Poisoned Welsh Rabbit

A MAN'S ESTATE (279 pp.)--Emyr Humphreys--McGraw-Hill ($3.75).

Lloyd George knew my father, Father knew Lloyd George.

This song, sung to the tune of Onward, Christian Soldiers, was chorused by Welsh Laborites after World War I when they wanted to deride the chapel-bound piety of the Liberal Party, whose politicians were then riding high on the swallowtails of "the man who won the war."

It might well be the theme of Emyr Humphreys' fine novel. Elis Felix Elis, M.P., once had Lloyd George for the weekend at his family home, the biggest house in Pennant, North Wales. But Elis died at 40 before this rich political promise could be fulfilled. In Pennant, whose wet, cobbled streets may remind readers of Dylan Thomas' "Llareggub," Elis left behind a poisoned Welsh rabbit of hatred, and a family--legitimate and illegitimate--hopelessly trying to evoke their true spirits by rapping on the tables of consanguinity.

The form is reminiscent of John O'Hara's Ten North Frederick (TIME,

Nov. 28, 1955), i.e., it centers on the funeral of a town's leading citizen, and each character is permitted his own piece --but Novelist Humphreys gives an extra dimension, in compassion and poetry, which O'Hara's cold-eyed approach denies him.

The main characters are Hannah Elis, bitter, spinster daughter of the late great M.P. She hates her grim, mustached mother and her cold, Bible-reading uncle-stepfather, who together run the biggest farm and shop and all the morals of Pennant. She longs for the love of Idris Powell, the young minister of the ruling chapel; but he, alas, becomes disgracefully snarled up in an affair with her "chance-child" half sister, Ada Evans, a spirited young woman who never goes to chapel. In the end it is her brother Philip Esmor-Elis who liberates Hannah. He had been "sent away" at birth, returned hating the "sadistic Calvinists and hypocrites" of Pennant. He is an "intellectual barbarian" who wants his inheritance in cash, but stays long enough to fall in love with the Welsh countryside and to acquire pity for his twisted sister.

There is madness, near incest, suicide and murder in this novel. Humphreys acquired a Welsh eloquence in Flintshire, North Wales, where he was born, and generously distributes it among his characters. And he has an ear for pitch that would make him a good judge at a bardic contest at an eisteddfod. His grim village of Pennant, however, will set no tourists searching for its actual counterpart.

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