The double-page map of Wales in the Longman Atlas for Irish Schools used to fascinate me. Where there weren't mountains, there were towns, loads of them, and big ones – towns that would be regarded as cities in Ireland. Denoted by heavy circles with dots in them, there must have been 20 in the 25,000- to 100,000-people bracket. (In Ireland there were only four.) Of the 10,000- to 25,000-people towns – denoted by empty circles – there were many, many more; dozens, probably. (In Ireland, only nine.) They were found in two clusters: a necklace along the north coast, and a much bigger clump in the south, stretching from the Bristol Channel deep into the Cambrian massif, wherever brick foundations could find purchase before the valleys flattened out into boggy plateaus.
I can remember the names of most of these towns without needing to consult my old atlas. South Wales had the more melodious and evocative names: Maesteg, Pontypool, Cwmbran, Merthyr Tydfil and – my favourite - Ystradgynlais. All these mini-cities evenly spread apart seemed to suggest an important civilization, like Flanders with its textile and merchant towns, the city states of northern Italy, or the rebel Swiss cantons.
In Ireland we tend to think of the South Wales towns as coal-mining communities, but they didn’t all begin as, or become, mining towns. I recall, from travelling through South Wales as a boy, en route to Tenby or Chepstow or to England, terrifying flame-spouting flues in Port Talbot, a steel town. Barry, south of Cardiff, is a classic Victorian seaside resort. And Caerphilly – the setting for most of the stories in Thomas Morris’s debut collection We Don’t Know What We’re Doing – owes its fame to the Norman warrior families who made it a military base and built its enormous castle.
But coal was the area’s literal and figurative bedrock, coal gave the place its wealth and meaning, and when the coal industry was killed off in the eighties, every town in the South Wales coalfield suffered badly. In the last couple of decades, these places are finding their feet again, as new types of community, but it’s been a tentative and humbling transition. Proud former world-beaters like Rhondda and Ebbw Vale are now service-industry centres, or commuter towns, or places to buy things in other words, they’re like everywhere else. Town centres all resemble each other – strips of gum-spotted cobble-lock paving, enlivened by funky lampposts and bland statuary, and lined with Lush outlets, fast-food shops, Cash 4 Gold outlets, and so forth. It’s no longer the satanic-mill country of yore, not exactly, but it is boring, deadening – humiliating, even, when you’re surrounded by the slag mounds of industry.
Functionless communities condition doubt in the people in them. The characters of Thomas Morris's superb book – subsisting in the shadow of the castle keep, the trembling lights of Cardiff on the far side of Caerphilly Mountain in one direction, the sealed-up mines of Glamorgan and Gwent in the other – are at a loss to know where their lives are going. They are as confused and bereft as these stories are elegant and substantial. They're mainly young people, and like young people everywhere, they make their own entertainment, with often funny consequences. (Though the oldest people in the book, Jimmy Hughes and his chums in Strange Traffic, are the funniest of all.)
To laugh while reading these stories is to feel a release, as you’ll go through the wringer as their protagonists do. As the narrator of the wonderful How Sad, How Lovely puts it, in lines that could serve as a keynote for the collection: “I couldn’t put words to these feelings and the way they swung. Some days it felt as if the feelings weren’t even inside me. They were airborne – in Caerphilly’s stupid streets – and I just happened to breathe them in.”
I’m not surprised that I found myself caring deeply about these fictional Caerphiladelphians, that they’re such sophisticated, real-seeming creations, as Tom has been a generous and rigorous developer of literary talent since he took over as the editor of The Stinging Fly magazine some years ago. It stands to reason that his work, too, is generous, precisely wrought and full of feeling. This is a book about certainly-drawn uncertain people, in a certain place, and you’ll search ages before you find another collection that so well evokes a place through its people.
I’ve never been to Caerphilly. But here it is now. And you know what? Caerphilly feels a lot like Dén Laoghaire, Bray, or Roscrea. It feels absolutely true. It feels like most large towns, and you’ll recognise it too.
Gavin Corbett’s latest novel is Green Glowing Skull (4th Estate). He is the current Irish Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin
We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris is published by Faber, at £12.99. Hodges Figgis offers a 10 per cent discount to Irish Times Book Club readers.
Throughout January, we will be exploring this stories with articles by the author, critics and fellow writers.
Morris is editor of The Stinging Fly magazine and edited Dubliners 100, a Tramp Press collection of stories updating James Joyce’s original to mark its centenary.
