THE OFFICIAL JOHN EVANS WEBSITE

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Giants Published by Underground Press (2000) ISBN:1 897607 06 7 Price: £3.95

Review of Giants

Sparse tale from the badlands of Wales John Evans not only writes a spare, tight prose but his plots too are similarly stripped down. He reminds one of another Celt, the well-renowned writer and film-maker Breton Alain Robbe-Grillet. Evans also makes films. As much as one would like to continue in this vein, the similarities end there. While the mind of Robbe-Grillet wanders in more rich and attractive landscapes, Evans inhabits the cold, derelict, desolate topography of post-industrial, drug-infested estates of south Wales. These are the badlands where days go by without the sighting of a police patrol. This is the place where “buildings break the skyline like dark monoliths in a primaeval landscape.” Evans’s Giants describes the bleakest of landscapes. Even the relationships are harrowing, with interpersonal connection going no deeper than the casual, raw, violent, masochistic sex. Like Robbe-Grillet, Evans offers little in the way of a plot. His prose drives us relentlessly through this nightmare world, scuttling in the deeper recesses of the mind. There’s a disturbing sense that something terrible has happened to the novel’s central character and that there is something equally dreadful awaiting him. It is this feeling that grips the reader, who similarly becomes trapped in this dark, disorientating labyrinth of urban and social decay. Evans’s work is set in the south Wales valley estates – Penrhys in the Rhondda and Gurnos in Merthyr come to mind. But his observations are equally relevant to other parts of Britain, anywhere where the demise of key industries has resulted in a loss of confidence in the value of culture. - Morning Star, Gwyn Griffiths, 2000.