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“..both tales include passages of razor-sharp humour as well as great beauty and poignancy…” – New Welsh Review

Iraq-bound young squaddie Ronnie takes something dodgy and falls asleep for three nights in a filthy hovel where he has the strangest of dreams. He watches the tattooed tribes of modern Britain assemble to speak with a grinning man playing war games. Arthurian legend merges with its twenty-first century counterpart in a biting commentary on leadership, individualism and the divisions in British society. Meanwhile Cardiff gangster Max is fed up with life in his favourite nightclub, Rome, and chases a vision of the perfect woman in far flung parts of his country.

Review: This is the third book in the publisher Seren’s series of contemporary retellings of the medieval Welsh story cycle the Mabinogion. The Dreams of Max and Ronnie to give this book its full title comprises two novellas based upon separate stories involving dreams. It starts with Ronnie’s … Ronnie and his mates are Iraq-bound. They go to visit Red Helen to get a little something for a last hit before they ship out. Ronnie takes his pill and falls asleep for three whole nights and has the weirdest dreams. In them a `grinning man’ plays war games while armies and gangs of men from around the country get in the mood but wait like sheep for their orders. In between Ronnie’s dream sequences, we have snatches of what’s happening in the real world …

“And DUMPHA DUMPHA DUMPHA goes the soundtrack to Britain’s life, pounding and meaningless, to this stage in the growth of one of the oldest democracies on the planet. Apparently. Supposedly. Pounding and pulsing and unchangingly repetitive. Beating and battering, a cudgel. Sound of the cat-pissed house. Sound of the seemingly deserted village, shop gone, pub gone, chapel now a holiday home. … And, before he is sent to fight for this, to kill for this and be killed for this, Ronnie sleeps on his lucky moo-cow blanket and Ronnie goes on dreaming.”

This wasn’t an easy book to read or love, yet it was extremely powerful as you can see from the truncated paragraph above. Nearly every page was protesting about (the Iraq) war, the futility of it all, the waste of life, and also people wasting their lives away, our celebrity culture in which every boy wants to follow the herd and be David Beckham or Robbie Williams, that you should always question the `grinning man’ (Blair). The writing was by turns coarse and blunt, then poetic – these 90 pages or so make a very angry and pessimistic tale indeed. The author in his afterword describes it as a Swiftian satire but it was that angry that the satire didn’t really come through for me.

By contrast, Max’s dream was a bit of a let-down for me. The story of a gangsta and his crew. Max is tired of his life of clubbing and whores in Cardiff – he wants a wife. Hearing of a film being made up north, he sends his crew on a recce with his photo in the search for the perfect woman, but of course nothing is as easy as it seems. If the first tale was angry, this was nihilistic and not as full of ideas, but equally condemning of the nature of Man.

A powerful addition to this series, but not an easy book to enjoy.