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Mary-Ann Constantine reviews
Fabula
by Llŷr Gwyn Lewis

These stories – linked together by the in-and-out flittings of the moth (Fabula zollikoferi) which gives the collection its name and its rather beautiful cover – take us on all kinds of journeys. Journeys in space, from Argentina to Japan; journeys in time, from the present back to the deep medieval past and onwards to an imagined future. Journeys in the Welsh language, too, since the author is a dab hand at mimicry, and treats us to everything from marginal glosses in the Black Book of Carmarthen, to Renaissance humanist meditations, folktales in rich Glamorgan Gwenhwyseg, a volley of brutal, angry Gog, and the awkward, uptight prose of a nineteenth-century missionary (mercifully, she loosens up). Many of the subjects and themes are traditional enough to make your hair (or your toes) curl: the hunt for Cantre’r Gwaelod; a Welsh couple on a pilgrimage to Patagonia; tales of pirates and wreckers on the Glamorganshire coast; a group of young people, all with names out of the Mabinogion, struggling for a Free Wales under a lost leader called Arthur. But the treatment is decidedly modern – clever, sophisticated, literary, and distinctly, well, European. It is not surprising to learn that Literature Across Frontiers chose Llŷr Gwyn Lewis as one of their ‘ten new voices’ from Europe.

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