Clare Dudman, A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees (Seren, 2010)

Unlike the re-reads of the first two books reviewed on this blog, A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees was entirely new to me.  Firstly, I should say that its author, Clare Dudman, is a friend of ours: she and Gregory used to share a publisher.  She kindly gave us a copy of this, her latest book, when we saw her in the summer of 2010 and I had been meaning to read it since then, especially after Gregory, who got to it first, said how much he had enjoyed it.

A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees takes as its subject the Welsh colony which was founded in Patagonia in the mid-nineteenth century.  No, I didn't know it existed either - and the great strength of this book is the life it gives to an almost-forgotten piece of history.  In 1865, when the novel opens, a group of about one hundred men, women and children are straining to catch sight of their new home from the deck of the badly battered ship that has brought them across the Atlantic from Wales.  All in flight from English oppression and hoping for a better life as colonisers themselves, they have been lured to Patagonia by promises of "a place of meadows and tall trees", where farming the land will be easy and where they will be masters of their own destinies.  They soon discover that the reality is very different.  The story of the colonisers' attempts to wrestle life from the parched soil while holding their community together and negotiating a form of co-existence with the indigenous people is fascinating, and kept me reading through disaster after disaster.  The couple at the centre of the novel, Silas and Megan James, have an unremittingly grim time, only gaining the possibility of a future in Patagonia after sacrificing a great deal, perhaps too much.  This is the story of a group of people who thought they had nothing to lose, and who end up securing their own survival through sheer endurance and determination alone.

Clare has done extensive research for this novel, not just reading widely but travelling to Patagonia and interviewing descendants of the original settlers.  In a note at the back of the book she explains the historical figures on which she based her central characters, and what became of them in real life.  She also outlines the subsequent history of the colony, explaining that, astonishingly, parts of Patagonia still feel distinctly Welsh, with the language still spoken and the inhabitants thinking of themselves as "Welsh-Argentines".  It is this painstaking research and personal experience that give A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees its depth, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys historical fiction, and even to those who usually don't.