Carys Davies is a relatively new name in literary circles. A prizewinning
short story writer, her first novel West took the Wales Fiction
Book of the Year in 2019. Her latest publication The Mission House
came out in full pandemic mode - no Hay Festival, no readings or
signings. That has not prevented her growing band of admirers from
discovering it. With two short story collections and two novellas to her
name , some themes are emerging. The first is in her preference for the
nov e lla genre . A genre for our times: environmentally friendly in its
reduced number of pages, convenient for reading on a commute, a pick-up-and-put-down format for busy mums and
home carers desperate to remember who they are beyond the current
day's tasklist.
The novella is also a challenge to the writer, one to which Carys Davies
has risen spectacularly. Her writing is taut, non-flowery. She avoids
multi-syllabic words. Her characters, plots and settings emerge from
the page full y formed. Some reader-reviewers on GoodReads, new to
Davies, are surprised by her style in The Mission House finding her
'boring', her prose drifting'. Au contraire. It is the art of narrating
everyday life coupled with the internal monologue of individuals. Like
the lake, calm on the surface yet buzzing frantically beneath with the
internal monologue of each character, influenced by each person's backstory, economic circumstances, their health, their dreams, desires
and anxieti es. This book is about grief and loss, disappointment and
hope, the misguided energy of hatred and healing of hurt souls.
Th e Mission H ouse is set in modern day Udagamandalam, though the
'Briti s h-built ' town is not named. The reader instantl y recognizes the
hill station floating above th e int ens e heat of the South Indian plains as
'Ooty' . The 'slow, blue train' takes five hours to reach its destination
just as it did when the railway was constructed in 1908. BACSA
m e mbers who know Ootacamund will be delighted to revisit it s market
with its cloth stalls, the old comfy library, the racecourse now used as a
vegetable garden, the Botanical Gardens, the chocolate s hop, the lake
where you can still hire a rowing boat, now with internet cafes, petrol
stations and CD sellers. And everywhere the ubiquitous rustling
eucalyptus trees, themselves an unlikely importation. A tired and
dispirited Englishman arrives seek in g respite from the heat. On the
train, he meets the Pa dre of St. Peter's Church who immediately offers
him the use of a bungalow next to his presbytery while the usual
occupant, a young Canadian missionary, is away. Coming out of the
sta tion, our traveller encounters Jamshed, the auto driver. The base of
the tal e is thus firmly constructed; the many other characters are
branches and le aves from this main trunk, each as well drawn and each
playing their full part, including the dog and a horse. We are drawn into
the rich cultural, et hni c , linguistic and religious mix that is still 'Ooty' -
or was before the rise of the BJP. The tiniest hints of trouble ahead are
lightly sprinkled like d ew , easily missed if yo u are not up early enough.
Here is an extract: 'In the
afternoons he went to th e library and sat in his usual chair opposite the
buffalo 's head and tried to read . When he couldn't, he walked out of
the library and through the wooded g rounds around it to the low wall at
its outer edge, and from th ere up the hill. On these occasions, he told
Jamshed not to wait; he would walk home , he needed the exercise .
Sometimes he cut through S t. Peter's churchyard and took the path
between the collapsing gravestones. As he walk ed he scanned the
inscriptions - the names and dates of the British who'd come here and
made the place their own: the s ldiers and the doctors, the officials and
their wives and so me times their children and their babies; the ones
who'd never left, who were planted here in the earth. 'For anyone who
has spent lockdown clutching their passport in one hand and watching
re-runs ofindian Hill Railways, this is for you.
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