Of Talons and Teeth
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An historical novel set in Wales before the Industrial Revolution, as human love tries to flower amidst squalor and serfdom.
Wales, a mining village, pre-industrial revolution. A world of serfdom and squalor, its inhabitants oppressed by both Chapel conformist impulses and the predations of a new kind of capitalism being born.
Sion, a metalworker, strikes up an illicit relationship with Katherine, the wife of the mineowner's personal dogsbody. And so begins the struggle of non-transactional and non-exploitative human love to be recognised in a place bent on the destruction and negation of that very thing.
A mix of political anger, historical excavation, Celtic mysticism, praise of the human impulse to love and rage at avarice and exploitation, Of Talons and Teeth seeks to explore that moment when human beings and the natural beauties around them were turned into mere chattels; when Mammon became the only god worth worshipping.
Customer Reviews
Out of the valleys
The author is of Welsh/Irish/Romany heritage and lives in rural Wales, where he is a cultural icon of sorts, rather like Irvine Welsh in Scotland.
This book is a love story set in a small Welsh mining village in pre-industrial revolution times. Life is hard. The characters are basically serfs, and they live in squalor. The narrative explores what happens when a metal worker finds love with the wife of the mine owner’s lackey-in-chief. The affair serves as a beacon of hope amid the squalor, or might do if they didn’t have to keep it secret. There’s politics involved too, because technology is coming, threatening new technology, and because there’s always politics in Mr Griffiths’s books. There was no Labour party at the time, of course, but it’s Wales, and there are mines.
I read a review that said there were parallels to the present day with AI looming, instead of looms looming, presumably. I must have missed that part, but I couldn’t get enough of Mr G’s power-packed prose after reading this paragraph on page one:
“Once there was a liquidity beneath a black and boiling sky threaded with red and jagged shapes and then there was a vast cooling and slow solidification happened and now there is a boy/man or a man/boy picking across a great flank of annealed rock. Scare-bird scrawny he is in the torn and drifting sheets of mist which rise from the cracks and crannies. So many ghosts of the swallowed dead.“
To paraphrase Billy Connolly, you don’t get writing like that in the ‘Daily Mirror.’