The Coward's Tale
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
'My name is Laddy Merridew. I'm a cry-baby. I'm sorry.'
'And my name is Ianto Jenkins. I am a coward. And that's worse.'
Nine-year old Laddy Merridew, sent to live with the grandmother he barely knows, stumbles off the bus into a small Welsh mining town, where he begins an unlikely friendship with Ianto 'Passchendaele' Jenkins, the town beggar. Through Ianto, Laddy learns of the collapse decades earlier of the coal mine of Kindly Light: a disaster whose legacy has echoed down through the generations and shaped the lives of all who live in the shadow of the colliery, especially Ianto, the keeper of all their stories.
Thaddeus 'Icarus' Evans strives in vain to carve wooden feathers that will float; 'Half' Harris and Matty Harris have the same mother and yet have spent a lifetime ignoring each other; 'Baker' Bowen - despite carrying the name of his forebears - has never learned to bake, and James Little, the gas-meter emptier, digs in his allotment by moonlight, his pockets filled with the treasures of his neighbours. Along with the other men of the town and the women who mothered them, married them and mourned them, they are bound together by the shared tragedy of Kindly Light and by the mysterious figure of Ianto Jenkins.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The tenderness and generosity of this debut novel is strengthened by the precision and sharpness of its language. Gebbie creates a mid-century Welsh mining village and its tragic history through the eyes of Laddy Merridew, a newly arrived schoolboy, and Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, the indigent bard whose stories of fellow townsfolk evoke the village's devastating past and "get into your soul." Ianto unspools the history of past generations of miners, their families, and the lasting devastation of the Kindly Light mine accident, a defining event for the town. Tenderness lies beneath cold exteriors, and casual brutality beneath placid domesticity, and Jenkins's burden as the teller is greater than his childhood meditations on death and loss. His empirical experience of the catastrophe created its own burden; he survived a "roar unlike any other... dust and the rush of no air, and flying rocks, and it is the world and the whole mountain tipped about." The tale is one Ianto can only just bring himself to tell to an audience that yearns to hear it, and this compassionate and sage depiction of a rural community gives the other warmly fashioned characters the power of healing and forgiveness.
