Rupert Owen reviewed The Collected Stories by Dylan Thomas
Review of 'The Collected Stories' on 'GoodReads'
5 stars
Dylan’s short stories are awash with his memories of people and places, and as memories tend to be made up of the self same stuff of dreams, the characters and events drip with the excesses of the imagination. The latter collection in the book are taken from Adventures in the Skin Trade and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. They are classic Thomas such as Return Journey and A Child’s Christmas in Wales. The first twenty short stories present a strange array of tales that sometimes befuddled me, sometimes drowned me in a glut of imagery, and sometimes just lost me in the telling. Isolating and violent but with the humanist always shining through in the finer details of the character’s actions. A small sentence in the story Where Tawe Flows sums it up for me ... ‘Wait a bit! Wait a bit!’ said Mr Humphries, ‘Let’s get …
Dylan’s short stories are awash with his memories of people and places, and as memories tend to be made up of the self same stuff of dreams, the characters and events drip with the excesses of the imagination. The latter collection in the book are taken from Adventures in the Skin Trade and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. They are classic Thomas such as Return Journey and A Child’s Christmas in Wales. The first twenty short stories present a strange array of tales that sometimes befuddled me, sometimes drowned me in a glut of imagery, and sometimes just lost me in the telling. Isolating and violent but with the humanist always shining through in the finer details of the character’s actions. A small sentence in the story Where Tawe Flows sums it up for me ... ‘Wait a bit! Wait a bit!’ said Mr Humphries, ‘Let’s get our realism straight. Mr Thomas will be making all the characters Blue Birds before we know where we are. One thing at a time. Has anyone got the history of the character ready?’. With well endowed eccentricities Dylan portrays the Welsh personality with sincere profundity, as assuredly described in A Visit to Grandpa’s where everyone in the town knows where Grandpa is going when dressed in his Sunday best.
These tales are oozing with the macabre, from madness to murder, malady and perversion. With a background as a journalist Dylan knew how to tumble the everyday into scandal of fantasy, with an overriding sadness for the longing of the past made present in the retelling of personal memories and observations. This made most apparent in Return Journey where perhaps the bombing of Swansea was in someway a metaphor in how our reveries of time gone by lay as remnants in our mind, so that we may only recall glimpses of what we experienced in our youth.