This review was first published online by the Created to Read blog and can be found here. 

White Ravens by Owen Sheers is very different to Fflur Dafydd’s re-creation (The White Trail), but just as fascinating. It is a re-imagining of the second branch of the Mabinogion, the tale of Branwen, daughter of Llyr. It starts with Rhiannon’s story – a tale of devastation on a Welsh sheep farm which leads Rhiannon and her brothers into a life of crime. Rhiannon abandons her brothers and walks off, alone, uncertain whether to escape from them and their new ‘business’ for good. Sitting on a bench outside the Tower of London, she meets an old man who tells her a story…

The old man’s story takes her back to the time of the Second World War. He tells her about a young, injured Irishman called Matthew O’Connell who is sent on a secret mission to rural Wales to bring back six raven chicks to the tower. Whilst there, he meets Branwen, falls in love and gets married.

Branwen’s brother (Evan) returns home from the trenches and reacts badly to the strange Irishman who has married his sister, taking out his frustration on the man’s horse. From this point onwards the story has a tragic edge to it, as Matthew takes Branwen to his native Ireland and they are ostracised by the local community, leading Matthew to drink and to blame his wife. Branwen, who now has a young child, eventually decides she’s had enough and contacts her brothers, who turn up to fetch her. The tale ends dramatically, with violence and death. Poor Matthew had the chance to read the Mabinogion years ago, and heed its warning. Now it is too late.

The story moves back to Rhiannon, sitting on the bench outside the Tower of London. After hearing the story, she now has a choice to make. Will she heed its warning or will she make the same mistake?

Lessons to Learn

I love the way Sheers focuses the message of the book around how we respond to old myths and tales, and whether we can learn from them in order to make decisions in the present. This story is far more realist than The White Trail, and the choice of period – during the Second World War is clever. It helps the reader to understand that behind Evan’s seemingly inexplicable and shocking actions might be an experience which has affected him deeply. It can also go some way to help us understand Matthew’s behaviour towards his wife, as he is unable to cope with the humiliation of returning to Ireland with a war injury. In the afterword, Sheers describes this as “the irrational violence of men suddenly returned from a world of conflict into a world of peace”.

Having read these two re-creations, I’m now hooked, and will be adding the rest of them to my ‘to read’ list. There is something addictive about old myths and legends. We don’t know where they came from, or how they started, or what their original meaning was intended to be, but they continue to live on, to change and develop through the telling…