Book Review: Addlands, by Tom Bullough

This was not a book I had heard of before I stumbled across it in a local bookshop. It was truly a serendipitous find.  I bought it because it was a book about the local area (well, somewhere about 15-20 miles from where I live) by a local author,  and I'm very glad I did. It is a totally absorbing read, lyrically beautiful and with the power to totally immerse the reader in the life of the isolated valley in mid-Wales where it is set.

It is huge in scope (but not in length, being a very manageable 293 pages long) following the fortunes of the Hamer family over 70 years and 4 generations as they scratch out a living from their hill farm. The characters are brilliantly brought to life and the changing seasons of the farm and the hillside on which it nestles lyrically described. The language is often poetic as it seeks to show how the place where these characters live is just as much a part of them as any other character trait.

Etty is a young woman, already pregnant when she marries Idris Hamer and comes to live on the remote Funnon Farm, on Llanbedr Hill near Builth Wells. She is the rock around which the novel revolves, the anchor to which all the other characters are moored, and the reader quickly grows to love her. Her son, Olly is a different matter altogether, wilder and more unpredictable yet also completely rooted to the farm and his mother.  Olly was born in 1941 and we follow his life from then until 2011 -  over a period of monumental change and modernisation for this part of mid-Wales. We see the closing of the local railway, the gradual moving away from the hold of the methodist church on the local population, the arrival of electrictiy, the move from horse power to tractors and the life-changing foot and mouth outbreak of 2001. All these upheavals and the personal triumphs and tragedies of the characters are contrasted with the quiet natural rhythms of the landscape which remain the same year on year.

It is a beautiful and affecting book, which will make you laugh and cry. The local dialect is cleverly employed, helping with the total immersion of the reader in this landscape and bringing the characters vividly to life. It is a haunting examination of continuity and change: how the landscape we live in makes us who we are and how the last century has changed us all.

When you have finished reading if you are anything like me you will yearn for the hills of Radnorshire and will be thinking about the characters and what the future holds for them for a long time to come. Highly recommended.