Reviews of The Earth Hums in B Flat in the UK and Ireland
Her subtle depiction of small-town life in 1950s Wales is reminiscent of Toni Morrison, with its gently layered hints of magic real or imagined. Viewed through the eyes of an innocent but perceptive girl on the cusp of adolescence, it picks apart the minutiae of people’s lives and the secrets that they hide, both harmless and deadly. Gwenni Morgan lives at home with a kind and understanding father, a mother who lives on her nerves and a slightly older sister, contemptuous of the childish games of Gwenni. Their community is tightly bound together by religious and social mores, and a shared history and tradition under pressure from a domineering culture and language. (Welsh is the spoken language, but English is the tongue of the law and the government.) It is a place where, ‘‘even though everyone knows everyone’s secret stories, no one talks about them’’. The townsfolk’s tacit awareness and acceptance has many positive effects, notably in their understated tolerance of Guto’r Wern, a harmless, mentally handicapped man who ‘‘grew up strange’’, but lives freely, relying on the kindness of his neighbours. This freedom is abruptly ended once Guto comes to the attention of officialdom and is ‘‘taken into care’’. On the opposite end of the social scale, Mrs Llwelyn Pugh, who has suffered tragic losses in both World Wars, is treated with sensitivity and tact by all in the community. But these secrets though unspoken are shared; it is the ‘‘bad things we want to hide’’, that fester and corrupt to the point where a moral code is defined as: ‘‘So long as no one knows, it’ll be alright.” Such secrets normally remain buried, tormenting only those who hold them. However, the disappearance and subsequent death of one of the church deacons triggers a series of painful and, at times, horrifying revelations. Gwenni, fancying herself a detective, like those in the novels she shares with the local sergeant, decides to investigate the disappearance herself. Naturally bright and curious, she notices more than most of the adults, but her understanding does not match her perception and her naivety leaves her confused and open to ridicule. Strachan avoids the pitfalls associated with having a child protagonist. While the novel demonstrates a rich humanity, it never succumbs to sentiment. Equally, the girl’s innocence is maintained in parallel with the reader’s growing awareness, a tricky balancing act which the author carries off without resorting to heavy handed signals or clumsy metaphors. Gwenni does advance, though, as the novel unfolds and her struggle to grasp the truth and its implications is always credible and affecting. She learns that there can be layers of meanings, different truths. Like her family photographs, ‘‘it isn’t that they lie, it’s that they tell a different story. How can we tell which story is the true one?” From any writer, this would be a hugely impressive debut novel. For it to emerge from the pen of a 62-year-old is astonishing. Though Strachan started late - she worked as a librarian, book reviewer and web editor in Wales before publishing her first book-length fiction - readers can only hope they don’t have to wait long for her second offering.
Everyone in this insular community knows everyone else, so when Ifan Evans and his mysterious "black dog" go missing, Gwenni, rejected by best friend Alwenna who has discovered boys and net skirts, bonds with Mrs Evans and her two small daughters. Gwenni, who has turned sleuth, unearths more "circumstantial evidence" about her family's past than she has experience to deal with. Strachan's deft handling of a dark subject is both sober and sparkling.
Gwenni Morgan, who lives in a small Welsh town, sees something she doesn't understand: the aftermath of the beating of a neighbour, administered by her husband. Over the next few days, that violent husband goes missing, but Gwenni is too young to make the connection between his disappearance and his wife's abuse. The connections she does make are almost supernatural: when Gwenni closes her eyes, she can fly through the town and see through windows and glimpse private lives. Some of this information is quite useless, of course, as she can't understand what she is seeing, and her mother – who knows the kind of gift her daughter has and is the only one who might be able to help her – instead punishes her daughter. Strachan eschews whimsy for reality in a beautifully written story about growing up – an experience that itself so often seems full of the wrong kind of magic.
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