Novel
A Toy Epic
Emyr Humphreys · 1958
Synopsis
Three boys from the same corner of the north tell the same childhood in turn, one sentence each, without being introduced. One is a pastor's son, another comes from the town and the labour party, the third from a farm and the chapel. They go to the same school, live through the same thirties, cross paths and end up friends, while what separates them grows as they grow. War is approaching.
Context
The book appeared in 1958 from a London publisher, thirteen years after its author began writing it, and covers in a hundred and fifty pages what he would later put into seven volumes elsewhere. Its method is alternation: the voices take over from one another sentence by sentence, without quotation marks and without saying who is speaking, and the reader tells them apart by their vocabulary. Critics see in it an accomplished example of literary modernism. The author himself produced a Welsh version in the year of publication, under a title meaning the three voices.
Who it is for
One hundred and fifty pages in English, never translated. The first thirty are difficult: one has to learn to recognise the voices, and nothing helps.
Prizes and reception
The shortest and most widely read of its author's thirty novels, and the one put into the hands of students.