The Island of Apples

Glyn Jones is a renowned Welsh poet, his handling of words and imagery is dazzling. In this novel we have also a story with an exciting accelerating plot, with an eminently readable narrative. The Island of Apples is a brilliant study of a pre-adolescent boy’s romantic imagination and dangerous enthralment, set vividly in the south Wales of Methyr Tydfil and Carmarthen in the early twentieth century. Also a sophisticated philosophic artefact which explores the relationship between vision and reality in general terms and through the heightened experience of their conflict and confusion in a boy on the margin between adulthood and the ‘dying’ of parents and childhood. In her introduction, Belinda Humfrey analyses and characterizes the novel; interprets some of its mysteries (beginning with the title), and places it within a twentieth century and larger literary context. She takes account of the novel’s critical history and Glyn Jones’s perception of it; and she makes use of his manuscript drafts and working notebooks.