Flame and Slag

by Ron Berry, Leighton Andrews (Foreword)

In this classic masterpiece, originally published in 1968, dysfunctional lovers Rees Stevens and Ellen Vaughan must uncover and interpret Ellen's father's journal in order to make sense of their own lives. Faulknerian in its range, hard driven in its narrative telling, singular in style, and fierce in its moral thrust, this richly complex novel uses the fictional sieve of Caib Colliery and the village of Daren to give meaning to the kaleidoscopic history of all of the South Wales valleys over the last century.

Genres: Fiction

250 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Ronald Anthony "Ron" Berry was a Welsh writer of English language novels and short stories. Many of Berry's books reflect the working class of the industrial Rhondda Valleys where he grew up and lived for most of his life.

Largely overlooked during his lifetime, Berry has more recently been embraced by contemporary Welsh authors including Rachel Trezise and Niall Griffiths, and also by contemporary researchers.

The Glamorgan County History series describes Berry as "...unjustly neglected... ...whose fiction thrives on those very aspects of Rhondda life that broke the spirit of Gwyn Thomas's imagination."

Reviews

[Aran Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's 40 years since the year long miners strike began. I've been listening to podcasts, watching documentaries and reading what I can of mining life

I grew up in the shadow of Bedwas Colliery, long since closed down when I played football on Trethomas football pitch

This book is set in the late 60s when cracks in coal mining as a industry were more than just starting to appear

Ron Berry writes as people from Welsh valleys speak; poetically, venomously, urgently and beautifully

I love his use of dialect and Wenglish, it's like listening to the old boys talk in the ruperra club, Trethomas where I spent so much of my younger years

I only live up the road from where I grew up, 15 mins or so, but the feeling of Hiraeth reading this book comes strong and fast

If you want to understand the effect of coal mining and how life in the Welsh valleys absolutely revolved around the success or failure of the pit, then read this book

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a mixed bag of styles from very poetic and Dylan Thomas-esque at points to quite dry and factual when dealing with facts about mining and coal production. As a result not always the easiest read but enjoyable and enlightening nonetheless. Very glad to see the Library of Wales reprint so many of these books although disappointed that so few of them get any wider reach given that they provide a working class counterpoint to most of the rediscovered classics that seem to be published (not meant a criticism of the latter as enjoyable as I love them as well!).

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Riven as a burnt-out aesthete, vitality siphoned up, drained away from inside his skull, John Vaughan lay baby-limp on a small, brand-new settee in Number 9 Thelma Street. You wouldn’t recognize him from the stark, owl-faced photograph in Caib institute committee room. He looked petrified, petrifying, his tiny dog-fretful blue eyes ambushed below white, furry eyebrows. His lamby curled haircut belonged to Arcadia, bulked milkily white behind his ears and on his neckline. Rivose creases dug into the putty-grey flesh of his jowls and brow, like the drying-out carcass of a hairless, foetal mammal.”

The dying John Vaughan, “huhrring and hissing emphysema”, leaves a journal of his days in the newly sunk Caib Pit to his son-in-law who sees the same pit closed. Together, they tell the story of a close community and its gradual dissolution – a story that Ron Berry, who went down the pit at Rhondda Fawr age fourteen, knew only too well. “We’ve been fighting losing battles since the Industrial Revolution…[this place] is a scrap-heap, and I’m on it.”

Ron Berry’s your man if you relish a bit of lush prose, but it runs in hidden seams amongst the sometimes clipped, sometimes bantering dialogue and the sudden bitter rants against life, the universe, and the National Coal Board.

Though rarely feted in his lifetime, I’d suggest Ron Berry is one of the best of the South Wales writers based on the two books of his that I’ve read. Not so wedded to grim, slice-of-life socialist realism as some of his contemporaries – but more than real enough, and thankfully never tedious.

[Billy Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surely one of the foremost chroniclers of south Wales. Ron Berry is a criminally neglected writer and while he is tentatively taking his deserved place under the critical spotlight now, a lot remains to be said about his preternaturally sensitive evocations of mining, loss, nature, love and conflict in the south Wales valleys. Indeed, Flame and Slag is all of these things and much more. Berry does things with language that often defies description. His prose is a melting-pot of technical mining jargon, the sociolect of Welsh industrial communities and an epic reverence for nature's brutal indifference to human activity. Part of the genius of Berry was that he was one of the first writers to really capture the idiolect of miners. What ensues is a nuanced and sprawling kaleidoscope of south Walian life in the 1960s.

Flame and Slag is set in an industrial south Wales in sharp decline. A strong class point is consistently recapitulated throughout, but it is a distinctive 'Welsh' voice that emerges. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, the concerns of cultural nationalists are depicted as unrelated or irrelevant to what is happening in austerity and the poverty of a south Wales that is rapidly becoming de-industrialised. The novel anatomises the death throes of a collective identity rooted in the working-class solidarity of the tumultuous 1920s and 1930s. Welsh-language intellectuals are portrayed scathingly as ineffectual, effete, and who are to a certain degree feminised by a community desperately clutching to its masculine working-class traditions, even as these are quite literally being destroyed by the National Coal Board.

Berry, in his own way, signalled a profound internal historical fracture in the urban centres of Welsh industry that he so vividly depicted.

[Alan Fricker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoying these from the nat library of wales.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good - some great prose with an interesting and neglected subject matter.