This essay first appeared in The New Welsh Review.
1 Introduction
Surprise was my chief emotion on completing – soon after its reissue by the University of Wales Press in 1992 – a first reading of Glyn Jones's The Island of Apples. Surprise, first, at the book's sheer quality. I'd read The Valley, the City, the Village (1956), Jones's first novel, some years before, and thought it a failure. But the low expectations with which my reading of The Island of Apples began were soon blown away. How was it that a novel so good could have vanished from sight for a quarter of century, to be almost unknown and completely unsung? I was immediately convinced that the book was a masterpiece: not only its multi-talented author's masterpiece in any genre, but a masterpiece, indeed a classic, both of Welsh literature in English and of literature about children. For me the book was up there with Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica and William Golding's Lord of the Flies. At Coleg Harlech I immediately included it as a set text on a module entitled "Childhood in Anglo-Welsh Fiction", reading it alongside A High Wind and Dylan Thomas's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. But I felt another sort of surprise also: surprise at the novel's modernity of conception. I'd long assumed that literary modernism had made zero impact on the conservative tradition of the Anglo-Welsh novel: but here was a novel which single-handedly turned that assumption upside-down. First published in 1965, The Island of Apples might have been slow coming; but at least it had come.
The new edition included a long introduction by Belinda Humfrey. Wide-ranging and interesting as it was, that introduction raised more questions than it answered. I looked up Leslie Norris's discussion of the novel in his Writers of Wales volume on the author and found it disappointingly brief. Soon essays began to appear on Jones in New Welsh Review: two in one issue, by Tony Brown and Ian Bell; then a third, by John Pikoulis.1 As far as coverage of The Island of Apples was concerned, Pikoulis's was the best of the three: I recognised Pikoulis's excitement at the brilliance of Jones's text as my own. But none of the writers articulated a second feeling that had possessed me as I read at least as strongly as excitement: confusion – the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land with no signposts to guide me; or, to be more precise, of being lost in a mind increasingly lost to itself.
Since my first encounter with the book, I've watched dozens of students striving to come to terms with it. Their dual response is invariably the same: fascination on the one hand, disorientation on the other; but the first is always strong enough for them to live with the second and press on to the last page – when the attempt to understand what they've read can begin in earnest.
Critics rarely consider the experience of reading it as a factor worth interrogation during the process of interpreting a novel. But in the case of The Island of Apples it's very relevant. The reader experiences disorientation because Dewi Davies experiences it. The reader fails to make sense of what's happening because Dewi fails to make sense of it. Disorientation, one might say, is Glyn Jones's strategy. He gives us Dewi raw: his perceptions, thoughts, emotions as he experiences them: his sense of the horror and the wonder of the world; his sense of beauty and his sense of anguish. I say "as he experiences them", but that's not quite right, of course. Although it seems that way to the reader, although The Island of Apples is very much Dewi's narrative, it's neither stream-of-consciousness (as Ian Bell wrongly claims) nor cast in the present tense. No, it's past tense from start to finish, from "I... saw Karl Anthony" (page 7) to "I saw the green rain" (page 256). Yet we seem, as Dewi seems, to be in the midst of things even as he, and we, keep our distance from them by virtue of that ever-present past tense. A part of the reader is plunged into the torrent of events even as a part of the reader remains standing on the bank, safely observing the crashing river-waters as they pass.
To register narrator's and reader's reciprocal and necessary confusions is to point to the chief constituent of this novel's modernity – uncertainty: an unreliable narrator produces an unstable narrative. Since all we can know is what Dewi can tell us, since there is no voice outside the narrator's to verify his text, we can be sure of the factuality of nothing in that text – which is, I suppose, another way of saying that in it "the real" and "the illusory", the everyday and the fantastic, are equally authentic. And yet, when the novel begins, everything seems plain-sailing. There we are, with Dewi Davies and his friends, in the solidly-created High Street of Ystrad, a Welsh valley town. Simple realism, we think, and do not feel the need to cudgel our minds. But on the last page, in storm-tossed woods by a fateful river, he has – and we have – reached a very different kind of locality – a symbolist one. The novel, in fact, spans the spectrum of fictionality: in it there is fiction that looks like realism, and fiction that looks like romance. In The Island of Apples we start with one and end with the other; and in the middle they get mixed up – inextricably.
An unreliable narrator and an unstable text. That means unstable events and unstable characters, too. Often we cannot know whether what Dewi tells us happened actually happened – happened, that is, in the fiction's reality-realm or in its dream-realm – or whether a character actually did what Dewi says he did or she did. The novel is thoroughly problematic. It has some of the properties of a metafiction, but falls short of full metafictional status because it's an unselfconscious text. It's modernist rather than postmodernist. Dewi remains unaware of the nature of the confusions that assail him. If he were a postmodern narrator, he'd foreground his confusions and perhaps attempt to analyse them. But it's a condition of Glyn Jones's undertaking that Dewi remain a serious being and the victim of his experiences; he cannot rise above them by way of the postmodern narrator's ironic self-consciousness. The child hasn't yet fathered the man.
As Ian Bell has pointed out, The Island of Apples is lightly plotted. But to claim, as he does, that this gives it "the sense of being an extended short story rather than a completely integrated book" is to misread it, to mistake its nature and to ride roughshod over its modernist credentials. The modernists thought plot dispensable, and were happy to consign it to the bin. Instead they opted for rhythm, symbolism, and myth as ways of giving form and unity to their texts. All these elements figure significantly in this book – and hence in this discussion. But let us first focus on
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2 The dialectic
"The Island of Apples... is also, surely, a novel about the inadequacy of romantic apartness." – Tony Brown
Commentators on The Island of Apples commonly highlight the clash between the claims of realism and romance in the life and mind of Dewi Davies – or between the claims of mundane contingency and poetic imagination. (As I've suggested, this is also a clash between fictional modes and is fought out in the stylistic arena of the text.) The prevailing view is that realism prevails, romance is rejected, and that it's right this should be so: Leslie Norris, for example, writes that Dewi Davies "waits until he is strong enough to take the world on its own terms"; he
knows his brief shimmering childhood is coming to an end and that the weather is going to be bleak and grey. When he's ready for such knowledge, he gets rid of Karl. 2
This, I believe, is a facile conclusion which cannot be supported by a careful reading of the book's closure. Before engaging Leslie Norris in detail, however, it's necessary to look more closely at the terms of the dialectic that selects Dewi Davies as its human battle-field.
A brief literal account of the book might run as follows. Its narrator, Dewi Davies, is a sensitive and impressionable boy on the verge of adolescence. Poised between the worlds of the child and the adult, he exists in a realm of uncertain perceptions and transitional values. He has attained an age at which youngsters begin to doubt and question adult behaviour, but haven't yet developed senses of selves strong enough to enable them to go their own ways. Opposites meet in Dewi's account of these worlds – the ugly and the beautiful, the real and the illusory, the mundane and the fantastic. All are described with equal attentiveness and given equal status in his imaginative life. At this crucial time, events of great moment occur, involving notable losses and gains. His father dies, to be followed by his mother. Simultaneously, a new influence comes into his life with the arrival of a new boy at school – the remarkable Karl Anthony. An intruder from another country, brave, romantic, resourceful and astonishingly self-possessed (things which Dewi might like to be but isn't), Karl sweeps Dewi off his feet. It's no exaggeration to say that Karl is the first love of Dewi's life. So powerful is his impact that the death of Mr Davies passes with virtually no comment from Dewi, and the death of Mrs Davies with a minimum of distress to him. A third adult, the grotesque headmaster Mr Roderick, is confronted and bested by Karl on a number of occasions, and later dies. When Karl announces his departure from Ystrad, Dewi expresses his wish to go with him, but the two are separated in a tempestuous finale.
Most critics would, I think, accept this as a no-frills account of Dewi's narrative. Yet there are problems in accepting the little I have put down as a reliable account of the "real" text of Dewi's life. Let me pose a crucial question: Is Karl a response to the series of deaths in the narrative, or does his arrival precipitate them? Several years older than Dewi, Karl is certainly in part a coping mechanism, and he becomes a surrogate parent to whom Dewi transfers that emotional dependency normally given to mothers and fathers: even when Dewi's mother is still alive, he confusedly addresses her as Karl (138). Hence Dewi's final separation from Karl cannot be other than tumultuous and traumatic, since in losing Karl, Dewi is finally suffering the cumulative uncushioned shock of his parents' deaths.
But are his parents really dead? We only have Dewi's word for the factuality of the four deaths in the novel – his father's, mother's, headmaster's, and that of Mr Powell, with whom he later lodges. It strains credibility that four such close deaths could occur within so short a time-span. The headmaster's is literally fantastic, Mr Powell's bizarre. So then, are these the fictions of a disturbed adolescent? Are they compass points in a dream-text which expresses its author's wishful rather than his actual life? Belinda Humfrey quotes a letter of Glyn Jones to herself:
The novel is, in one aspect, about things coming to an end. Dewi is a boy on the verge of adolescence. This is the time when our parents begin to 'die' to us and the figures of authority are also diminished...
So perhaps the four deaths are metaphorical. The "pursuers/rescuers" who come to reclaim Dewi at the novel's end from his brambled woods could well include his father, mother and headmaster – real life breaking back into his extended fantasy.
One of the problems the reader faces is the provenance of Dewi's text itself. Sophisticated in some ways, it is naive in others. Unreliable narrators are usually conscious tricksters, but Dewi's narrative is devoid of any sense of narrative dissemblance or deception. Two connected questions that may well occur to a puzzled reader are: when did Dewi write it, and in what state of mind? Soon after the events narrated? Years afterwards? If the latter, why does his narrative reconstruct his confusions as he lived through them instead of disentangling them and placing them so that he and the reader can make sense of what has happened to him? To ask these questions is of course to be confronted by their unanswerability. The text has no frame such as, for example, that provided by Nabokov in Lolita, where John Ray Jr. introduces Humbert Humbert's prison-composed confession and tells us that its author is dead. Glyn Jones gives us Dewi Davies raw and unexplained, and we must sink or swim with him.
No critic that I've read on The Island of Apples has questioned the literalness of the deaths of Mr and Mrs Davies and Mr Roderick, but then the habit of realistic reading dies hard in Wales, even in a text that has been suggestively claimed (by John Pikoulis) as an early example of magic realism. The native tradition favours grit (coal-dust, slate-dust), not foreigners with sword-sticks. And The Island of Apples, with its vivid sense of place and contingent things, has so often the appearance of realism. With Karl Anthony, however, the problem is impossible to duck. Glyn Jones is on record as saying that Karl is a "real" boy. Even if we do, this still leaves us with a headache: how much of Karl belongs to the novel's reality-realm, how much of him to its dream-realm? Trust the author not the tale, said D. H. Lawrence. Because it's impossible to decide where to draw the line, it's tempting to interpret Karl as a fully-formed imaginary friend. Suppose there exists an objective Karl, a fellow-pupil at Dewi's school, but that the Karl who enters Dewi's life, and becomes an intimate part of it, is Dewi's invention. This, surely, is the reading that makes most sense. For when we look at how Karl enters Dewi's life (not to mention the symmetrical way he leaves it), we see that he conforms to the imperatives of romance, not those of realism: "The first time I ever saw Karl Anthony, he was floating down past our house in the river." The sentence might have ended with an exclamation mark, but cool Dewi withholds it. Karl is apparently dead – and how, rationally, could he be otherwise? Mr Davies wades into the river and pulls him out. Attention focuses on Mr Davies, and when Dewi looks round, Karl has disappeared, leaving behind him a dagger elaborately embellished with snakes – a property straight out of Middle Earth. This is only the first time that Karl demonstrates an astonishing capacity for rising from the dead – unlike the authority-figures in Dewi's life, who now begin to die one by one, as if in response to some dark desire in Dewi to dismiss them from his life. Their talent for death is the obverse of Karl Anthony's talent for resurrection. The dagger is only directly involved in one death, Mr Roderick's, but it stands as the emblem of Dewi's under-mind, like the dagger that Macbeth sees before him, and seizes to kill the king. Karl's coming signals that time is up for Mr Davies, who succumbs almost immediately to pneumonia on account of the river. When Mrs Davies dies, Rees Mawr puts it down to the river again: "it's that damned river doing all the damage" (156). Karl, meanwhile, moves closer and closer to Dewi until he displaces the triumvirate of adults who shape Dewi's life, and he and Dewi share the attic room (a mental garret?) in Academy House. A house whose owner too is not long for this world... But powerful though it is, the fiction will prove impossible for Dewi to sustain indefinitely.
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3 Karl Anthony
"...I couldn't imagine my life if I were not able to turn to him..." (253)
If, in this view of the novel, the Karl in Dewi's life is Dewi's creation, and hence the text in which he figures dream-text (some of it in fact doubly dream-text, since there are specific occurrences of dreaming within Dewi's ongoing fictionalising), we must ask what it is he represents. The answer is implicit in what I've already written: he is freedom, he is imagination, he is the spirit of adolescent rebellion and romance. He is what, at this crucial period in his life, Dewi needs more than he needs his father, his mother, his headmaster – needs to such an extent that he wipes that trio out.
This Karl, therefore, is an essential part of Dewi, not something existing outside him. He can only be separated, or torn from Dewi at the cost of enormous pain. But while Karl is seductive, and hugely desirable, he is also dangerous.
We cannot doubt Dewi's massive need of Karl. Dewi's world is one of intense ugliness: or rather, to be more exact, the world as Dewi perceives it with his awakening knife-edge sensitivity is one of intense ugliness. Examples of this ugliness abound. Almost all the adult males are ugly: Mr Davies, with his "long red and white fur like a forest monkey" (29) and the "green ointment out of a tin stinking like goose-grease" (47) with which he tries to combat baldness; Mr Urquart, "yellow and cantankerous", with his "big back-fin" and knees "fastened straight on to his bum" (9); Uncle Walter with his black-scabbed gashed calf "the bright red of butcher's meat, very wide and deep and wet looking, and the shape of a smooth potato-furrow" (58); Rees Mawr with his concealed "hanging bag" (23); Mr Powell, with his red wig and "bulby" nose, networked with veins "scarlet and hard and shiny as threads of sealing-wax" (74); and Mr Roderick, tooth-inspector extraordinaire, who would
bring his heavy purple face down to yours, with its holes in the skin and the strong tale smell of his breath, and the brown edging of bad-stomach scum round the corners of his lips... (100)
If this, one thinks, is how grown men look to him, it's no wonder Dewi prefers the Peter Pan figure of Karl Anthony, who paradoxically combines an astonishing maturity of manner with a lack of scholastic knowledge that gets him put into a class younger than his age warrants.
What then of beauty? Dewi from the opening page demonstrates acute visual powers, but later he will, in a selfless act of transference, assign them to Karl, and claim that it's Karl who has taught him how to see. When Karl falls into rapt contemplation of some object or other, Dewi declares: "I didn't know what he was staring at". What Karl sees is what Gerard Manley Hopkins, in a poetic application of Duns Scotus's conception of "haecceitas", called the "thisness" or "inscape" of things:
He was fed by his eyes, he told me, and he always used to stop and look at the holly trees, he seemed as though he couldn't get over the light grey bark on them, with the tiny wrinkles in it; where a branch came out of the trunk, especially a small branch, the bark was often wrinkled around it, he said, there was a mass of fine curved lines and wrinkles, small and elegant and close together, beautiful as the bunches of lines around the eyes in human skin. (182-183)
Karl's visual powers are redemptive, and, in the dialectic of the novel, they counterpoint and counteract the ugliness which Dewi sees everywhere. In this passage, it's interesting that Karl relates the tree-wrinkles to human wrinkles: working from the natural to the human, his imagination redeems the latter. Before Karl, Dewi would have seen human wrinkles as ugly signs of mortality. Moved by a desire to please his mentor, Dewi begins to look out for such things himself, to nurture his own powers of seeing:
Between us we made up something about the little wing of an insect we found abandoned on a stone, it was like a tiny leaded window, the transparent parts iridescent, coloured bright red and blue and purple, like the stained glass of a cathedral, and between the tiny panes, rigid as iron, was the delicate black framework of veins that held the wing together. (184)
If one gives passages like the above their proper weight, it becomes difficult to dismiss Karl as something aberrant or inessential: he is the spirit of poetic imagination, and his is the spirit that animates Glyn Jones's own poetry of vivid Hopkinsian intensities: in "Esyllt", for example,
... this intense and silver snail calligraphy Scrawled here in the sun across these stones.
The stained glass insect wing belongs to daytime seeing; Karl is also a master of night sight. Indeed, he's a connoisseur of darkness, and in his accounts to Dewi of what he sees, there is a curious metaphorical exchange between the earthly and the heavenly:
Up in the valley, all Ystrad was dressed with lights, the small intense seedlings of the roadside lamps stretched out in a vast rigid pattern upon the earth, and the little heaps of the town lights floated everywhere, small intense clusters glittering in the over-all phosphorescence, showing where the shops were, or the pits; I saw laid out upon the dark floor of the valley the fallen constellations, the crystal skeleton of Ystrad, the diamond anatomy of a town. (133)
Karl is able to perceive patterns in both the large and the small. Such intensity of seeing is not without peril, however, if you lack the emotional and intellectual maturity to cope with what you see. As long as Karl is with Dewi, Dewi can absorb what the two together experience. But when Dewi is left alone, when Karl has withdrawn from him, he can be overwhelmed. This is what happens in a key passage in Part Three, section 2, where a telling shift occurs from the security of "we" to the isolation of "I". It is "lovely" for the two boys – the single integrated child – to watch and play with moon and stars, to feel the air and listen to the wind; but later, when Karl has gone, Dewi cannot sleep, and his mind reels:
I felt as if I was becoming faint and unconscious with the swirling mystery around me, as though I was slipping overwhelmed into everlasting oblivion. When I told Karl about the vastness and terror of my thoughts he smiled back at me, and nodded, and patted me in a comforting way on my back. (196)
When Karl is with him, the adolescent boy can cope with the full wattage of perceptions like this, and the universe, in its beauty and terror, seems manageable; but when Karl withdraws, he suffers a kind of mental vertigo. And as Dewi becomes ever more dependent on his Karl-self, so that self leads him into ever more disturbing experiences.
In the latter part of the novel, as imagination increasingly reveals its dark side, the pressure of imagining Karl comes to demand from Dewi the formal properties of dream-narrative. When, in the passages I have quoted above, Karl and Dewi look intensely at natural objects, they are wide awake. But increasingly a pattern emerges in which Dewi will fall asleep while Karl tells him a story, and enter the landscape of the story to act out a part. A typical example is Karl's account of Victor Yvetot (166-168). Victor, says Karl, got a local girl pregnant. One day the two of them set off to visit the girl, who lived in an old walled town. According to Karl, this "evil place" contained a huge black "forest bull" (plainly an image of rampant male sexuality, it is covered with thick fur like Mr Davies). In his dream, Dewi assumes Victor's role, and the walled town with its two great doors, changing into Ystrad, releases two streams of women and girls. Transformed into vengeful furies, the girls rush after Dewi and Karl in order to tear them to pieces. The dream now seems like nothing so much as a metaphor for male adolescent fear of female sexuality, and Dewi wakes up. 3
As the narrative gathers momentum, so the boundary in Dewi's dream-text between sleeping and waking further blurs. The two great set-pieces of the book's closing movement – the burning of Mr Roderick and the river-flight from Ystrad – mount a formidable argument in favour of the reading of the book I'm advancing here: that Dewi's Karl and everything in which he is involved is invention. Neither event is credible as a real-life event, and in neither case is it possible to draw a satisfactory line between what portion of it might belong to the book's reality-realm and what to its dream-realm. Romance, fantasy, unfettered imagination – whatever we call it – is now in control, and both we and Dewi are in its clutch. Psychically, Dewi reaches crisis-point. In the novel's metafictional arena, the struggle between realism (the black steamer) and romance (the white yacht) reaches a climax, and romance triumphs. But triumphs, paradoxically, only at the cost of breaking apart, and threatening Dewi with the realm of the mundane.
The book closes with boy – and reader, who has no option but to follow him there – floundering in a symbolic landscape:
I found myself in the middle of the woods with mounds of brambles everywhere. 'Karl!' I screamed again, 'Karl! Karl! Don't leave me ! Karl! Karl!' The lightning burned, it jigged and throbbed in the heavens like an unceasing agony pulsing through my flesh. The brambles held me fast although I struggled, and in the lamps of my pursuers I saw the green rain falling cold, my rescuers had landed from the steamer and were in the woods all around me. 'Karl! Karl!'
Leslie Norris, you will recall, believes that this ending represents a Dewi Davies who is ripe for knowledge of the bleak weather of adulthood, and here "gets rid of Karl". It's significant, however, that in order to support this viewpoint, Norris quotes only the novel's penultimate sentence, omitting those which precede and follow it. When one looks at the passage as a whole, it's difficult to conclude with him that Dewi "gets rid of Karl". What rather appears to happen, is that Karl is torn from Dewi by a power beyond Dewi's resistance. His divorce from Karl is mental agony; he struggles against the "brambles" that restrain him; the text ambivalently juxtaposes "pursuers" and "rescuers"; and Dewi's last words are a desperate, unregenerate cry for what is going from him.
Karl's departure in this dream - floating down the river in a symmetrical manner to the way in which he had entered and initiated the text - closes its perfect circle. In one sense, Dewi is his creator's experimental animal. Give a boy the spirit of imagination as an imaginary friend, and see where it leads him. Having twinned with him, Dewi doesn't want to lose Karl; he can imagine nothing worse than separation. To get him away, Glyn Jones has to tear Karl in a kind of anti-birth from the living flesh of Dewi's being. Dewi is bereft. But there is another way of looking at things. Dewi, we remember, had demonstrated considerable imaginative ability before the arrival of Karl. Thus we might see Karl as a phase in the development of that ability. Awakening to the richness of the world, Dewi dreams Karl in, nurtures him, and then dreams him out. But why must the improvement in Dewi's imaginative power wane? What, perhaps, must depart with Karl is the spirit of romance which is so much at odds with life in a town like Ystrad. Whichever of these interpretations we choose, we are left with a reading very different from Leslie Norris's. True, we may have reached a position not altogether different from Tony Brown's – "surely, a novel about the inadequacy of romantic apartness". That isn't, however, where I'd put the emphasis myself. The Island of Apples is surely a novel about the necessity of the creative faculty, despite its perils. Imagination may pull you away from the world, from necessary and difficult relationships at home and school, may sometimes wear the mask of escapism, but it also delivers the world up to you with an intensity that nothing else can match. Life would be unbearable without it. Hence Dewi's final cry.
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4 Rhythm and symbolism
I've already referred to Ian Bell's view of The Island of Apples; here is his judgement on its form:
If read purely as a narrative, the book is undeniably slight. Its central episodes are only loosely related to each other, and there is little sense of urgency in the plotting, giving it the sense of being an extended short story rather than a completely integrated novel.
This is comprehensively to misread the book. It's very much a novel, and its theme, as I hope to have shown, demands nothing less than novel-length exploration. I have already touched on the matter of plot, and suggested that the book is modernist in its sense of form. Instead of plot, it draws its coherence from three elements: an overall rhythm, an integrated network of symbols, and an underpinning of myth. It is time to examine each of these in turn.
Rhythm is very much a modernist term. It derives from musical theory, and the symbol-loving modernists, who wanted to push the novel in the direction of music, were much given to musical terminology. E. M. Forster is a case in point. In the final chapter of Aspects of the Novel, Forster prefers rhythm to pattern when speaking of the overall effect of certain novels precisely because it allows for a degree of looseness, whereas pattern presumes a more arithmetic regularity. The Island of Apples is a rhythmic novel; the narrative moves through a wave-like sequence of thematically linked and gradually intensifying episodes until it attains its final crisis-climax. These episodes constitute the chief events in Dewi's ever closer identification with Karl, and include: Karl's arrival by river, his appearance at the campfire, his climbing of the Nannies, the story of Victor Yvetot, the death and burning of Mr Roderick, Karl's departure by river. This sequence is logical and cumulative and displays craft and judgement on the author's part.
Incidental symbolism plays a supporting structural role. Here again, in the two most prominent symbols in the text, Glyn Jones's dialectical method is at work. As imagination, Karl Anthony is fire to Dewi Davies's water. As in Blake's Los, imagination, the sun, golden light and fire come together in the cluster of associations that attach themselves to Karl. Fire is Karl's natural element: he is Apollo the sun-god and Prometheus the fire-bringer – and an arsonist to boot. When Dewi sees him – or believes he sees him – in the yard at the Vaughan Arms4, he stand with "the dazzling light falling over his face like a golden visor" (53). Later, in the school, just prior to the confrontation with Mr Roderick, Dewi repeatedly emphasises Karl's golden hair:
... his hair had grown out long into lovely irregular waves, it was no longer white but had turned a pale golden colour. Compared with the two teachers struggling behind him in the wind he looked almost like a god. (149)
And when Mr Roderick seems on the point of administering a beating to Karl before the whole school, he is "saved" by "a burst of sunlight":
... before the strap could touch him his face became radiant, glowing like lit-up silver, and three livid red weals burned themselves diagonally across his forehead and down his cheek. (223)
The sun has projected the bars from a stained glass coat of arms in the hall windows across his face – an Apollonian shield. Speaking on one occasion of his homesickness, and of his weariness of the pettiness of life in Ystrad, Karl tells Dewi that he is
parched for a glimpse of the mysterious brightness burning at the back of the sun. That world is my home. (203)
At the very end of Part One, Dewi says that whenever he thinks of Karl, the thought
was like a warm glow, and very comfortable, the memory of his face was like being cold in winter and putting on a coat hot from in front of the fire. (62)
Karl's first significant intervention in Dewi's life occurs at the camp, where he bests Mr Roderick in the struggle over what to do with the knocked-out Jeffy Urquart. He lays Jeffy down near the fire, and, true to his word, the boy soon recovers. His parting words warn the boys to look out that night for a "mysterious fire in the sky" (109), and when Dewi does so, there it is:
... a huge fire burning high in the sky, a sort of bonfire resting on nothing at all, hung blazing in the middle of the darkness like a tremendous planet, just as Karl said there would be. (115)
But there is a dark side to this symbol-cluster. Is it Karl who sets fire to Mr Roderick's house? When the boys burn the headmaster's body, there is Karl again with his special grape-cork powder:
and every time he tossed a handful in there was a terrific explosion, and an outburst of the sweet smell, and the flames flared out of the blaze like angry dragon-fire burning towards him across the grass. (237)
Later that same night, alone, Dewi fears for Karl: his thoughts are "full of confusion and leaping flames". Imagination is dangerous, it can disrupt the mind which contains it.5 In order for Karl to be carried into Dewi's life, his natural element must be neutralised; he arrives unconscious, even dead, borne on the river that flows past Dewi's home. As Karl tells his friend:
'... I had only been in Ystrad a few hours when I nearly drowned myself. I never have any luck with water. Only fire.' (106)
Dewi's strongest association with water occurs after he has overheard an exchange between Rees Mawr and his grandmother about Mr Powell:
My mind was full of all sorts of strong feelings, they were in high waves charging across one another, like a rough sea sweeping in among rocks. (157)
This passage offers a key to the symbolism of Dewi's final dream, when Karl is wrenched from him. The forces of fire and water battle for supremacy in this gigantic mental storm. In attempting to throw his pursuers off the scent and electing to escape by water (246), Karl has turned his back upon his natural element, and the result is disastrous. Subdued once more by water, he is borne out of Dewi's world just as he had been carried in – unconscious or dead – leaving Dewi with a mind rent by angry dragon-fire:
The lightning burned, it jigged and throbbed in the heavens like an unceasing agony pulsing through my flesh. (256)
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5 Myth
In her Introduction to the 1992 edition, Belinda Humfrey points out the existence of Arthurian associations in the text. She starts with the epigraph from T. Gwynn Jones, "Ynys Afallon ei hun si felly" – "The isle of Avallon itself is thus". This Ynys Afallon ("island of apples"), she says, "keeps King Arthur alive with the potential to return to the 'real' world". She observes that Karl Anthony's initials are the same as King Arthur's, yet cannot satisfactorily identify him with Arthur: "he leaves the novel at its end... a lost hero but no King Arthur". A scattering of "hints", then, that raise more problems than they solve. Hence it isn't surprising to find Ian Bell writing:
... while these hints serve to heighten the atmosphere of the book, they are not easy to translate into any schematic array of symbolic meanings. And in any case, I feel the temptation to create a coherent symbolic framework for the book is misguided.
Bell is right about the difficulty of the task, but his assertion that "the incidents mean nothing more (and nothing less) than themselves" and that we shouldn't enquire further about them is a recipe for critical stultification. I'm no expert in Welsh Arthurian literature, but it strikes me that there's a whole raft of associations in the novel which derives from and points back towards that literature.
Let us start with Karl Anthony. When he vanishes from the river-bank after rising mysteriously from the dead, he leaves behind him, sticking upright in the earth in the ring of rope, a serpent-hilted dagger. Dewi plucks it from the ground. This event is reminiscent of nothing so much as Arthur's extraction of Excalibur from the stone. It is, of course, Merlin who has set it there; only a true king can withdraw it. Later, Dewi thinks he sees a golden-visored Karl in the yard of the Vaughan Arms, but when he gets into the yard only Myrddin, the "half-daft" odd-job boy is there. "Myrddin" is the Welsh version of Merlin; Jones's Abergarth is a fictionalised Carmarthen – Caerfyrddin, in Welsh, Merlin's Castle. In Geoffrey of Monmouth, Myrddin is the son of a nun from Carmarthen and an incubus – hence a "fatherless" child. In The Island of Apples, Dewi's granny claims that Karl's grandfather was a famous local tenor who travelled abroad, but both Karl's parents are dead (138). Karl is certainly something of a magician: he can, seemingly at will, return from the dead; he throws magic powder on the campfire; he exercises mesmeric powers. He is, like Merlin, a mentor, and trains Dewi in perception.
If Karl is Merlin, is Dewi Arthur? Well, his father was known as "Jack the Dragon" (112), suggesting Uther Pendragon or Uthr Bendragon, father of Arthur according to Geoffrey of Monmouth. His Uncle Walter – "my mother's stepbrother" (57) – the man with the gashed thigh, has the look of a semi-comic version of the Maimed King whom only blood from the Holy Grail can heal. Dewi inspects the wound, but can do nothing about it. The novel, of course, can only glance at Walter – the Maimed King belongs to an offshoot of the legend.
In The Black Book of Carmarthen there appear a series of prophetic verses entitled "Yr Afallennau" ("the apple-trees"). They concern the legend of Myrddin following his flight from the battle of Arfderydd to the Forest of Celyddon, and his prophecies about the fortunes of the Welsh. Here Merlin is a somewhat different figure from the one familiar to readers of Malory and Tennyson. In The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales, the contributor of the entry on "Yr Afallennau" writes:
Myrddin speaks in the first person in each stanza and in his addresses to the apple-tree, which sustains him with its sweet fruit, he attributes to it remarkable powers such as the ability to protect him from his pursuers, Rhydderch Hael and his men. He declares that he was a gold-torqued warrior in the battle of Arfderydd, but since the death of his lord Gwenddolau he has endured sickness and grief in the Forest of Celyddon for fifty years.6
A number of things in this passage call for comment in connection with Glyn Jones's novel. First, the idea of the "gold-torqued warrior" fits nicely with the imagery of golden light which follows Karl around. Second, Karl's "homesick" feelings in Mr Powell's "madhouse" of a boarding-house (203) echo Myrddin's sickness in his madness in Celyddon. Then there's the matter of apples. Early in the novel Dewi tells us about the orchard at the back of the house. It is "all dry land now, a real wilderness" (38) – not unlike the waste land of the Maimed King:
There were one or two decayed fruit trees about the place too, white-limed up to the armpits, old, and the branches covered with curly blue fur, but all we ever got off them were a few cracked apples tasting like corks. (39)
Here Dewi plays in a broken-down coach, like some fugitive prince from the land of Cinderella. In short, his playground is a fallen realm, a place far removed from the country of romantic enchantment and infinite possibility. It is only when Karl enters it that Dewi's world can be renewed, and the dangerous apples of Eden once more (metaphorically-speaking) tasted and found good.
The final point that demands attention concerns Myrddin's enemy, Rhydderch Hael. Interestingly the Companion writer uses the same word for him – pursuer – that Dewi uses at the end of his narrative for those who want to separate him from Karl. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, Rhydderch is known as Rodarchus, King of the Cumbri, and he defeats Guonnolous and his supporter Merlinus in battle. Rodarchus. Mr Roderick, alias Growler...7 At this point it begins to look as though there is nothing particularly random about Glyn Jones's headmaster's surname. To recap: Myrddin/Merlinus is defeated by Rhydderch/Rodarchus in battle, goes mad, withdraws into the Caledonian forest and lives on inspirational apples. Whither his enemy pursues him – using agents armed with sword-sticks in top hats and coats with astrakhan collars, perhaps...
One of the more curious inset stories in The Island of Apples derives from a book given to Dewi by "the mad woman in the Ystrad library". It deserves quotation in full:
The book was about a schoolboy from England, Rex or something or other his name was, he didn't have a mother and he was travelling abroad by train to see his father, who was an engineer building bridges over the deep ravines in some wild mountainous country. Well, at one of the frontier stops this Rex, because of his name I think it was, gets mistaken for the prince of that country by some fierce rebels on the look-out for him. They kidnap his train and want to put him on the throne instead of the king his uncle, who spends all his time gambling, and on yachts, and going about with actresses and that. The rebels are pretty mad when they find their mistake, because Rex hasn't got the royal birth-mark on his shoulder, but he's heard all their plans, and they take him to their hiding-place, a ruined castle on top of a hill, with a raven sailing round it, where they are going to shoot him. But I had had a look at the end and I could see everything was all right; this king, Rudolf his name was, falls overboard, trying to escape when the rebels capture the count's yacht, he'd had too much champagne to drink anyway, and the real Prince Carl is found and made king, and he and Rex become big friends, because somewhere between where I'd got to and the end Rex had saved his life, and risked his own life for him more than once. (40)
"Guff" this may be, as Dewi declares it, but it looks like the template for many of his later romantic imaginings. Its basic pattern, Rex + Carl v. usurper Rudolf, supplies the basic pattern of Dewi's anti-authoritarian fantasy-life. King Rudolf is clearly Rodarchus/Roderick. While for Rex and Carl... should we read Dewi and Karl? Perhaps, but in the story, interestingly, both Carl (the true king) and Rex (the supposed king, whose name of course ironically means king) can be kings. The two exist in a kind of symbiosis, always threatening to merge with one another. But this of course anticipates the relationship of Dewi and Karl, who as blood-brothers (228), self and alter-ego, Arthur and Merlin, cannot exist without one another and are never wholly distinct. Hence the teasing initials of Karl Anthony, which puzzled Belinda Humfrey.
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6 Conclusion
For the English Romantic poet John Keats, the proper function of imagination was a question of perennial importance. In journey-work such as "Sleep and Poetry" he sees its task as being to provide an antidote to and a means of escape from "real things" which, unopposed, "like a muddy stream, would bear along / My soul to nothingness".8 By the time of the great Odes, however, his mind has toughened and he sees that imagination, if it is to be worth anything, must seek to encompass the world of suffering and death. In "Ode to a Nightingale", for instance, the urge to escape is continually thwarted by consciousness of that adult world: his imagination confronts and contains palsy and consumption on the one hand, and entertains visions of magic casements and fairy lands forlorn on the other.
A century and a half separates Keats from Glyn Jones, but it seems to me that in The Island of Apples Jones plunges into the same imaginative waters - and deep and mysterious they are, too. The antithetical pressures of imagination - its desire to penetrate and grasp deep reality and its desire to fly away from it to a realm of wish-fulfilment (pressures which Coleridge in Biographia Literaria re-classified as imagination and fancy) – meet in Dewi/Karl. At the end of the book, Glyn Jones rips Karl out of Dewi's being, and the boy suffers the ultimate in anguish. Yet the Dewi who narrates the text has survived his 'separation' from his imaginary friend to write the history of their twinning, and his text shows that imagination is alive and well in him. And of course Dewi Davies is Glyn Jones. By sending his child-surrogate the immortal diamond-eyed angel of imagination, Jones was able to explore his own residual artistic self-divisions. In doing so he produced a masterpiece, an entirely satisfying and cogent novel, one that marries the modes of realism and romance and operates in accordance with the imperatives of modernism, elevating rhythm over plot and making considerable use of symbolism and myth. The Island of Apples seems to me one of the few unassailable peaks of Anglo-Welsh fiction in the twentieth century.
(1999)
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Notes
1 "Shock, strangeness, wonder: Glyn Jones and the Art of Fiction" by Tony Brown: New Welsh Review 23 pp. 43-53; "Forever Young" by Ian Bell: New Welsh Review 23 pp. 54-55; "The Wounded Bard" by John Pikoulis: New Welsh Review 26 pp. 22-43.
2 Glyn Jones: Writers of Wales (University of Wales Press 19) p.
3 Ystrad's two Freudian doorways hark back to Dewi's Aunt Bronwen Big-doors, whose nickname remains ambiguous.
4 Mr Powell calls Karl "Vaughan" (162). Questioned by Dewi, Karl says that Vaughan is his middle name. "Vaughan" derives from the Welsh word bychan/fychan: "small".
5 There is, in fact, ice in Karl's fire. His eyes at one point seem to Dewi "like icicles" (116); there are "miniature snowstorms in all his finger-nails" (118); and his hair, when the sun has bleached it, resembles "a cap cut from the dense fur of the polar bear" (149). All these associations emphasise Karl's north European, Aryan characteristics, as well as the element of cold calculation in his nature. 6 In a Strange Land Ed. Meic Stephens (Oxford University Press 1986) p. 6.
7 Rhydderch: "As a name which was difficult for English speakers to say or write, it appears under many guises... RODERICK is one approximation." (The Surnames of Wales by John & Sheila Rowlands, 1996, p. 144)
8 Lines 157-159. See The Poems of John Keats ed. Mirian Allott (Longman 1970) p. 76.
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