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People Of The Black Mountains Vol.I: The Beginning Kindle Edition
This proud and haunting novel is the last great work of Raymond Harris, his final testament.
Here, in one vast, breathtaking sweep is his story of the land where he was born, the land he loved and left, but could never forget - the story of the people of Wales and the borders, not over one or two generations but many thousands, from the very beginning of recorded time.
People of the Black Mountain is a chronicle with a difference, alive with feeling, set within a night-long quest of a young man of today, searching for his grandfather lost on the high ridges. On the moonlit heights Glyn hears voices calling within him, voices which pull us back, over the rim of the years to the days of Marod and his family, sheltering in their caves and hunting horses in a misty Arctic summer. As Glyn follows the tracks the stories form a linking chain across the ages, from before the last Ice-Age to the fierce, defiant struggle against the invading Romans.
Lost lives, forgotten memories, like like the arrowheads beneath close-cropped turf. Myth and magic, plague and invasion, the warmth and sadness of daily life - slowly the waves of history ebb and flow, like the oceans which long ago formed the sandstone layers at the heart of the mountains themselves.
Rooted in the past yet written for the present, People of the Black Mountains is a novel unlike any other, written by one of the great men of our time: a journey in search of a buried history, following the tracks on a map that all of us can read - and walk along - today.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage Digital
- Publication dateDecember 31, 2013
- File size1264 KB
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Product details
- ASIN : B00EKOC3L6
- Publisher : Vintage Digital (December 31, 2013)
- Publication date : December 31, 2013
- Language : English
- File size : 1264 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 361 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,339,810 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #764 in Historical Asian Fiction
- #10,525 in Historical Literary Fiction
- #18,965 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
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"The People of the Black Mountains" is a historical novel It was his last writing, and his greatest. It was intended to be a trilogy tracing the history of his beloved Wales from Neolithic times up to the present day. Alas, he did not live to complete the third volume - though his wife offers a synopsis of where the third volume was to have gone.
Williams uses a very clever device. The novel begins in the present day. Glyn and Megan are driving to the Black Mountains to visit Glyn's grandfather, Elis. They arrive late in the day. Elis is no where to be seen. There is a note. Elis is out walking in the hills. He should have been back. Worried, Glyn sets out to track his father in the gloaming.
Thus begins a tale that is drenched in history and place. As Glyn walks the hills, calling his grandfather's name, an echo wafts back on the breeze, but it is not the name of his grandfather that comes back to him, but that of "Marod". And, with Glyn, we are catapulted back into Neolithic times.
The story weaves back and forth. We periodically come back to Glyn as he traverses the Black Mountains. And as he does, the history of his people speak to him from the dales and the peaks - from the very sandstone itself. The story is roughly chronological, so that each time we move back in time, it is to a time less remote. Vikings, Romans, Saxons, Normans - all in their turn wash over the black mountains and recede - like a tide - but always leaving the place essentially unchanged.
This is a riveting, taut, hauntingly beautiful book. And I offer as a testament, the very first lines:
"See this layered sandstone in the short mountain grass. Place your right hand on it, palm downward. See where the summer sun rises and where it stands at noon. Direct your index finger midway between them. Spread your fingers, not widely. You now hold this place in your hand."
Thus he describes the topography of the Black Mountains.
Raymond Williams (1921-88) was born in the Welsh village of Pandy, Abergavenny, the son of a railway signalman. Rising above his station (as they used to say), he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge and eventually became a professor of Drama there. Like many of his generation, he not only grappled with ideas, but with men - he served as a captain in an anti-Tank armoured division during WW II, taking part in the D-Day invasion of Europe. Williams loved ideas and culture and his writings established him leading critic and theorist in the fields of communications and cultural studies.