When I’m feeling particularly depressed about the state of the world, I remind myself that equal marriage has been enshrined in law for over a decade here in the UK and has been legalised in many other countries. Set in a small Welsh village in the late 1980s, not so very long ago, Anthony Shapland’s love story, A Room Above a Shop, has a very different backdrop.
He’s not quite sure what he’s walking towards. A pulling and a pushing – his instinct says go; his anxiety says stay. Either choice feels wrong. He can’t not act. He can’t stop the buzz, the vibration, the hunger.
B is swept up in village bonhomie when M buys a Christmas round for everyone in the local pub’s bar which has only recently admitted women. M has taken over his late father’s hardware shop where the hard times of the miners’ strike and the ensuing unemployment were acknowledged with credit. He and B exchange a look and a chat, arranging to meet on New Year’s Eve. One of four siblings, B has grown up a misfit, struggling with a sexuality which he’s learnt must be hidden at all costs. B and M carefully find their way to a relationship that becomes love, B working in M’s shop, living in the makeshift bedsitter above at first, next to M’s room. Downstairs they continue their performance of staff and shopkeeper, stifling their horror at the screaming ‘gay plague’ tabloid headlines announcing HIV/AIDS, quoted in tones of disgust by customers. Upstairs they’ve discovered a passion and love which feels like home.
Early bracken curl-bright fiddleheads through grey earth. The light is clear. He feels his shoulders ease, his lungs open. The day is past the shortest, drawing out, the big sky makes it feel endless.
Weighing in at a mere 160 pages, Shapland’s novella is delivered in a series of short chapters arranged in brief paragraphs. I’d assumed from his vibrant use of language that he’s a poet but he’s an artist, amongst other things, which explains the evocative images vividly summoning up the Welsh landscape. The relationship between B and M is beautifully drawn, each of them terrified of being exposed, careful to conceal a love that has taken them both by surprise, a happiness that can’t be shared with family, and the loneliness that came before it. Their public days together are hedged around with self-restraint and a performance of straightness lest anyone guess their true relationship. Shapland captures how exhausting that must be, and how infuriating. It’s a striking piece of writing, beautiful and moving, brief but extraordinarily powerful.
If you’d like an introduction to more Welsh fiction you’ll find lots of links on Karen’s Reading Wales ’25 page over at BookerTalk.
Granta Books: London 9781803511603 160 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)
