Values-Steeped Classic Measures, Speaks to the Present

books:


	• How Green Was My Valley Richard Llewellyn Amereon Ltd, 1985 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 50 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fine, fine book

Read this in China. I gave it to a passenger on the plane on the way back. I just had to encourage someone else to read it!

Very good book. I was really drawn into the story. Written in colloquial Welsh. The family and related townies are so aptly described that you really get to feel for them. Highly recommended. A good primer in fisticuffs, also.

BTW, I tried watching the old movie (40/50's) afterward, but it was bad (not just in comparison to the book, but in it's own right). Your mileage may vary.

On my stranded on an island list!

Definitely on my all time top ten list of reads, even after reading at least 4 times over my life. Every time I read it, new inspiration flows out of it, as different things resonate with me as my life evolves. I find in uncannily relevant today--- the same issues we deal with here and now-environmentalism, corporate control, labor issues, religous interpretation, hippocracy, physical and mental illness, bigotry, generational gaps, love, sex, meaning of life stuff, are all there. The more things change the more they stay the same. I find Huw to be wonderfully human, innately good, yet he certainly struggles to cope with the "devil" within, as we all do-and sometimes the devil wins. His deep and poetic appreciation of the small things in life help me to do the same. I highly recommend this novel to anyone who is attracted to bittersweet coming of age stories.

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Poetry in Prose

I love this book which is the most beautifully written story I've ever read. It is a lovely story of a boy growing up amid the ever-blackening hills of Wales. A sick child, he is a keen observer the changes in his green valley as it goes from a green valley to one blackened by coal dust along with the joys and tragedies of a Welsh coal-mining town. It may not sound interesting, but Llewellyn's beautiful writing style is reason enough to read this book. And the story is wonderful.

Welsh Gem

The title say it all. A delightful book, allowing the reader to live that life in the little coal mining town of the mid 1900's. Sad & joyous - just as life is!

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Values-Steeped Classic Measures, Speaks to the Present

"How green was my valley then, and the valley of them that have gone" records Richard Llewellyn's final words in this 1939 novel of the Gilfach Goch (Rhondda Cynon Taff) coal-mining region of south, central Wales.

The novel is nostalgic, but not in the negative sense of looking back to a sanitized world we would have preferred, but which never was. For Llewellyn, nostalgia is a tempered and well-honed tool for liberating us from the stunted vision of our popular culture with its trendy media and revisionist historians. Laurie Lee and James Herriot would have agreed. Good fiction is the best non-fiction in this sense, not to be confused with the selected-omitted-arranged elements often encountered in mainstream history. Must we cite Shakespeare's histories?

Book publishing today understandably promotes the commercial notion that "real truth" resides in just-released bestsellers, but Llewelyn would almost certainly have disagreed, arguing perhaps that if the humanities pledge to monitor the human condition, then books from long ago, often the less-well-known ones, might well be our best measure of the present.

First, take the subject of bullying. Media solutions today favor diplomacy, legal challenges, and police action, but NEVER suggesting fighting back in self-defense. "How Green Was My Valley" reminds us of the forgotten historical norm: teach your kid to stand up to the bully, teach him or her to fight, and be prepared to go after the bullies and their enablers yourself if the safety of your family is at stake. Fighting in self-defense is preferred, as with character Dai Bando, over passively aggressive measures such as letters to the editor (which might well prolong suffering and confusion). Llewellyn recommends more self-reliant justice to dispense with the protracted anguish that comes with ineffectual diplomacy. As with Welsh back then, we cannot always count on the police or a standing army, both of which affirm violence, just not your own.

Second, be alert to the value of prayer in the book, a potent example to children (and readers) who witness it. How can we not find liberating the example of the Welsh father Gwilym Morgan who would spontaneously kneel in front of his family to offer appropriate prayer. What witnessing do our fathers exemplify today? Must those who say grace in public restaurants (their family's hands in a tradition-affirming circle) be the last holdouts of less-trendy moral actions? Where else does heroism reside today?

The two themes come together in Llewellyn's support of hereditary self-defense. When the narrator comes upon a very young girl being humiliated for simply being Welsh, a protective impulse from collective memory brushes aside the cowardly restraints of topical manners and other facile turn-the-other-cheek sentiments: "I saw, as through the mist of a morning, the grass upon a field torn, and a spewing forth of earth and stones, and men coming to stand before me who wore their steel as I wear tweed, in ease and comfort, and their swords were bright. And I heard a note in the infant voice as of trumpets sounding for battle, and drums beat, and men were shouting, chariots raced and dragon banners streamed, and bowmen plucked strings while steel spoke in the ranks and lance heads glittered in the sun. And battle lust was in me, with blood running red about my feet and my hands red with it, and slippery, and the smell of it hot near me."

Llewellyn finds the response wholesome. Yes, the "infant" young girl is able to keep her healthy survival instincts alive, much as kids today find video games and horror shows to be their only options to preserve a cultural toughness that parents have been cleansed of.

"How Green Was My Valley" is surely one of those classics we must read again, if for no other reason than to free ourselves from the self-defeating social programming--nearly invisible--that pervades modern society.

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