I always love returning to Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, a full-throated song of her Maelor (‘Flintshire Detached’) upbringing. She wrote it knowing that she was dying, and it shows, for it’s a brilliant, ballsy (un)apologia. Bizarrely, for a couple of years poet R. S. Thomas was curate to Sage’s reverend grandfather, the villain of her tale. My favourite biography, Byron Rogers’ The Man Who Went into the West, serves up the story with relish.
When I was ill last year, a friend gave me Tom Macdonald’s The White Lanes of Summer (Y Tincer Tlawd in the original Welsh), and it worked a treat, conjuring up early twentieth-century Ceredigion with such dazzling acuity. Same patch, same brutal beauty, but such a different age: my head and heart soared when twenty years ago I read – on a clifftop near Aberystwyth – Niall Griffiths’ intoxicating (and intoxicated) debut Grits. It was the book that finally nudged me to move to Wales.
I landed in the Dyfi valley; possibly the fault of Jan Morris, my greatest literary role model. A Machynlleth Triad is her cutest book, her portrait of the town as self-assured capital of an independent Welsh republic is enough to make a former Plaid candidate go wibbly at the knees. The memoir of her gender identity and reassignment, Conundrum, is – remarkably – almost fifty years old; groundbreaking does not even touch it. But my favourite is her most wistful: Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, an elegant meditation on time, place and mortality.
In researching On the Red Hill, I returned to some queer favourites, and discovered new ones. In the former category, it was a joy to fall in love again with James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room and Another Country especially. Baldwin busts all attempts to label him; though he’s been dead over thirty years, we need him so much right now. Sarah Waters can make you turn pages like no other novelist, and I lapped up rereads of Fingersmith and The Paying Guests. New to me was J. R. Ackerley, whose sublime We Think the World of You, published in 1960, so artfully chronicled the murky intersection of sex, class, money and hypocrisy. It stuck to me like a layer of soot.
On the Red Hill by Mike Parker is available now.
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This column was first published in March 2020 in #LoveBooks, the newsletter of the Friends of the Books Council of Wales.