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"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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