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Cynan Jones

Started by holyzombiejesus, October 25, 2019, 12:47:08 PM

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holyzombiejesus

Cynan Jones is a Welsh writer who has just published his fifth book, Stillicide. He is one of my favourite writers and I would be very surprised if I get to read a better book than Stillicide this year. I was reading the final part on my train journey home and actually stayed on past my station as I couldn't break the spell of the last couple of chapters. He generally writes quite short novels in a very measured poetic way. Very earthy writing but so beautiful. Fuck, he's great. The Guardian review of Stillicide contains the line "The radical distillation of language, the sense that every word has been individually chosen, results in a blunt perfection..." and I think that captures his writing well.

Here's an excerpt from (or maybe a short story that became) Cove.

QuoteHe swings the fish from the water, a wild stripe flicking and flashing into the boat, and grabs the line, twisting the hook out, holding the fish down in the footrests. It gasps, thrashes. Drums. Something rapid and primal, ceremonial, in the shallow of the open boat.

Flecks of blood and scales loosen, as if turning to rainbows in his hands, as he picks up the fish and breaks its neck, feels the minute rim of teeth inside its jaw on the pad of his forefinger, puts his thumb behind the head and snaps.

The jaw splits and the gills splay, like an opening flower.

He was sure he would catch fish. He left just a simple note: "Pick salad x."



Briefly, he looks toward the inland cliffs, hoping the peregrine will be there, scanning as he patiently undoes the knot of traces, pares the feathers away from one another until they are free, and feeds them out. The boat is flecked. Glittered. A heat has come to the morning now, convincing and thick.

The kayak lilts. Weed floats. He thinks of her hair in water. The same darkened blond color.

It's unusual to catch only one. Or it was just a straggler. The edge of the shoal. Something split it from the others.

He retrieves a carrier bag from the dry bag in back and stores the fish. Then he bails out the blood-rusted water from the boat.

Fish don't have eyelids, remember. In this bright water, it's likely they are deeper out.

He's been hearing his father's voice for the past few weeks now.

I've got this one, though. That's enough. That's lunch.

holyzombiejesus

And here's a review of possibly his best book, The Dig.

QuoteThe countryside is rarely excavated with the panache of Cynan Jones in this dark, tense and vital short novel. The Dig is about a farmer, Daniel, who brings life to the lambs he labours over, and an unnamed man who brings death to the badgers he sells for townies to torture. These two lonely men live close to each other in west Wales, and from the foreboding beginnings of Jones's already much-praised book, their lives are set on a collision course.

The Dig turns the reader into a helpless animal; transfixed, waiting for that blow to the skull. The first, unexpected emotional whump is actually the worst, but the story that unfolds from this shock is like a badger bait: you can root for the underdog but the game is rigged – there can only ever be one outcome.

The illicit "sport" of digging badgers and baiting them with dogs is not much covered in literature, apart from a brilliant poem by John Clare in the 1830s and a brutal 20th-century account by a jaded, complicit Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter. Clare wrote about it superbly, but it would be hard to imagine a contemporary account more vivid and frightening than Jones's, which unflinchingly sheds light on this anachronistic, stubbornly persistent subculture.

A gawky adolescent goes on his first dig and watches the steam comes off the exhausted terriers, Jip and Messie, when they are retrieved from the badger's sett, their wounds spilling fresh blood, "a synthetic colour against the dun green slope".


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It is not merely violence that is passed from father to son in The Dig. Daniel's struggle succinctly reveals the crisis in modern farming and the suffering endured by young people still trying to make a living from the land. Ever since Thomas Hardy, writers have wrestled with the challenge of convincingly depicting the relentless hardship of country life. Despite running a wine and flower shop in west Wales rather than a hill farm, Jones matches the achievements of Ross Raisin in God's Own Country, showing us the "stupefying tiredness" of farm labour and the close relationship this creates with animals and the land.

The nocturnal Wales of The Dig can appear hallucinogenic and timeless, with just a quad bike here and a farm grant there to place it in this century, but it is also completely authentic. I have sat in court with badger baiters, in kitchens with farmers and admired the "unnatural luminosity" of gorse flowers at night, and there is not one false note in Jones's descriptions. The occasional single-line paragraph – "The night rippled with stillness" – can be rather self-conscious, but more typical is the evocative rendering of a sheep shed, which, filled with lambing ewes, is "maternal and quiet".

Jones won a Betty Trask award for his first novel, The Long Dry, and The Dig has already garnered some hefty literary endorsements proclaiming its supposed muscularity and inviting comparisons with Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy. Jones's spare prose is actually rather reminiscent of early Ian McEwan, although several similes are more adventurous: the badger digger so hefty that when he climbs from his van "it lifted and relaxed like a child relieved of the momentary fear of being hit"; his house surrounded by dilapidated kennels and broken machinery, "the bodies of cars like some disassembled ghost train littering the field".

For all this manliness, The Dig is a tender and sensuous depiction of the deep connections both good and bad people have with the earth and its animals. Daniel finds "an understood geography, familiar and mammal" in lambing, and solace in a land that doesn't forget a loved one. The badger digger, too, has an intimate relationship with his dogs and the countryside he maps by its setts.

There is a terrible futility about each trapped life in this book – the stunned, tortured badger, the struggling farmer, and even the badger digger, who persists with his sadistic crimes even though he suspects that the police will catch him sooner rather than later. When Daniel struggles to rescue a dying lamb, he remembers his pragmatic farmer father telling him that sometimes he must choose between a quick misery or a slow misery. His father is wrong: Daniel cannot choose, and his misery is both quick and slow. Death may be everywhere but The Dig is brilliantly alive; a profound, powerful and utterly absorbing portrayal of a subterranean rural world.

Twit 2

#2
Sounds great. Some of it reminds me of the tone and style of "The North Water" a gritty whaling thriller which I read and loved off the back of a recommendation on here.

Jones's writing process sounds interesting:

I'm a big fan of poetic writing about the sea, especially if it's of a dark/existential flavour. The author's knowledge of the landscape and his ascetic lifestyle no doubt contribute to the authenticity. I find so much modern literary writing sterile, affected, ersatz, inauthentic: someone's idea/impression of how something should be. I'll add it to my to-read pile.

grassbath

I loved The Dig - I think I may well have read it on your original recommendation. Must get around to reading some more.

Twed

I started The Dig based on this thread and it has become one of my most treasured books.

holyzombiejesus

Quote from: Twed on November 02, 2019, 05:44:50 PM
I started The Dig based on this thread and it has become one of my most treasured books.

Ah, that's great.

willy crossit

just finished the dig, fantastic

"He was a gruff and big man and when he got from the van it lifted and relaxed like a child relieved of the momentary fear of being hit. Where he went he bought a sense of harmfulness and it was as if this was known even by the inanimate things around him. They feared him somehow."

holyzombiejesus

He has a new (very short - 23 pages) book out through the Nightjar Press. Only £3.50 inc postage in the UK and is individually numbered and signed, if you're in to that sort of thing.

https://nightjarpress.weebly.com/

bgmnts

Definitely gonna check this guy out after I've ploughed through my mountain of unread tomes, he sounds ace.