Library of Wales: Make Room for the Jester

Stead Jones said in 1964: “Army signals took me to France on D-Day, an experience which seems more alarming now than it did then, and to the Far East. Promotion during these years – from Private to Corporal – came rapidly. After demobilisation, I became a student once more, and now find myself at forty a lecturer in Liberal Studies in a Lancashire Technical College. I like reading, listening to music, talking Welsh and playing golf badly.”

Lew Morgan and Gladstone Williams are two friends trying to make sense of their lives over a long hot summer in the north Wales seaside town of Porthmawr. It will be a summer that changes everything. When the charming but drunk Ashton Vaughan returns home to Porthmawr – ‘the primeval swamp of respectability’ – he triggers a chain reaction of ruin, disillusion and death which keeps the whole town bubbling for most of the summer.There’s fraud, farce, drama, drunkenness, temperance, hysteria and tragedy.This Welsh take on The Catcher in the Rye is a haunting journey from the edge of childhood into a threatening adult world. A remarkable and welcome rediscovery.