The Dreams of Max & Ronnie
Page 9
And they are very peculiar pieces. ‘Rhonabwy’s Dream’, unlike the other tales in the Mabinogion, came probably not from an oral tradition but a written one. Its author is aware of tradition and, as Chaucer would later have it, ‘authority’, but s/he extracts from it the raw ingredients of satire and parody; not until Monty Python and the Holy Grail would the Arthurian myth and its concomitant notions of chivalry face such bombardment. There’s a glorious irreverence in having the knights splash through the ordure of cows and sleep in bug-crawled beds, as there is in the total lack of reader-friendly explication; the narrative scaffolding of Arthurian romance itself is here undermined, suggesting an eschewal of cultural authority and precedent that swings harmoniously along with many current attitudes.
Contrasting with ‘Rhonabwy’s Dream’, which does not indulge in direct personal reference, ‘The Dream of the Emperor Maxen’, as Sioned Davies’ introduction tells us, directly concerns the actual historical figure of Magnus Maximus, who became emperor of Britain in AD383. A possible transposition here suggested itself attractively; to turn Rhonabwy’s dream-figures into recognisable contemporary personages, and allow Maxen himself to become something of a generic city scally. Obviously this meant that I had to forego any extensive mirroring, and, despite the long hours of scribbling and brain-wringing, I could not invent convincing analogues for either Ffyrdd Elen or Cynan, Maxen’s brother-in-law, who founds Brittany. But I never felt that measurable transliteration was the point. And besides, I’m sure that the iconoclastic authors of the Dreams would approve.
But to return to matters oneiric, and the Windy City. Re-reading my words at a distance of a few months and several thousand miles, I was taken somewhat aback by the level of my own disgust and dismay, particularly in ‘Ronnie’s Dream’. The piece seems aghast, appalled by its targets; so, of course, satire should be, and often is (think of Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’), but, at that distance from the country and society and government that I was writing about, and adrift in a foreign milieu which I was having great fun exploring (although it does share shortcomings with my subjects), I was a wee bit startled by my own seething. Not for long, however; I recognised it again that afternoon when, in a bar, a fellow drinker told me that every child in Britain and America under six years old has an invisible barcode tattoed on the nape of his or her neck, and again when, that night, in the Green Mill club, a crowd of jocks asked the bouncer if they could sit at the table ‘where Mister Capone used to sit’. Both Rhonabwy’s and Ronnie’s Dreams are enraged at this; the painless and stupid joy of obedience, the unthinking capitulation to the otiose and attenuative side of myth-making. No matter that these people were just concretising dreams; a reality is found in the acceptance of an invented tangibility (albeit invisible), as Rhonabwy’s chronicler knew. And, central to the anger of the dreams, for me – their energiser and propellant – is the nightmarish aspect of a people marching with eyes wide open towards their own destruction. Only in dreams can you not run away from the juggernaut or the monster or the man in the mask: only in dreams, or in despair. So it is with observing the species’ trajectory today; we see the flames on the horizon yet we continue to run towards them. This is dream logic. This is the terror of dream logic. And from which chase-dream do you awake more hungry for consciousness, the one in which you are chased or the one in which you are doing the chasing? Today, such choices are a luxury that we cannot afford, because they’re not dreams any more; they may seem like such, but they’re happening in the waking world, the one, apparently, of sense. The one inhabited by us and by generations yet to be born. How the definitions have been smudged.
Still, the Mabinogion, a millennium old, continues to live and breathe and pulse, galvanised every so often by various and diverse treatments and appreciations, in film, animation, theatre, literature. The world it examines and praises and, at times, excoriates, remains, in parts, familiar, lending itself freely and generously to re-interpretation. It’ll be around for as long as we are.
Niall Griffiths
New Stories from the Mabinogion
GWYNETH LEWIS
THE MEAT TREE
A dangerous tale of desire, DNA, incest and flowers plays out within the wreckage of an ancient spaceship in The Meat Tree, an absorbing retelling of one of the best-known Welsh myths by prizewinning writer and poet, Gwyneth Lewis.
An elderly investigator and his female apprentice hope to extract the fate of the ship’s crew from its antiquated virtual reality game system, but their empirical approach falters as the story tangles with their own imagination.
By imposing a distance of another 200 years and millions of light years between the reader and the medieval myth, Gwyneth Lewis brings the magical tale of Blodeuwedd, a woman made of flowers, closer than ever before: maybe uncomfortably so.
After all, what man has any idea how sap burns in the veins of a woman?
Gwyneth Lewis was the first National Poet of Wales, 2005-6. She has published seven books of poetry in Welsh and English, the most recent of which is A Hospital Odyssey. Parables and Faxes won the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize and was also shortlisted for the Forward, as was Zero Gravity. Her non-fiction books are Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression (shortlisted for the Mind Book of the Year) and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage.
OWEN SHEERS
WHITE RAVENS
“Hauntingly imaginative...” – Dannie Abse
Two stories, two different times, but the thread of an ancient tale runs through the lives of twenty-first-century farmer’s daughter Rhian and the mysterious Branwen… Wounded in Italy, Matthew O’Connell is seeing out WWII in a secret government department spreading rumours and myths to the enemy. But when he’s given the bizarre task of escorting a box containing six raven chicks from a remote hill farm in Wales to the Tower of London, he becomes part of a story over which he seems to have no control.
Based on the Mabinogion story ‘Branwen, Daughter of Llyr’, White Ravens is a haunting novella from an award-winning writer.
Owen Sheers is the author of two poetry collections, The Blue Book and Skirrid Hill(both Seren); a Zimbabwean travel narrative, The Dust Diaries (Welsh Book of the Year 2005); and a novel, Resistance, shortlisted for the Writers’ Guild Best Book Award. APoet’s Guide to Britain is the accompanying anthology to Owen’s BBC 4 series.
RUSSELL CELYN JONES
THE NINTH WAVE
“A brilliantly-imagined vision of the near future...one of his finest achievements.” – Jonathan Coe
Pwyll, a young Welsh ruler in a post-oil world, finds his inherited status hard to take. And he’s never quite sure how he’s drawn into murdering his future wife’s fiancé, losing his only son and switching beds with the king of the underworld. In this bizarrely upside-down, medieval world of the near future, life is cheap and the surf is amazing; but you need a horse to get home again down the M4.
Based on the Mabinogion story ‘Pwyll, Lord of Dyfed’, The Ninth Wave is an eerie and compelling mix of past, present and future. Russell Celyn Jones swops the magical for the psychological, the courtly for the post-feminist and goes back to Swansea Bay to complete some unfinished business.
Russell Celyn Jones is the author of six novels. He has won the David Higham Prize, the Society of Authors Award, and the Weishanhu Award (China). He is a regular reviewer for several national newspapers and is Professor of Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, London.
HORATIO CLARE
THE PRINCE’S PEN
The Invaders’ drones hear all and see all, and England is now a defeated archipelago, but somewhere in the high ground of the far west, insurrection is brewing.
Ludo and Levello, the bandit kings of Wales, call themselves freedom fighters. Levello has the heart and help of Uzma, from Pakistan – the only other country in the free world. Ludo has a secret, lethal if revealed.
Award-winning author Horatio Clare refracts politics, faith and the contemporary world order through the prism of one of the
earliest British myths, the Mabinogion, to ask who are the outsiders, who the infidels and who the enemy within...
Horatio Clare is a writer, radio producer and journalist. Born in London, he grew up on a hill farm in the Black Mountains of South Wales as described in his first book Running for the Hills, nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Horatio has written about Ethiopia, Namibia and Morocco, and now divides his time between South Wales, Lancashire and London. His other books include Sicily through Writers’ Eyes, Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope and A Single Swallow for which he was the recipient of a Somerset Maugham Award.