City Burning, A

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Mae nifer o gymeriadau'r straeon hyn yn wynebu penderfyniadau mawr wrth geisio bywyd llawnach, ar gryn gost iddynt eu hunain, tra bo eraill yn tystio i ddigwyddiadau lle bo rhaid iddynt ddewis rhwng ymyrryd neu droi'r tu arall heibio. Mae'r straeon a leolir adeg 'Helyntion' gogledd Iwerddon, sy'n amlygu arddull llawn empathi, yn tynnu'r darllenydd i gydymdeimlo â gwewyr meddwl y cymeriadau.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

Many of the characters in A City Burning face decisions about embracing a fuller life, though at a cost to themselves. Others are witness to events in which they must decide to be involved or pass by. These are stories, especially the ones set in The Troubles, where the reader is bound to a character's dilemmas by tellingly empathetic writing.

Dosbarthu

Byddwn yn dosbarthu eitemau sydd mewn stoc o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith, fel arfer drwy Royal Mail Tracked 48. Ar gyfer archebion o flaen llaw, byddwn yn dosbarthu’r eitem o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith ar ôl ei derbyn gan ein cyflenwr.

Dispatch

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Graham is a tv producer of over 100 documentaries and factual programmes for BBC, ITV, S4C and Channel 4, including 'The Story of Wales'. She produced and co-wrote the Oscar entrant cinema feature 'Branwen' (6 BAFTA Cymru nominations and Best Film at the Celtic Media Festival), and was a screenwriter on drama projects set in Italy, Romania and Ireland. She began her career in ITV, and spent eight years as a producer at one of Britain’s rare production co-operatives, Teliesyn. Graham’s stories have been widely published and several have been shortlisted in competitions. She was born in Belfast, and has lived and worked for many years in south Wales.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

A City Burning is referred to as a debut but it is a very mature collection and many of the stories have been competition winners or been published in periodicals. It is significant that Angela Graham is a TV director and screenwriter of long experience, for truly seeing and being seen lies at the heart of many of the stories. That she is also a poet is not surprising given the precision of her language and the tight focus on her subject. The city of the title is her native Belfast and almost half the stories are set in Northern Ireland or centre on Irish characters. One is even (ambiguously) entitled ‘An Ulster Psyche’, and the psychological strains and tortured loyalties of the people are a principal subject – within the ‘tribes’ as much as between them. Graham often focuses on divides and those who have to decide whether to change their view or themselves. This goes beyond the Irish stories and can be as slight and delicate as an independent, defensive man beginning to respond to a woman’s touch (in ‘Saltem’), or as complex and agonising as the life choices and guilt in ‘Mercy’ (where the ‘right deed’ for the wrong reason has poisoned more than one life). Whether it is as a result of a brief moment or a lifetime, most of the stories focus on a sudden realisation, an act of seeing. In ‘Snapshot’, the trivial occasion of a harmless collision of cars and the clash between a Catholic woman and a bullying Ulster farmer brings home to the Ulsterman’s wife, the silent observer, the truth of her own experience of him. We know little of the narrator of ‘The Sea Hospital’ but he feels himself trapped in the ‘family skin’. He sees his uncle, ‘a hampered, frightened spirit’ arising from ‘the clinker of stored up wrongs’. He admires those who ‘plan their content’, and he uses an old fear as shock treatment: ‘I must look, I must see. I must choose Life that’s coming to get me. Silly and tragic.’ This is the choice or the realisation of many of the protagonists. Sometimes it is remembered in mature fulfilment, as in ‘Coasteering’ and in perhaps the most beautiful story of them all, ‘All Through the Night’, in which a Welsh husband remembers the night he almost lost his (English) wife. The story most explicitly about choosing to bridge the divide is ‘Resistance’, set in a street in Belfast where the original Protestant majority is feeling threatened by Catholics moving in and they by the army patrols. Lily, a Catholic girl, resists the norm. She treats the passing soldiers ‘as human beings’ and attends a comically awkward ‘coffee morning’ given by the well-meaning Protestant pastor. Next morning, the (Protestant) milkman and his son are stoned to death by local boys and his bottles looted to make bombs. Lily is at first overwhelmed by the evil but resolves she will not be washed away: ‘I will cause ripples too – it was love or hate – resist or drown.’ The most recent stories treat another sort of resistance: those who go on loving and working through the pandemic – the mourners at a young doctor’s funeral; the woman who mourns her lovely, brave bus-driver husband; Lisa, the carer in ‘The Scale’, who sticks by the poisonous, frightened old woman she is sent to care for. Facing the unseen enemy she asks, ‘Put my heart on the scale. Let’s see what it’s worth.’ Hearts are weighed in many of Angela Graham’s stories and their owners are often surprised at the result.