Book Review – The Prince’s Pen – Horatio Clare
The Prince’s Pen (2012)
New Stories from the Mabinogion
By Horatio Clare
206pp, Seren, £8.99
The dedication at the front of this novella – a rewriting of the tale of Lludd and Llefelys from The Mabinogion – is, ‘Aux Étrangers’. You don’t have to be Welsh to be caught up in the excitement and strangeness of much of this tale but you might miss a lot of the fun.
‘You’re going to tell them to cover their heads? Their arms? Their butt-cracks? Have you seen the version of modest Muslim dress now prevailing in Porthcawl?’
The popularity of Gavin and Stacey might suggest otherwise but reading about Little Mari Evans of Bridgend, blowing herself and twenty-six of the enemy to kingdom come, on the very station platform where I was reading the book, well that was fun!
The Prince’s Pen is one of eight ‘new stories from The Mabinogion’, commissioned by the Welsh publisher, Seren. Authors such as Saunders Lewis and Alan Garner have tried their hand before with the retelling of these ancient stories. I still remember Alan Garner’s The Owl Service with particular pleasure, even though it was aimed at a teenage readership. This novella should appeal to all age groups.
Horatio Clare has a keen eye for landscape: his first book Running for the Hills, set in the Black Mountains, won the Somerset Maugham prize, and A Single Swallow was shortlisted for the Dolman/Author’s Club Travel book of the Year. This is his first venture into fiction but Clare brings all his skills to conjuring a Wales of the not-too-distant future. Global warming has reduced England to, ‘a dense archipelago, a shattering of islands’ but in Wales, ‘we knew we were lucky to have our feet on steep stone, green slopes and earth.’ As in the original story, Britain has been invaded: The World Majority Government (almost certainly the Chinese) want, ‘our air, our west winds and our rain–making hills: water!’
Clip, Prince Ludo’s ‘Pen’ and close advisor, addresses us directly and with a pent-up fury that lures the reader to make many false assumptions and keeps us on our toes. This anger is often directed inwards, so Clip’s character is thoroughly explored, but this reader was still surprised at the very end of the story. And what a story!
Well over half the novella is devoted to the first of the fabled plagues to haunt Britain in the original tale: the invasion of these islands by a technically superior super-power. In this section Clare successfully and wittily grafts the new onto the old. The insects that are used by Lludd to poison the Corannyeid in The Mabinogion are reincarnated as a Bulgarian computer-whizz whose nickname is Theo the Bug. If this seems unlikely, we are told that Theo had come to Wales to study at ‘the University of the Atlantic in St Donat’s.’ Theo turns the technology of the invaders onto themselves, but ‘ it was still an unfair fight. God knows how many programmers they had, and how many machines, and we had one Bulgarian who lived on sardine sandwiches, adored Uzma, had a thing for breakfast TV in Welsh (which he was learning) and also for books of philosophy.’
The ‘unfair fight’ is won after a delicious twist, which, though far-fetched, Clare makes believable, just. Levello has already converted to Islam in order to marry the beautiful Uzma, a Pakistani ‘princess’, but Ludo decides to take this further. ‘Uzma… Her people. We fire them up and it’s bloody Jihad! Let’s see the Invader cost-benefit a spot of holy war!’
The second chapter deals with the second plague in The Mabinogion, the terrible scream caused by an eternal fight between two dragons. In the original, one dragon is British but the other is foreign and so Clare, instead, stages a debate between the two faiths which now inhabit these islands: Islam as represented by Uzma and a sort of soggy, wooly, Welsh secularism as proposed by Clip. There are touches of comedy here too, but on the whole Clare treats this debate seriously. So seriously indeed, that I began to wonder if Clip, wearing a number 10 Welsh rugby shirt, with Uzma clothed in white, were meant to be themselves, metaphors or an allegory. The original dragon fight is here made to carry too much weight and Clip’s confusion at the dramatic climax to the debate, is echoed by my own.
If the present influence of Islam is acknowledged in the second chapter, Clare brings in allusions to the Lehman Brothers and the collapse of Northern Rock in the final chapter. This part is the least successful, though its other references to spirits and Ludo’s final battle with a giant are very close to the original.
This novella makes exciting reading for readers of different ages, but the rise of China as a super power, the threat of global warming, the spread of Islam and the financial crash may be just too heavy a contemporary weight for this little tale to carry.
Horatio Clare’s ‘blurb’ for Ticking (2022)
‘Ticking is a quietly stunning collection. You read the poems with a growing sense of excitement, which turns to a feeling of eerie glee. The sense of a poet finding her voice and vision is palpable. A small quadrant of the Welsh coast is deeply observed and felt and excavated, its histories, dramas and secrets brought to light.
Everything here seems to live, thrillingly and awfully, at once. The girl in the woman, the body in the cliff, the appetites and angers of the sea, time caught in a child’s question, the spectre of death at a wedding; here are the patterns of mortality in bent grasses, in the imprint of a bird on a window, in the wheeling of a moment, a day, a season. Wales has made another poet: her name is Ellie Rees.’