This book has taken me far too long to read, and not for the usual reasons (that it’s too long, it’s rubbish, idleness, I lost it, etc.) but because I could only manage ten pages a day before getting a kind of mental nosebleed. And that is because it is so good, so different. There is a note at the back from the publishers, of whom I had not heard: ‘Repeater Books is dedicated to the creation of a new reality.’ There follows some invective about capitalist realism in historical fiction and ends: ‘We are alive and we don’t agree.’ I would say that this book fulfils their brief admirably.

We are in Wales at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The last wolves are being hunted, the little people have left for the realm of legend and a begrimed and barely literate populace struggles for existence in the shadow of a mountain being hollowed out by new mineworks. And when I say ‘we are in’ I mean we are dumped into a dense thicket of prose without a guide, and through which we can barely see.

The last wolves are being hunted and the little people have left for the realm of legend

This is intentional. Like the peasants in Monty Python, everything and everyone is covered with mud or worse and not even the upper classes can escape. The local dignitary, Sir Herbert, who wants to flood the valley and dam it – and damn the consequences to the people – cakes make-up over the weeping sores on his face, and his wig is infested with vermin. ‘A tiny thing moves in the periwig and shows a jointed leg, then retreats back into the thick white weave.’ I am not joking when I say this is one of the most startling descriptions of just about anything I have ever read in all literature, for it is both delicate and minute, yet also appalling. (A hundred pages on: ‘A segmented brown thorax appears for an instant amongst the weave to flex and throb.’) Some people will call this symbolism but I call it a very good eye for detail. Here are some dead toads spread out on the floor for food – ‘the splayed flippered feet of them and the moon bellies’. Just that. You can see them now.

The pattern of the language is Welsh, or Welsh English. There are few commas and verbs get shunted to the end of sentences. ‘Oh rocks! Tell us in plain words!’ says Molly Bloom in Ulysses. But here at least language is engorged with itself, as if it is the only wealth available to those who speak it. ‘Beshitted myself I have,’ says one unfortunate character with vividly rendered food poisoning; bathos and a kind of gangrel dignity vying to great effect. It is a dialect with enormous potential for invective and when it explodes from the mouth the effect is often hilarious. Here is the preacher, his eloquence reaching a high pitch when he contemplates the hole in the chapel roof and the absolute failure of anyone to do anything about it:

Runts and bentbacks. Do you breathe this air about us like the rest of us Lloyd or suck it in through gills? Indicative this roof is of the point this entire enterprise has reached: the unsurety. The, the, decay setting in. I see it in the souls roundabout as well as in the beams.

Remember how the bards speak in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall? It’s like that all the way through. Well, it would have to be.

This is the heart of the book, and what makes it more than just worthwhile but also deeply human and knowledgeable about what it is to be human is its humour. Every so often you will find yourself barking with laughter wrung out of you by Griffiths’s skill. This is even more marked than in his best-known novel Sheepshagger, which is – you’ll never guess – also set in Wales. (Incidentally, in this new book bestiality is generally kept offstage or used as a figure of speech – not that I’ll be quoting any of it in a family magazine.)

There is a great deal of effing and jeffing throughout and things are all the better for it because when it is absent you know they are really bad. As we totter between shebeen and brothel things are pretty awful most of the time anyway and the depredations of early-stage capitalism do not make them any better. But here we are in the thick of it, as if we were there ourselves. The world Griffiths evokes gets into your bones. You will not wish this book to be a page longer but glad to have read it you will be. Affect your own speech it will for a while.