Library of Wales: Turf or Stone

Margiad Evans, although born in south east England, came to Ross-on-Wye and thereafter identified intensely with the life of the Welsh borderland. Her writing feels as rooted in its culture as a Hardy or Emily Brontë novel (but without his nostalgia or her romance). Indeed Turf or Stone, though set in the inter-war years of the 20th century, recalls Wuthering Heights in many ways. Its depiction of rural life is hardly less raw than Brontë’s but is, in some ways, bleaker. The central character of Easter Probert has much in common with Heathcliff but there is no grand passion at the heart of the novel. The passions that do exist are thwarted, embittered and tainted with disgust. The novel begins with Probert’s reluctant marriage to Mary Bicknor, follows her wretched life with him and their impact on their employer’s family, especially on Phoebe, the eldest child. Turf or Stone has an almost cinematic concentration on the physical detail of the characters and surroundings. In some major characters, particularly Probert and Phoebe, we are given flashbacks and intimate access to their thoughts and emotions, but in the case of Mary (who is in most ways the heroine) this is not so. We understand her disgust and her desperation, but we are never admitted to her heart or her memory. This has a strange effect on the reader’s sympathy for we often feel closer to Probert, the sadistic tormentor, than to Mary his victim. The last section of the book brings Probert back in contact with Phoebe. We observe his actions minutely but have to infer their meaning, which gives a tension and mystery to the story before the shocking, almost casual final paragraphs. While in some ways the novel belongs very much in the gothic tradition, this drawing back from the female victim-protagonist and equivocation with the reader’s sympathies makes it a more modern and complex experience. Although on one level its world has a timeless rural flavour, on another (especially in the characters of Dorothy and Matt Kilminster) we see a very particular stage in society after the First World War. Turf or Stone is a compelling read and also contains some of the fine descriptive writing for which Margiad Evans was famous but its lasting impression is of a period when, even in the apparently unchanging countryside, the bonds of human attachment were all breaking down. -- Caroline Clark @ www.gwales.com