The Island Of Apples by Glyn Jones

 

You can buy Island of Apples...Here

316 pages

• The Blurb...

The Island of Apples is a brilliant study of a pre-adolescent boy's romantic imagination and dangerous enthralment, set vividly in the south Wales of Methyr Tydfil and Carmarthen in the early twentieth century

• Our Review...

I read The Island of Apples as part of the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge. see link.

The prompt for this week's book was magical realism. This is not a favourite genre of mine. I DNF'd 100 Years Of Solitude which is often held aloft as the pinnacle of the genre. To counter my feelings about the genre I chose a book set close to home, in the hope that this would encourage me to finish. Hooray I made it!

IOA is a coming of age tale, set in Merthyr (Ystrad) in the early 20th Century where a young boy Dewi is on the cusp of leaving childhood behind and entering the world of adults. Into his life comes a young boy of the same age with masses of confidence and experience. He is an adventurer with tales of derring-do among the crowned heads of Europe. He becomes the nemesis of the overbearing headmaster and Dewi hero worships him. But is he real or a figment of Dewi's imagination? All could be as it says on the tin, or Dewi having a breakdown or real magic. The ending is a Henry Ford. By that I mean it's like Ford's famous quote "If you think you can or if you think you cant, you're probably right. 

Thrillers with a twisty plot should, I feel, be read in a distinct pace. Breathless and accelerating to the climax. However this sort of writing allows the reader to meander and occasionally wallow in the succulent language.

I enjoyed the language and writing style but the narrative was just OK if you know what I mean. The ingredients were great but the meal was a little less than the sum of it's parts. Nonetheless a fascinating insight into the era. The author was a friend of Dylan Thomas and you can feel the influence of Under Milk Wood.

• Selected Quotes...

Her veins showed through her white skin, they were blue, but faint, like words scrawled on the other side of writing paper.

There was a lovely smell of frying coming from out there, and the bacon was making a nice sizzling noise like bike tyres on a sopping road.

And as soon as our train moved off up the valley towards Pencwm I saw the slope of the first raindrop falling like a fencing-scar across the glass of our window.

a mouth so wide you expected it to join up at the back of his neck when he grinned: and deep winy skin the colour of a purple apple, pitted all over with holes as though he slept every night on knitting.

We saw the lights on in the bedrooms where people were ill and dying; we stood at the door of the dark and cosy bakehouse and watched Mr Protheroe the night baker kneading the bread by the dim light of the bat’s-wing burner, up to his elbows in dough; we looked in over the frosted glass at the back of the post office and saw the yawning men getting the letters ready for the next morning. We stood silent and motionless under the hoarse or blub-blubbing street lamps, and saw the colliers going to the pits in groups with white faces, or coming home pitch-black; we saw the policemen, the bad women, the News and Banner printers, Herbert the milk meeting the morning train. Ystrad was alive every night with silent people, while above our heads, under the moonlight and the moon-sheeted blue on the slates, thousands slept and knew nothing of it, nothing of the darkness and the silence and the solitary lights on in town, and the soft whir and pounding of machinery behind closed doors, and the night creatures wandering the streets, the rats, the stray cats and dogs, the sheep and the little mountain ponies.

• If You Liked This Then You May Like...

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• About The Author...

Glyn Jones was a Welsh poet, novelist and literary historian. He served as Chairman and President of the Welsh Academy's English language section. A friend and contemporary of Dylan Thomas. click link for very interesting Wikipedia atricle on his life and career.