reading Fflur Dafydd’s 2009 dystopian thriller Y Llyfrgell in 2025, five years after the novel’s setting in 2020, is a strange experience. the novel is very clearly a product of early anxieties about the rise of ebooks as a publishing format: in its grey, pallid future physical books have been effectively erased over the course of a decade, and, in particular, almost the entire physical collection of the National Library of Wales, except mostly-recent archival material, has either been deaccessioned or mysteriously vanished in an unsolved theft in 2015. print media is dead; everything is exclusively digital — and no-one seems to care.
the novel follows four characters: twin sisters Ana and Nan, library staff who have been planning an elaborate revenge on the book reviewer whose bad reviews they believe drove their mother to suicide; Dan, the lone porter/security guard at the library since everyone else is at a meeting in Cardiff; and Eben, the reviewer who also believes his bad reviews drove Ana and Nan’s mother to suicide. the plot is a bit perplexing at times — we learn, for example, that despite coming into the library with two loaded guns and either locking people in their offices or herding them into the Reading Room (whence they’re meant to be locked out of the building) Ana and Nan did not intend to actually kill Eben, merely psychologically torture him and cause him to fear for his life and then let him go. frankly, it seemed like Dafydd felt committing to an all-out revenge would have made her protagonists too unlikable and so she chickened out, but the result mainly just left me confused once I grasped what exactly the original plan was. there’s also a somewhat confusing subplot about the disappearance of physical books from the library that I’ll talk a bit more about later.
I say “the original plan” because, obviously, everything goes off the rails quite quickly. Nan, who has always been in her sister’s shadow, has other plans, and once she begins to assert herself things spiral out of control. the characterization, with only a few momentary lapses, is excellent, and notwithstanding the slightly perplexing plot the strong narrative voices are what drive the novel, and on this basis alone I can absolutely understand why this won the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize, for “[a]n unpublished novel with a strong story line no less than 50,000 words”, at the Eisteddfod in 2009. in spite of its flaws, it’s difficult to put down.
the biggest thing that gives me pause is the setting. there are a two main reasons (or groups of reasons) for this, one aesthetic and one ideological. on the aesthetic side, the timeline is way too short. like, comically short. obviously it is true that we have seen an explosion of digital media over the past fifteen years, but this has by no means supplanted printed books, and certainly the existence of digitization projects like the Internet Archive has not eliminated either the physical existence of or the market for “classics”. a digitized copy of a book from 1850 does not replace the physical copy. it is, in retrospect, obvious that this aspect of Dafydd’s world-building is more a response to the mix of panic and hype ca. 2009 than it is to the real impact of digital publishing. to some extent this is perhaps unfair — certainly anxieties about ebooks have persisted since 2009 — but while I could believe that ebooks will entirely replace print books in terms of new publishing, someday, Dafydd also seems to posit a world where all print books have been destroyed in ten years, such that there are no physical copies of, for example, the work of the nineteenth-century poet Eben Fardd remaining, allowing him to be erased from (literary) history once his name is erased from the National Library’s database.
this requires, first of all, that the only online traces of Eben Fardd’s existence be in the catalogue of the National Library of Wales. no books of criticism, no journal articles that mention him, nothing online — or nothing online outside the Welsh government’s control (more on this in a moment) — that includes his name in passing. second, this requires that everything on the internet and everything in private collections be under the control of the Welsh government. there is a vague implication that the First Minister exhorted the population to turn their backs on print en masse, but no (clear) indication that this was backed up by legal force. again, this requires that everyone in the country voluntarily have destroyed all of their print books. it’s just not plausible to me. (it is, however, an interesting counterpoint to texts like Owain Owain’s Y Dydd Olaf, Islwyn Ffowc Elis’s Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd, or Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul’s Là a’ Dèanamh Sgèil do Là, where the denied language serves as a way of escaping state control.)
on an ideological level, this is paired with a bizarre and frankly, it seemed to me, rather antifeminist throughline that I’m really not sure how I’m meant to feel about. the unnamed First Minister is a woman, as is the Head Librarian, and it is implied and then near the end explicitly stated that the erasure of Wales’s literary history is specifically an erasure of the men in Wales’s literary history — Eben Fardd, T. Gwynn Jones, and Waldo Williams are all specifically named — as part of an effort to promote women. near the end Eben realizes that all of the police officers who have just brought the plot to a violent conclusion are women, and this provokes something like horror from him: he clearly regards this as an feminist plot. now, Eben is not a pleasant man, so I’m not entirely sure we’re meant to take this at face value, but there’s enough in the rest of the book — in particular a vague opposition between the librarians and a shadowy, patriarchal “Brotherhood” (of which Eben is a part) — to make me think that he’s right about the fundamentals, and that the core of the novel is an evil feminist conspiracy to erase men and promote women. hello?? I feel like I have to be missing something, but I truly don’t know what.
this is exacerbated by the novel’s treatment of Ana and Nan’s mother, Elena, a star novelist who was relentlessly harrassed by Eben and others in the “Brotherhood” who could not abide her presence in the literary scene as a successful woman. Eben comes to the library on this fateful day to access Elena’s diaries, partly to assuage his sense of guilt at having — as he sees it — driven her to suicide. his attitude towards the diaries is, however, dismissive, and it’s clear that he sees Elena as an evil, man-hating feminist (and perhaps a lesbian, though this is not followed up on beyond a passing reference to her involvement with another girl in her class at school). unfortunately, in part because we never get to see Elena’s perspective directly, the book kind of lets this perception stand? that is, I came away feeling like we were meant to see Elena’s opposition to patriarchy as just a kind of prideful spite, rather than a meaningful political stance in a world that clearly — even on the novel’s own terms — still oppresses women.
one particularly ugly aspect of this is the descriptions we get of Elena’s most successful novel, Miriwen yn Fy Meddwl, which, if it were real, I would probably describe as the story of a closeted trans woman who finds her life as a man slowly but surely overtaken by the woman she imagines and imagines herself to be. unfortunately, the framing of it in Y Llyfrgell is left as an uncomfortable invocation of the transmisogynist trope of the trans woman as “autogynophile”, a man (often a gay man) who is sexually aroused by imagining himself as a woman. since Miriwen yn Fy Meddwl doesn’t actually exist, this is what we’re left with, along with the oddly throwaway observation that Eben — who’s implied to be gay — identifies with Miriwen (and is uncomfortable with this). it all just left a bad taste in my mouth.
there’s also some ableism involved in the resolution: as it transpires, Elena’s suicide is entirely unrelated to Eben; rather, she had early-onset dementia and wanted to die while she was still mostly in control of all her faculties. unfortunately, this is paired with an implication — though it’s coming from Nan, who also has early-onset dementia and is not necessarily a reliable witness to events — that she specifically wanted the publicity around her suicide to point the finger at Eben and his bad reviews. another evil feminist conspiracy...
with these significant caveats, the novel is gripping — the character work in particular stands out. it’s compelling a portrait of four deeply unpleasant people — Dan is probably the most sympathetic — navigating a crisis of their own making. it left me with these lingering uncertainties and some trepidation, but I’m still glad I finally read it.
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