her hair and call her silly for not knowing she should have made origami flowers. Emotionally, for him, there wasn’t a big enough leap for that resolution to pack any punch so I waited for pyrotechnics and got lots of flower petals. Oh well. It’s that sort of fantasy, I guess.

What did you think of how Garner squared the contemporary characters with the ones from the myth? I remember part of my confusion with my first reading was because I was trying to figure out whether Roger was Gronw and Gwyn, Lleu or vice versa. In the beginning I thought Gwyn was Gronw because of his (supposedly) sly relationship with Alison but it flipped on me near the end. I liked that they couldn’t be perfectly segued in. (Or I’m just confused.)

I was disappointed with the ending too. I agree with you Imani, I don’t think Roger earned being able to save Alison. The repetition of the myth may have been ended, but it would have been nice if the wounds of class and culture could have been healed too.

I had difficulty all the way through figuring out who Gwyn and Roger matched up with in the myth and didn’t figure it out until I read the myth on Wikipedia.

Okay, the more I try to think about who’s who and how the novel and the myth fit together, the more confused I am.  Am I being dense?  I suppose at the end I see Gwyn as Lleu because he feels betrayed by both Alison and Roger. But .... ?

The ending is such a dilemma, isn’t it?  If Gwyn saves Alison, then it’s kind of cheesy and unrealistic although hopeful, but if Roger does, it’s unrealistic in a different way (he’s been such a horrible character all along and now he gets to do something great?).  And I do find it troublesome that Alison is the one who needs saving.  It’s the women who cause much of the trouble in this book.

Maybe I’m confused. I thought Gwyn was Gronw, since Gronw was originally lord of the valley and Gwyn is supposedly a ancestor?

I was bothered by how women were portrayed in the books too. Alison, completely clueless though she has a moment now and then when she shows some spark. Nancy who is mean, though I saw he meanness as an attempt to protect Gwyn and also as a result of her bitterness over not being the one who owned the house. And Alison’s mother, who never makes and appearance but somehow is a controlling witch. I didn’t like any of the female characters and had a hard time believing Alison to be a teenager. She seemed so childish at times I thought she was about 10.

As I understand it Gwyn is both Lleu and the wizard who started the whole business in the first place.  In some tellings of the myth, they are one and the same.  I agree that Roger hasn’t done enough to earn the right to save Alison but what worries me more is that in refusing to let the grudge go Gwyn matches up to the English stereotype of the Welsh as a close-minded, bitter race who make a lot of fuss about nothing.  This may not be a true as it once was, but in the 1960s this was still very strong.  The parochial nature of the British is something you probably have to experience to understand.  I’ve been beating myself around the head trying to make some sense of this and I think the key may well be in the reason that Gwyn feels he can’t make the move towards helping Alison.  The cruelty of what Alison does when she reveals his ambitions to Roger can’t be over emphasised.  She exposes his desire to move away from the land and the language which, as far as Garner is concerned, gives him his identity.  She exposes him as a traitor.  And Gwyn can’t take that.  The only way that he can re-instate himself in his own esteem is to flip and go back to the traditional and mythical position.  Someone asked if the myth had now been laid and I think my answer would have to be that I don’t think it has.  Alison and Roger may have come out of this re-living relatively unscathed, but Gwyn hasn’t.  I think the implication is that in another generation there will be another re-enactment.

Ann, I am so glad you are providing such great context. You are helping me not be so confused about the book. Pieces of it are making sense.

So, what would it take for the myth to stop replaying itself each generation?

What do you all think about what will happen after the story? Roger and Alison will go back home and probably look back in ten years and think, wow that was weird, but that will be that. Gwyn on the other hand, I’m not so sure about. He’ll go to school, I fairly certain, but will he stay in the country or move to the city? Or is it possible that he will become educated and manage to meld the country and the city? By that I mean, take pride in his connection to the land and his Welsh-ness, but also be educated and “citified”?

I also had the same sense that this is a myth that will continue to be re-enacted in future generations but I never thought about what it would take to make it stop. That was a good question Stefanie.

I could definitely see Gwyn coming back and maybe it would be his grandsons who would play the same scene again. I think it might be up to the next boy who’ll play Gwyn’s part to forgive? I don’t know. I’ll definitely have to think about this some more.

I don’t think I caught on that it was written in the late 1960s—I probably would have been a bit more forgiving in my reading of the gender dynamics, then. (For some reason, I thought it was the 80s based on my book’s copyright page. Must have missed the original publication bit.) I found it difficult to figure out their ages too—at first I put them at about 12/13 and then it swooped up to 15, and then I wasn’t sure until Wiki set me straight. That sort of thing drives me nuts; I always like to know, preferably from the start so that I can settle in with the characters.

I hadn’t thought about whether the myth would continue or not—the ending was so wtf to me that I kind of just threw my hands up and shrugged. But yes, I suppose Gwyn hasn’t resolved things on his end.

Thanks to Ann’s contextualizing here and there I went to look up things like the Aberfan disaster. I’m no stranger to British parochialism—oh, how many times I’ve tightly smiled as certain persons tell me I should be oh so grateful that Jamaica got the British social system—but I did not have anything but vague ideas about the strained relations between Wales and England. I think that even now, if a British writer had set such a book in Jamaica and ended it with the British kids sailing off into flowers with the Jamaicans left bewildered and stewing in hatred...*ahem* I know Gwyn’s obstinacy is not inexplicable but I’d question why it had to be set up for that end in the first place.  It would be even more frustrating because isn’t anti-Welsh at all, there’s just this weird...tension between two views that aren’t resolved, but one clearly gets off a bit lighter than the other.

I’m really curious about how it was received at the time, in Wales. Clearly, England loved it since it got those lovely prizes.

Oh and what about Huw? I read a review that Danielle linked to in her post which fleshed out an idea I had that he wasn’t a typical human. That joke he told to Roger about promising a pig owner (or something) to exchange horses with golden saddles and such for his animal and actually getting one over him doesn’t at all seem possible in the 20th century. Who’s walking around with golden anything except a bit of jewelry? So either he’s lived for a very long time or he’s inherited his ancestor’s memories somehow. Maybe via the valley.

When I finished the book, I’d assumed that because Alison is saved and the flowers appear that the myth is laid to rest.  But now that I read your arguments, it makes sense that’s it not yet—maybe it can’t be?—and that it’s destined to play out again.  How can you have a completely settled ending with Gwyn so filled with anger still? 

That’s an interesting question, Stefanie, about Gwyn’s future.  It seems to me that he is destined to keep struggling with these tensions wherever he is—they have made him who he is, and it’s hard to imagine how he’ll be able to make peace with them fully.  I don’t like being hopeless about it, but with that ending ...

I know Dorothy, I don’t like being hopeless about the ending either but we aren’t really given much choice.

I’m wondering though, why is it the responsibility of people who have been historically wronged (Welsh) to forgive in order for things to move on and those who have done the wrong (English) don’t really have to change or offer any kind of recompense? That’s probably more a rhetorical question than anything. But like Imani, I’d be interested to know how the Welsh liked this book.

I thought Huw a frustrating and fascinating figure in the story. Huw seemed to talk as though he were all his ancestors in one person with their memories and experiences added to his own, a “we” contained in an “I.” I don’t think is was actually Huw who did the pig and horses bit, but because the story had been passed down and Huw seems to “contain multitudes” as Walt Whitman might say, he can tell the story as if he had been the protagonist. I could be stretching it, but that’s how I managed to make some sense out it.

This is just a quickie and I’ll come back to it tomorrow (I’m having one of those days when I’m running just to catch up with myself!) but the figure of the wizard who tricks the traveller (pig farmer) is a stock character in British myth of all kinds and one that Garner has used before in the person of Cadellin in ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ and ‘The Moon of Gomrath’.  Your comments made me think that we do have to separate the Wizard and Lleu out because Huw is the wizard figure.  I’ll think about this more while I’m running after my own tail (or tale, whichever you prefer).

I must say that, like Dorothy, I read the ending as a resolution of sorts. I thought it was emotionally powerful that Gwyn couldn’t overcome his sense of betrayal to save Alison. In some ways it proved to me the strength of the love he must have felt for her, and how intimate was his desire to overcome the disadvantages of his upbringing. I thought it gave Roger a chance to redeem himself, because after all, he needed it!

Can I throw in some new questions?  I was a bit confused by Huw and Nancy.  Where did I get the idea that Huw was Gwyn’s father?  Who was his father?  Nancy obviously knows all about this--whatever had happened before.  Isn’t she the one who locked that shed with the stuffed owl?  Did this all happen in her youth?  And the uncle (sorry--don’t have my book with me)--the man who owned the house originally?  It seems he and Nancy and maybe Huw were all involved in something to begin with.  So it does seem as if it keeps going on on and on.  Then it is not really all that surprising, if you look at history, no matter how awful it is--we never learn from our mistakes and keep repeating them.  What does it take to put an end to awful things?  Also the people of the town all seemed quite aware of events and the fact that “she” had come again.  And did anyone else find it creepy that all those little paper owls were in a cirlcle around the stuffed owl?

Danielle

BTW--it has been helpful reading this discussion thread to help sort things out.

Danielle - I’ve got my copy here and right near the end, when Huw and Gwyn have a heart to heart, Huw says to him: ‘You are the Lord in blood to this valley after me. There is not one doubt of it. I am your father. Did you not know?’ And in the same conversation, Huw has confessed to being responsible for Bertram’s accident on the motorbike (he took the brake pads away). If I’m getting this right, Nancy loved Bertram. But she had also (evidently) had a relationship with Huw. So their previous love triangle ended in death and bitterness as the current one threatens to do. I think that’s right and hopefully Ann will set us straight if not!!