The Claude Glass, by Tom Bullough

In Radnorshire lie two farms, Penllan and Werndunvan, separated by a hill known as Cold Winter. Penllan belongs to Adam and Tara - university-educated, shaped by the hippie movement (the time is 1980-81), and visited by friends who make music, read poetry, believe in open relationships, and give their children names like Cloud. Adam works unsparingly: "It was the nakedness of hill farming that appealed to him - the ravages of the cold, the relentless rhythms and cycles that most people went out of their way to avoid."

He hasn't altogether forsaken the values of his background. He worries about the education his sons, Robin and Martin, seven and four, are receiving at the village school. Robin, one of this novel's two main consciousnesses, combines rather uneasily a country child's instinctual life with more sophisticated imaginings.

Werndunvan belongs to Philip. He is a surly man with a pill-popping, slatternly wife, Dora, and a son, Andrew, Robin's contemporary and later friend. Poverty - and miscalculations - mean they live in four filthy downstairs rooms of their large farmhouse. Upstairs are other rooms chock-full of old furniture and unwanted objects. Andrew wears his father's cast-offs, is rarely washed or properly fed, and appears backward. He knows affection only from the farm dogs, especially Meg and Di, themselves victims of Philip's callousness. Yet the inanimate has a curious hold on Andrew, too.

Upstairs, he finds the Claude Glass. This "small convex mirror" bestows a picture-like unity on any vista it reflects. It was in popular use in the late 18th and early 19th century when Werndunvan was in its prime - was, indeed, the home of William Wordsworth's in-laws, the Hutchinsons. When we learn this fact, illumination of the novel's preoccupations is instant and exciting.

Andrew, our second main consciousness, offers us, like the child in Wordsworth's "Anecdote for Fathers", the beauty and wisdom of the innocent mind. But he shows us too the importance of civilisation. For who gives Andrew the kindness essential to proper growth if not Robin and his incomer family, however full of ambiguities their lifestyle?

This is a novel of compelling complexity of thought and feeling, sustained by the authenticity of its rich detail. A sheep's agony in labour, a moribund tractor - Bullough endows the components of his scene with a poet's sense of their quiddity and a novelist's appreciation of their human significance.

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