Tag Archives: Rhidian Brook

#BookReview ‘The Testimony of Taliesin Jones’ by @Rhidianbrook #books

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A small quiet book in which an eleven year old Welsh boy asks questions fundamental to life. The Testimony of Taliesin Jones by Rhidian Brook is the story of Taliesin and his questions about how God fits into his life. “At night the questions come: why am I here and not there? Why am I me and not them? Before I was me, where was I?” It is a novel about growing up, about change, uncertainty and belief, set in Cwmglum, a small rural community in West Wales. Rhidian BrookTaliesin’s father is a sheep farmer, his older brother Jonathan has recently gained a girlfriend and learned how to swear convincingly. Their mother left home last year and now lives in West Haven with Toni the hairdresser. “The events of last year linger around the rooms in petrified time. When Taliesin’s mother left, the clocks in the house all stopped. It was she who set the pendulum swinging and it was always her who turned the key of the carriage clock that ticked a furious little tick on the mantelpiece in the sitting room.” Everything that was safe and predictable in Taliesin’s life is suddenly different. And warts are growing all over his hands.
Influenced by the books he reads – his latest book is Lord of the Flies – he asks questions, his thoughts peppered with quotes from books he has read. He is anxious, bullied at school, and must find a way to tell his piano teacher Billy Evans that he can’t read music and has been pretending while muddling through by listening. And then he sees Billy, who is also a healer, straighten the back of a bent old woman. When Billy makes Taliesin’s warts disappear, Taliesin wants to heal too and sets up a group at school called The Believers.
I fell for this book from the first page in which Taliesin explores his latest book, an atlas, sent by his mother for his birthday. “He opens the book and releases a smell of paper, a fresh smell that reminds him of exercise books distributed at the beginning of a new school year: green for Geography, pink for Biology, grey for Religious Education.”
This is a book about faith, but it is about so much more. A boy looking for his place in the world, trying to make sense of things, as we all do. It is a simple story, sometimes touching, sometimes funny, with a depth that makes it stay with you afterwards.

Read my review of another Rhidian Brook novel:-
THE AFTERMATH

If you like this, try:-
‘Love is Blind’ by William Boyd
‘The Museum of You’ by Carys Bray
‘Rush Oh!’ by Shirley Barrett

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE TESTIMONY OF TALIESIN JONES by @Rhidianbrook https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3Pw via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Aftermath’ by @Rhidianbrook #WW2

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1946. Post-war Germany, Hamburg. The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook is a gentle novel with an emotionally difficult core: the adjustment of two families, one German one English, to the landscape of rubble a year after the end of the Second World War. Broken country, broken families, broken minds. The title refers to the aftermath of the war and also to the aftermath of events in the lives of both families. Both are grieving and are in new territory, geographically and emotionally. They are proud and unsure. Together, will they heal? Rhidian BrookThe English family: Colonel Lewis Morgan is occupied with the Occupied while his newly-arrived wife Rachael prevaricates, “I don’t know. It was suffix and prefix to her every other thought. This indecision was becoming her signature.” Their son Edmund has no such doubts, facing a challenging encounter with the teenage girl upstairs involving a glimpse of knickers and a steaming pisspot, he then ventures beyond the house’s garden into forbidden territory and meets the local feral youth.
The German family: Herr Lubert, a widower, and his daughter move upstairs when the Morgans arrive in the requisitioned house. Ironically Stefan Lubert is an architect, surrounded by broken buildings, but works instead in a factory while waiting for his papers to arrive which will allow him to practise again. School is closed so Frieda is on the ‘rubble runs’, clearing bricks and rubbish, where she mixes with the feral youth.
They all make their own adjustments to the new situation and for a while it is a quiet, polite tussle for power. Rachael makes changes in the house; she moves plants and drapes a modest cloth over a nude sculpture. She sets herself rules about not fraternising with the Germans, who she believes need punishing. She disagrees with Herr Lubert about a Mies van der Rohe chair which he explains is a Bauhaus design, functionality stripped to simplicity. She says it is uncomfortable.
It is as if each family is trying the other on for size, it is a fascinating observation of ordinary people in extraordinary times. Lewis reflects on the logic of the tasks he must perform: “They blow up a soap factory which employed two thousand Germans, made something everyone needed and had no military value whatsoever and, in return, the Russians send the Germans bread. It was like balancing Hell’s ledger.”
The cover of the book is an attractive, calm monotone and the story is also told in a calm tone; but underneath the emotions are building. As the initial discomfort eases, passion rises.

Read my review of another Rhidian Brook novel:-
THE TESTIMONY OF TALIESIN JONES

If you like this, try:-
‘The Translation of Love’ by Lynne Kutsukake
‘Homeland’ by Clare Francis
‘The Ways of the World’ by Robert Goddard

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE AFTERMATH by @Rhidianbrook via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-So