Dr Sue Asbee, is a Lecturer in Literature at the Open University and an authority on the work of Margiad Evans. Publications include: Yellow Book Writers The Women Aesthetes: British Writers, 1870 - 1900, vol. 3 London: (Pickering & Chatto, 2013), and The Twentieth Century London: (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) edited with Sara Haslam. Novelist, essayist, poet and writer of short stories, with a lifelong identification with the Welsh border country, Margiad Evans - the pseudonym of Peggy Eileen Whistler (1909-1958) - was one of the most remarkable women writers of the mid-twentieth century. She had published four novels and was known for her brilliant descriptions of the natural world.
This final novel by Margiad Evans is an extraordinarily passionate
and intense piece. The tortured love affair, which is one of its
strands, was inspired by Emily Brontes work and, as with Brontes
moor, the landscape is very much a character in the novel. Creed is
set in the semi-rural slum district of a border town whose ugly
vitality (and terrible weather) surrounds and colours the
action.
Creed is a story of unrelenting pain and isolation. All the main
characters are thought-tormented by their inherited faith, their
past crimes, present obsessions or physical fears. The only fairly
comfortable characters are those who live in the upper town: John
Bridges and his mistress (though somewhat socially isolated) enjoy
a life not only of material comfort but also one not haunted by the
fear of God a fear which drives Bridges clerk, Dollbright, almost
to madness. Dollbright is the central character and readers first
encounter him at his most judgemental. He curses Rev. Morriss as a
blasphemer. Later, Morriss describes him as a wild enemy to us and
to our century, with the primitive strength to condemn. Dollbrights
total lack of human sympathy, his contempt and hatred for other
men, expose his faith as unchristian, but his human weakness and
redeeming feature is his love for his wife. This conflict drives
him close to suicide, but finally to a kind of freedom and
humanity.
The opening of the novel, Ifor Morrisss extraordinary sermon,
asserts the redemption of all, however sinful, through Gods
presence in every soul. This could be seen as special pleading by a
flawed priest but is rather played out as a true revelation at the
heart of the novel. Creed depicts almost unendurable suffering and,
in one character, it is totally self-inflicted: Gwen Trouncer is
drawn as vile in every way, a living nightmare, but ultimately
there is pity even for her.
The language of the novel is as extreme as its emotions and
sometimes it is definitely over the top, but its almost surreal
vitality is a result of trying to depict states of mind far beyond
verbal expression. Dollbright, feeling suicidal, runs home in the
dusk: He felt he was running down an open throat, that he could not
bear it if the sky too closed upon his eyes and squeezed him
between two meeting masses. [] He had no hearth in his thought.
The author is well aware how far from most of her readers this
world is, and every now and then she breaks the conventions of
narration to assert her presence, her personal knowledge of such a
place and the truth that only fiction can tell. Of the dregs of
society she depicts, she also says, What are the dregs if they are
not the essence of the whole. She sometimes struggled to depict the
mental states of that essence but, for all its excesses, in Creed
she produced a powerful and compelling work.
Caroline Clark
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the
following acknowledgment should be included: A review from
www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi
gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar
www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
*Welsh Books Council*
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