Siân Llywelyn’s Darogan is a supernatural mystery novel, following two agents of a secret government agency tasked with investigating paranormal (or potentially paranormal) events in Wales: DAROGAN (“Dirprwyaeth Arbennig Rywdweithiol i Olrhain Grymoedd Anesboniadwy,” the Special Networked Commission for Investigating Inexplicable Forces; as a noun “darogan” means “prophecy, prediction” and has particular nationalist connotations vis-à-vis the figure of the Mab Darogan). Beca is the daughter of a long-time DAROGAN agent who died a few years ago; at the beginning of the novel, her partner Glyn — a close friend of her father’s — is killed during what should have been a straightforward sting operation, leaving her traumatized and alone. Taran is — of course — Beca’s new partner, a technology expert assigned to balance Beca’s burgeoning supernatural abilities, which her boss, Edgar, distrusts. the novel interweaves the development of Beca and Taran’s working relationship with the slow unraveling of the mystery surrounding Glyn’s death, leading them from Aberystwyth to Conwy to London and back again on the trail of a long-lost medieval relic.
I’m of two minds about this novel. there are a lot of things about it that I liked. first and foremost, I really enjoyed Llywelyn’s use of language — she bucks the tendency to write in conversational Welsh in favor of a more literary (if not fully Literary) register for the narration (paired with conversational dialogue), with 3pl. -ant and even a few hwys in there. I thought it was artfully done, and I particularly enjoyed the stylistic shifts between the normal third-person, past-tense narration and the first-person, present-tense narration of Beca’s visions of the past; I found the prose throughout the novel pretty tasty.
another aspect of the novel’s language use that I wanted to flag is the handling of Taran, who is nonbinary. after their introduction to Beca and one brief conversation (where they bristle momentarily when Beca refers to them as “anneuaidd”, a word they’re unfamiliar with), however, this doesn’t come up again. by this I mean not only that no-one in the novel reacts to Taran being nonbinary but also that as far as I can remember, after Beca is initially told that Taran is coming to join her (where Casi, her friend and fellow agent, refers to Taran with the pronoun nhw “they”), the novel never uses a pronoun to refer to Taran, exploiting literary Welsh’s ability to be pro-drop and avoiding speaking of Taran in isolation. on one level, this is an interesting linguistic exercise — it lets Llywelyn avoid using what in Welsh are (I think) more strongly plural-marked forms for Taran and, I should emphasize, it never feels unnatural; if I hadn’t been specifically curious about how the novel would handle Taran and so paying close attention to it, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. given the constant attention to language that this must have required I can’t say that Taran being nonbinary felt like an afterthought, exactly, but I do think it might have been nice to have a little more direct engagement with questions of identity.
aside from that, the narration is engaging and characterization is pretty solid — notwithstanding my frustrations with parts of the plot, I found the book to be a page-turner, and I think Llywelyn does a good job with tension within scenes.
my main frustration is with the pacing across scenes. the novel has, I would say, two arcs. after the opening incident where Glyn is killed, the first ~60% of the novel follows Beca and Taran on a case involving the so-called “Red Lady of Paviland”, whose redness has mysteriously vanished. this plot turns on the development of Beca’s psychic abilities, including visions of the past and channeling the spirits of the dead, and — after delivering an enigmatic prophecy in the voice of her dead mentor — leaves her briefly comatose. this part is atmospheric and sets up a tension within DAROGAN between the agency’s “old guard” (represented by Glyn, Beca’s father, and the deputy supervisor Donald) and Edgar (the head of the agency), who does not believe in the supernatural and wants to transition the organization away from relying on people with these “abilities” towards people who will use “rational” and “scientific” methods to solve their cases.
this in itself could be interesting, but there’s also a key problem: psychic powers, ghosts, ley lines, etc. objectively exist within this novel, and Edgar knows it, which makes his insistence that it’s somehow “fake” fall rather flat. still, I was interested to see Beca learn to use her abilities.
unfortunately, she doesn’t. the remainder of the novel sees Beca and Taran on the quest for the lost medieval relic, during which Beca makes no use whatsoever of her powers. only during the climax of the novel, in the last ten pages or so, does she have one more vision, but this vision doesn’t contribute to the resolution of the mystery or the Edgar plot. it just kind of...happens. this was a disappointment! as much as each individual scene in the second half of the novel was well-constructed, then, the whole that they added up to didn’t match the tone or direction of the first half of the novel.
there are also Politics to untangle here. the long-lost medieval relic is the Croes Naid, a reliquary for a piece of the True Cross, taken from Wales by Edward I. the novel leans heavily on an opposition between Wales and England, which I don’t in principle object to; what struck me as weird here is the implication (and ultimately the explicit affirmation) that a medieval Christian relic can be taken to represent the Welsh nation / a hoped-for Welsh nationhood. when the Croed Naid is recovered, we are told:
Nid eiddo’r Senedd ’mo’r Groes Naid. Mae hi’n eiddo i bawb sy’n cyfri eu hunain yn rhan o’n cenedl. Felly cyflwynaf hon i Gymru oll, gan addo na chaiff hi byth ei chuddio eto.
[The Croes Naid does not belong to the Senedd. It belongs to everyone who counts themselves as part of our nation. So I dedicate this to all of Wales, with a promise that it will never be hidden again.]
despite the invocation here of “[p]awb sy’n cyfri eu hunain yn rhan o’n cenedl” (and that “’n” is doing some work), the question this leaves me with is: what about those among that “everyone” who aren’t Christian and/or whose identification with Welshness doesn’t rest on medieval history? this isn’t to downplay the effects of the English conquest and subsequent centuries of English rule, but to wonder about the choice of symbols. for one thing, while obviously part of the affective value of the Croes Naid is its connection to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, there are other, secular symbols that could have been used instead — Llywelyn’s crown, for one thing. even then, I wonder about the reliance on recognized or self-declared monarchs (Llywelyn and of course Owain Glyndŵr) as the basis for a national identity. that the restoration of the Croes Naid is accompanied by part of the Gorsedd ritual (the partial unsheathing of the sword) felt particularly odd, insofar as it draws our attention not to medieval history but the Romantic nationalist imagination of Iolo Morganwg. just a weird vibe overall.
overall, then, the book was an enjoyable reading experience, but not, for me, entirely successful as a novel.
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