Book Note: How Green Was My Valley

Llewellyn, Richard. How Green Was My Valley. New York: Macmillan, 1940.

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Whenever it's possible, I read the book before I watch the film based on it. When I learned the interesting fact that the film How Green Was My Valley won the Academy Award in 1941 (beating out both The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Cane), I decided to give what must surely be one of the greatest films ever made a try.

But first, I wanted to read the book (see the opening of this post).

The book is genuinely amazing. It's bildungsroman about the transition from the Victorian era into the modern age (and from boyhood to manhood) in a small Welsh coal-mining town. The characters and setting are vividly drawn, and the lyrical quality of the writing reminds me very strongly of Cry, the Beloved Country.

And there's Shakespeare in it! In the scene below, Huw Morgan, our protagonist, takes his sweetie Ceinwen to the Town Hall to see the acting.

As Ceinwen says, "There is elegant." 

Of course, the father of the family has a different viewpoint. When Huw says, "But, Dada . . . only Shakespeare they did. No pollution," he says, "Pollution of Satan" (387).

The scenes with the Shakespeare performers in Huckleberry Finn (for which, q.v.) come to mind—both in the performances and in the chaos that follows

Even without the Shakespeare, How Green Was My Valley is a terrific novel. We'll see whether any Shakespeare makes its way into the 1941 film (or other film adaptations that have been made through the years), is it?

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