Addlands by Tom Bullough review – a chronicle of change in rural Wales

Language and literature intertwine in this tale of family feuds and farming life over seven decades

Visiting Presteigne in 1867, George Borrow was told by one of the town’s inhabitants that he was neither in England nor Wales, but in Radnorshire. Tom Bullough, whose fourth novel is set in the south of that debatable county, clearly understands the point: he skirts abstract questions of national allegiance and identity, focusing instead on the land itself and on the interconnected lives of the families who wrest a living from it.

It is through the eyes of hill farmer Idris Hamer that we first see the land – the mountains streaked with thawing snow, the faded grasses and bracken, the dark soil turned by the plough – but it’s the child he brings up as his son who dominates the narrative. Born in 1941 into a world torn apart by war, Oliver Hamer is in some ways representative of his generation but is also, within the narrow bounds of his community, an extraordinary figure whose street-fighting exploits become, as he grows to manhood, the stuff of local legend.

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