My previous blog post was triggered by the review of a book, Bred of Heaven by Jasper Rees, published on the Daily Mail website and written by Roger Lewis. No, not the Welsh Rugby Union’s Roger Lewis, another, altogether less pleasant one.

That previous post dealt with the negative English views of Wales and the Welsh. In this piece I’m going to deal with the review itself. Or rather I would if there was a review to deal with. We glean very little idea of what Bred of Heaven is actually like to read,where example where the author fails and succeeds in relating his deliberate immersion in Welsh culture. It is unusual to come away from a well-written review of some form of art without some impression of work itself, however Lewis has achieved that.

There is obviously some history between author and reviewer, at least in Lewis’s mind, as in the second paragraph he mentions Rees’s previous effort relating how he learned the trumpet. The fact that Rees then went out and wrote a book and becoming Welsh was evidently the red rag to Lewis the bull, as there’s evidently history between Lewis and Wales as well. He became so enamoured with sharpening his extensive armoury of axes and other pointy things that he forgot to review the book.

And no, cherry picking certain scenarios from the book and denigrating them does not constitute a review. Reviews and reviewers, good ones at least, can legitimately take a stand against the subject matter from the outset, provided they deal with the work in question in a valid and comparative manner. Listen to Mark Kermode reviewing a Transformers movie and you’ll hear what I mean. Kermode’s reviews may been seen as biased, unfavourable rants against Michael Bay but they are energetic, entertaining and informed by a depth of subject matter knowledge Lewis can barely begin to imagine. Lewis sets his stall out in the grounds of the A.A. Gill and David Starkey school of thinking which teaches that the easiest way to attract attention is to be incredibly unpleasant. Gill and Starkey have made media personalities out of themselves using that philosophy. Lewis I suspect will not.

Lewis does state that Wales is his background. Would he not be expected therefore to know that Caldey Island monks are Cistertian, and not by any stretch exclusively Welsh? Or that a ‘y’ in Welsh would phonetically give you same sound as ‘ee’ in English so in the context of the small, round green vegetable, ‘pys’ is absolutely correct. One could argue that ‘peas’ in English is less consistent and even more confusing. If you hadn’t encountered the word before would you pronounce the ‘ea’ as it is in ‘peat’ with an ‘ee’ sound or as it great, with an ‘a’ sound? Lewis is resorting to toilet humour by hoping you’ll mispronounce the word ‘pys’ while he sits at the back of class underlining more rude words in the dictionary. As for the Kingsley Amis quote: “As Kingsley Amis, who lived in Swansea for many years, once said, can it be true that there are Welshmen who are genuinely puzzled by the letter x?” No where near as many as the number of English confused by a Ll, Roger.

Llewis takes the path very well trodden when dealing with Rees’ attempts to learn the language. The same words routinely trotted out for the Anglo-centric view are here, tacsi/taxi, bws/bus, along with the assurance that have been no new nouns since the Middle Ages. Lewis was obviously proficient enough with his cyfrifiadur to log on to the rhyngrwyd and use Google Translate to haul out the half dozen examples he required to make such a predictable point, words all selected entirely at random, possibly by the cyfrifiadur he’s so proficient with. Strange though that with a hinted French ancestry he never rails against the French for their use of the same words. Welsh is a phonetic language with 28 sounds, not necessarily single character letters. The language is therefore more concerned with sound and speech than absolute spelling. With Wales as his background he really should have known that.

The “appalling and moribund monkey language” line aside, his real issue with the language appears to be the belief that “it is foisted on people for political reasons” in which there is a grain of truth. The Welsh Language Act was enacted through political means, or Parliament as it’s also known, and it goes some way to redressing the political ends of a predominantly English government who for political reasons did their level best to exterminate the language. Left to it’s own devices, if it hadn’t died out in the 19th century, Welsh would probably enjoy the same status as Cornish today. By actively trying to discourage it Westminster undoubtedly secured the language’s future by way of the Welsh political backlash against such policies that took place in the mid-20th century.

This lack of any perspective in discussing Rees’ book, or Wales itself, causes Lewis’ argument to fall firmly and flatly in the later paragraphs. Lewis detests the way Wales has been turned into a foreign country by this political promotion of the language. The stupidity and ignorance of that statement are both profound. The name ‘Wales’ is derived from an Anglo-Saxon word waelisc, meaning, literally, foreigner. Foreigner’s land is Wēalas. Wales has always been viewed as a foreign country since those living to the east of Offa’s Dyke ceased considering themselves as indigenous British. The Welsh themselves preferred to be known as cymry, from the Brythonic word combrogi, meaning fellow-countrymen.

The parting shot in this non-review is Lewis’ opinion that Rees has done nothing more than discover “a theme-park souvenir-shop Wales, a Walt Disney Wales of wool, slate, coal, leeks, daffodils and Offa’s Dyke, whoever she was.”

Wool, slate and coal are most definitely part of Wales’ history. The quarries and mines were the bedrock of Welsh life, culture and politics for a great many years and to dismiss them as “theme-park” is great disservice to the contribution that bedrock made to current British social and political landscape. Rather like the roses of England and thistles of Scotland, leeks and daffs have their place in Welsh history and lore. Cadwaladr is said to have ordered his soldiers to wear leeks in a battle against the Saxons to identify friend from foe and Saint David is said to have eaten wild leeks.

As for Offa’s Dyke (Clawdd Offa), she was built by the Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia in what is now considered England, probably between 757 and 796, before either Wales or England even existed in their current form.

The theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, when shown a paper of dubious quality, commented “not only is it not right, it’s not even wrong!” Maybe Wales isn’t Roger Lewis’ background after all.