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[ Text Only: Homepage ]
[ Graphical: Channel4 Homepage ]
Just as he is affected by the two influences of Liverpool and Wales so the two elements of language and landscape are central to his novels.
'Useter go fishing at Bala with me grandad when I was a kid, like. Caught a fuckin pike once. Yowge fuckin thing it was, teeth like six-inch nails. No messin.'
So says one of the two villains as they drive to Wales in search of the one-armed gangster. Unlike the 'colourless paste' that he sees in most modern writing, Griffiths embraces language with passion. Right from his first novel he uses dialects and sounds of the street to create the world he wants his readers to inhabit, a world far away from that of urban cool. His words can be violent, cruel and threatening yet in amongst all this will be moments of startling beauty, moments of lyricism that are all the more powerful for being so unexpected.
'Deeper, further into this country, lakes the same slaty shade as the clouds above and the mountains granite-spurred and serrated on the flanks as if gnawed by some massive maw...'
You can sense the power of the landscape as the two villains drive deeper into Wales. Here is a writer who almost 'feels' the landscape. It is in his very soul. He would suffocate spiritually in the featureless urban sprawl that dominates so much of modern writing. In Grits he wrote of the nearby mountains:
'Amazing these mountains are, you should see em. Give off a weird energy like, stronger in some places than others, kind of throbs and hums and when I reach a spot where I see a stag, it's like I can feel his energy flowing through my body... Never felt so alive, so powerful, so wild.'
In Stump the landscape is seen as a force for good. In the film Griffiths talks about an 'inspiring landscape - releasing dormant energy' or of 'Nature as the energising force'. Yet in his early novels the landscape is often harsh and brutal, reflecting the cruelty and pain some characters inflict on others. It is not a landscape that cares; it is indifferent to events; it will be there long after we've gone. And in this landscape are birds of prey which for Griffiths sum up the brutal side of life, 'the thrill of blood and nature'. It is a Wales far from the tourist board land of rolling green valleys, or our own Garden of Eden.
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