Book Review: HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY by Richard Llewellyn

How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Each word a laden fire-boat, each sentence a joy of craft, the whole a glory of art... written by the hand that through long, hungry years, had wielded its golden sickle in the chartless wilderness of Words."

There are books that we read to refresh our souls and rekindle beliefs that may have been giving a beating by the morass of incivility to be found everywhere in 2020.

This is such a book! There is a jewel of a novel it was. (And yes, I deliberately phrased it thus... to show how delightful the Welsh flavor was!! One of the chief charms of this book)

Huw Morgan and his wonderful family showed that life in the Welsh countryside in the Victorian era, too, had its share of evil. But Llewellyn's masterpiece highlights the hope that comes from good men and women doing honest work, with shining spirits that blaze from the page as brightly as Anne of Avonlea or the Marches did, which no sling nor arrow of misfortune could fully erase.

It reminds me a great deal of Elizabeth Gaskell's NORTH AND SOUTH, because of its themes of country versus city, the genteel values of a gentler age pitted against the cold hearts of commerce in a new century. There was also a great deal of moralizing in that book, hehe. (But then, being a teacher, I enjoy books with moralizing DONE RIGHT.)

Llewellyn passionately wrote about the injustices done to Welsh miners, as well as the hypocrisy and moral stagnation to be found in small rural towns. I particularly enjoyed how he handled the differences of opinions within one family, which would have torn it asunder had it been a lesser one. But the Morgans are an immortal family of an entirely superhuman moral fibre, and I am not ashamed to confess that I teared up several times at the brave sacrifices that the family members made for one another. *sniff*

Mind you, this book gets pretty dark at times, so this is DEFINITELY not for children. Llewellyn does not shirk from details of the worst possible crimes imaginable, but his gift for description blesses us with musical prose about the beauties of the grass and the nightingales, with dialogue that you thrill to "hear." Some of the loveliest bits on love and morals that I have ever come across lie in this book, passages to savor and re-read with delight.

And my goodness, so many beautiful bits on singing!!

"Sing, then. Sing, indeed, with shoulders back, and head up so that song might go to the roof and beyond to the sky. Mass on mass of tone... singing and singing, until life and all things living are become a song. O, Voice of Man, organ of most lovely might."

This classic is definitely in the SHOVE-DOWN-THE-FACE-OF-YOUR-BOOK-CLUB-FRIENDS category! Be sure to grab a copy if you come across one! It's one that will CLEANSE YOUR SOUL!!!


View all my reviews