Griffri

by Christopher Meredith

In the dream I'm travelling very fast and without effort high over the ground as if I'm a bird flying. There's the trackless mass of trees and strips of mountain ridges and the thread of river like sour milk. The sky is dark blue and red like bruises. I swoop down and then up to miss smashing into the crowns of the trees and I see the bruised air and the black horizon. I come to a figure standing on the heather. He stands with his arms flung out, the fingers spread, like branches. I come close to his face, to his untidy red moustache and his head split by an appalling wound. On two nights separated by a gap of a dozen years, Griffri ap Berddig, a poet at the court of a minor Welsh prince of the twelfth century, tells his life story to a Cistercian monk. Part boast and part confession, his words turn into a compelling narrative which develops through an accumulation of obsessive images towards self-revelation. A complex mixture of historical detail and invention, Griffri is a serious and entertaining novel examining the limits of our knowledge of the world and ourselves. Christopher Meredith is a poet, novelist and currently lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. Born in Tredegar and educated at Abersytwyth and Swansea, he worked for some time in a south Wales steel plant, and as a teacher. His novels are Shifts , Griffri and Sidereal Time , and he is the author of a collection of poetry, Snaring Heaven . His books are taught in universities in Wales and England.

258 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Christopher Meredith (1955-) is a Welsh poet and novelist, writing mainly in English.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

It takes a considerable leap of the imagination to picture what your life might have been like, had you been born 800 years ago.

Poet and novelist Christopher Meredith comes from Tredegar as does his fictional counterpart Griffri ap Berddig, poet to the Prince of Gwynllwg. The novel is Griffri's own account of life in a turbulent world of change and loss. It is not a mediaeval romantic fantasy - no wizards or knights, no bold Welsh heroes and treacherous English villains. Instead, it is a novel that, although very much linked to the landscape, the events, and the people of twelfth century Wales, is in many ways timeless. The Welsh and French lords with their bodyguards, lawyers, and priests need little more than suits and sunglasses to become mafia dons. Yet all that most of them fight for is peace, security, and the hope of better times. Griffri believes he is a chronicler, though he realizes the songs he sings are just the same old flattery - "Hawk. Dragon. Wolf. Oak door of Gwynllwg" - and everyone, including the princes (whose grandfathers were kings and whose sons may be Norman vassals), knows it. "A poet affirms who we are, or who we think we are, as if that might hold everything in place, or shift it into a better place. I think I used to believe that," says Griffri. But even the story of his own life turns out to be false.

It's an odd and compelling book - vividly written and entirely self-contained. Christopher Meredith makes no link to the present and gives no quarter to anyone unfamiliar with the people and places of the mediaeval borderland. But you don't need to know the history to admire and enjoy the book. Nor do you need to be Welsh, though if you are, this chronicle of erosion and loss will echo down the centuries.

[Cath Beard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Total departure from the subject matter (and era) of Shifts. lots of swords and killings and things which could probably do with a dollop of Freudian interpretation.