Cwmardy and We Live by Lewis Jones

I bought the combined volume of these two books solely because of the brief mention it got in that excellent drama series Pen Talar on S4C. I read fiction in bed and I did not sleep so much in the few days it took to finish it. I was rather apprehensive at first not knowing whether to expect Socialist Realism (or Communist Party propaganda). The first page made me doubt further. The language seemed a little flowery and stilted. But of course language is the product of its era, in this case the 1930s, and reading Dickens is a little strange for the first page until you get into the flow of it. Then the key characters developed especially Len, Mary and Ezra and came across as complicated individuals facing real dilemmas. Even Lord Cwmardy, the coal owner, was not a cardboard cut out. They were real characters in that everything was not neatly tied up. To me Lewis Jones was describing people he knew, warts, ambiguities and all. The setting is Cwmardy, the pit with its horrors and inhumanity alleviated by the camaraderie of the miners, Cwmardy the pit village with its bustling, tumultuous life and the terrible but inspiring political and social events of those times. Lewis Jones was not a Stalinist apparatchik as the introduction makes clear. These books reveal his deep humanity which is truly inspiring.