Library of Wales: Shifts

Christopher Meredith is an award-winning novelist, poet and translator. His first novel, Shifts was published to critical acclaim in 1988. He has broadcast on radio and TV and given readings and talks all round Britain as well as in Czechia, Egypt, Estonia, France, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Slovenia and the USA. Born and brought up in Tredegar and now living in Brecon, he has been a steelworker, a schoolteacher and a university professor.

This is a reprint of a novel first published by Seren in 1988. It is set in a post-industrial town such as Ebbw Vale, or perhaps Tredegar, the author’s home town, in 1977. Thus located in place and time, it is a work of fictional realism, authentic in its depiction of working-class lives and detailed in its account of the winding down of the steelworks on which the life of the town and all the characters depends. A once great industry is coming to an end and the workers wait, unable to do anything to stop it, while their personal lives unravel and fall asunder.The four main characters - Jack, Keith, Rob and Judith - are bound together in grief, love, work and betrayal, and have to find their own ways of coming to terms not only with the plant’s closure but with the crises in their own lives. There is also a mysterious character called simply O whom Richard Poole, in an Afterword, thinks may be nothingness, the existentialists’ néant, that is at the heart of the others’ lives. Only Keith, who is heavily into local history, seems to find consolation for the rupture that has taken place: towards the end of the novel he is learning Welsh and finding a new sense of direction. Jack moves to Reading and Wayne joins the Army.The strength of the novel is plain to see: it is about a place and time within living memory and pulses with many of the issues with which we are all familiar. Judith, around whom the plot turns, is likely to embrace feminism as a way out of her failing marriage. The pathos of ruined lives and relationships is understated, and the spare style reflects the bleak greyness into which the community has been plunged. Even so, this is a rooted novel, firmly set in modern Wales and, in essence, deeply sympathetic and clear-eyed in its exploration of what has happened to the working class of south Wales since the closing of its heavy industries. The occasional note of humour, or at least of sardonic wisecracks, lightens the grim picture of a ravaged community and its blighted lives.That the publisher has reissued this novel in the Seren Classics series (it has never been out of print) attests to the critical esteem in which it is held and its steady sales over the fifteen years since its first appearance. Of few novels from Welsh presses can that be said.Meic Stephens(Review taken from 2018 edition)