From a couple of weeks back.

"Dydwy ddim yn Sais, you bastards!" Berry Morelli from Candlenight by Phil Rickman

All bar one of two, I think I've read all of the books by Rickman - probably puts him on the list of our favourite authors. This is actually his first novel, (I read them out of order), but it is by no means any less engaging than the others.

Candlenight takes as its subject the fierce rivalry between the English and the Welsh that still exists in some parts of Britain, adds a pinch of the cultural and spiritual heritages of the Welsh and a liberal splash of magic. Rickman is incredibly subtle in his approach to the supernatural element of the story, leaving much of it to the imagination of the reader, which of course is a far more effective way of approaching it. The sense of menace comes over very well... chilling, I would imagine to the English among us... the sense of threat to those who do not have the blood of the Red Dragon flowing through our veins in a place where it is quite simply fatal to be English.

Rickman deals in one or two paragraphs with the history of the modern revival of the Gorsedd, or Bardic/Druidic traditions that haev haunted Welsh history since the dark ages and leaves mostly unspoken the explicit connections of those in the sory who perhaps represent the Gorsedd Ddu, (Black Bards), who as the name suggests are the practitioners of the black magic underlying the ill wind that blows through Y Groes - the setting for the story, an idilyc Welsh village - until close by the end of the book. He pins much of the strangeness on the secret presence in the village church of Owain Glyndwr (Owen Glendower), last of the Welsh 'Kings' after Llewellyn, or rather, the presence of his tomb.

This was an intelligent and enjoyable read.
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How can I choose just one quote?

"The comings of such as I, and our faith, may have changed things on the surface. But underneath, here and there, the magic runs as deep and as strong as in the days when the Fair Folk came out of the west. The threads of many beliefs can run side by side; from time to time they tangle and mesh into a stronger rope. You have seen this for yourself, Sorcha; and you, Finbar, feel its power compelling you to action." Father Brien from Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier.

There is an old legend, or fairy tale out of the germanic tradition, which is also claimed by many celtic traditions of a family of seven children - six brothers and a sister - who are beset by a curse in which the brothers are all turned into swans and only the sister may save them by remaining absolutely silent while she spins thread and weaves fabric and makes six shirts. The plant fibres she must use are spiney and of course painful even to touch, let alone anything else. Daughter of the Forest takes this story as its basic tale and weaves around it a very human, very compelling and moving story. It says a lot perhaps that I read this book, all but the first couple of chapters, in one day.

Written in the first person, it tells the story from the sister's point of view entirely and is set in Ireland and England. Sorcha is an incredibly strong young woman who loves her brothers very much, enough in fact to endure solitude, hardship, rape, torture and a number of other terrible betrayalls in order to try and save them. And even through all that she suffers, she still manages to maintain an innocence, a gentle nature and the spirit to go on when many would just have quit. Such is the power of her love for her family.

Nothing in the book is left out, but neither is it overstated and when Sorcha is brought to England by Lord Hugh of Harrowfield and becomes 'Jenny' for she cannot tell anyone her name or anything about herself or her task, not even in sign or pictures - a condition of her geas - the story contrasts the two ways of life she has led in an excellent and expert fashion, and captures the feeling of isolation and latent hostility she suffers from the English. Perhaps inevitably, she falls in love with Lord Hugh, as she had begun to do so many years ago with his brother Simon, when she and her brother Finbar had rescued the young Englishman from torture at the hands of her father's men at arms. These feelings remain unresolved right until the end of the book and even resolved, they leave the kind of bittersweet tang of real life that just adds to the impact of the story.

The villains of the piece are, of course, The Lady Oonagh - the wicked stepmother figure and Sir Richard of Northwoods - uncle to Lord Hugh. Oonagh is a sorceress who beguiles and then marries the father and who, when she cannot bend the children, and particulary Sorcha, to her will, enacts the curse upon the brothers, and attempts to hamper the escaped sister's efforts to undo her handiwork - subtly, sometimes so subtly that you do not realise it is her doing - throughout the story. Sir Richard is simply a power hungry megalomaniac, who schemes after his nephew's lands and comes to see Jenny as a way of getting them - of course this interferes with Sorcha/Jenny's work and endangers not only her life, but that of her brothers as well. The Fair Folk - as they should be - are shown as neither good nor evil. They just are there and sometimes their interference helps, and sometimes it hinders, and sometimes it does both at the same times.

For myself, obviously, I really enjoyed the story and the way it was told... but now I want to read Finbar's story, and though this is the first part in a trillogy it seems from the excerpt of the second book, that this is tale of Sorcha's children. Still, I'd recommend this book to anyone.

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