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Peter Ho DaviesPeter Ho Davies
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Critical perspective
BiographyPeter Ho Davies was born in 1966 to Welsh and Chinese parents. He has degrees in Physics and English, and was awarded an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He has worked in Malaysia, Singapore, and the USA, and was also, for a time, UK business manager for Varsity.
His first novel, The Welsh Girl, set in a Welsh village during the second world war, was published in 2007.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction, Short stories
BibliographyThe Ugliest House in the World Granta, 1998 Equal Love Granta, 2000 The Welsh Girl Sceptre, 2007
Prizes and awards1997 H. L. Davis Oregon Book Award The Ugliest House in the World 1998 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize The Ugliest House in the World 1999 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award The Ugliest House in the World 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) (shortlist) Equal Love 2000 New York Times Notable Book of the Year Equal Love 2001 Asian American Literary Award (shortlist) Equal Love 2008 British Book Awards Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year (shortlist) The Welsh Girl
Critical PerspectiveAs the English-born son of Chinese and Welsh parents, and living as he does in the United States, there is something of the outsider to Peter Ho Davies. His two collections of short stories, The Ugliest House in the World (1998) and Equal Love (2000) have looked at the way in which human beings deal with the reality of being in some way outside of every relationship to which they belong, be that filial, familial, romantic or platonic.
Anthologised several times and celebrated by many critics as being reminiscent of Joyce and Raymond Carver, Ho Davies has also won several awards for his work, as well as finding a place on Granta’s prestigious 'Best of Young British Novelists' list. Currently working on his first novel, Ho Davies is a writer of some considerable power. Eschewing formal experimentation in favour of imbuing his stories with emotional depth, he is an acute observer of the often unsettling ordinariness of life; his stories resonate with simple yet beautifully judged images. He conveys eternal truths with precision: the search for connection, the need for emotional reciprocity, the complexity of sentimental ties. Yet Ho Davies suffuses his work with subtle ambiguities. The reader can never be sure of a narrative stance. His stories have that magical breath of independence which allows for personal interpretation; they rest in the mind long after the final page is turned, demanding examination while resisting simple analysis.
Ho Davies’ two collections of stories are impressive in their temporal, geographical and emotional range. The reader is taken from modern-day Chinatown in San Francisco to a Welsh slate quarry at the end of the 19th century, from the Malaysian jungle in the 1940s to 1960s New Hampshire. Ho Davies displays an impressive variety of voices, a disparate series of narrators and protagonists which reveals his desire (and ability) to occupy the mental space of those far removed from his own sphere: a heroin addict attempting to win back custody of her son in 'Everything You Can Remember in Thirty Seconds is Yours to Keep'; a young girl hoping to find a new love for her divorced father in 'Brave Girl'; a lieutenant in the Boer War suffering from flatulence during an officers’ dinner in 'Relief'; a middle-aged man working for a helpline that specialises in dealing with potential suicides in 'I Don’t Know, What Do You Think?'
Ho Davies’ work is notable for its confidence, its directness and its clarity. There is nothing showy about his writing. He relies upon the carefully understated sentence, and the spaces between words. In 'On the Terraces', from Equal Love, a man keeps vigil by the bedside of his brother who is dying of AIDS. ‘Every few minutes I try to look up to see if he’s awake. I watch the circles of condensation bloom and fade against his condensation mask, and then go back to my paper.’ The choice of the verbs ‘bloom’ and ‘fade’ is inspired; Ho Davies conveys with impressive economy a sense of the brief burst of life, an explosion of quiddity which is nothing but a prelude to the inevitable ultimate finality. And then, following the terse beauty of the image the reader is brought short with the abruptness of the next phrase. The brother goes back to his paper. We understand that there are hidden depths to this relationship, a past, things left unsaid, stories and rivalries and issues unresolved. We sense the brother is acting out of duty, wherein there is also love, but a love which is somehow indistinguishable from that duty.
In the best of Ho Davies there is also the suggestion of dramatic possibility, of places unexplored. Many of his pieces could be extended. Indeed, one story, 'Today is Sunday', from Equal Love, began life as a novel, before becoming a beautiful eight-page meditation on father/son relationships during which the son pays an unexpected visit to his father. When told his timing is bad he asks, ‘Christ. Am I not allowed to care?’ There is more poignancy in that one simple question than in many 400-page novels. 'A Union', from The Ugliest House in the World, is, at 80 pages, the longest story from Ho Davies’ two books to date and one that would perhaps gain something from the longer form. It examines the affect of a prolonged strike on a small Welsh slate mining community and is also a subtle portrait of a marriage. It reveals Ho Davies’ gift for historical fiction and in its tone, its rich palette of colours, its earthy feel for the raw lives of those whose very existence was shaped by the ground upon which they stood, it recalls Bruce Chatwin’s sublime On the Black Hill. Yet the reader is left wanting more. It is no surprise that Ho Davies’ first novel is to be a work of historical fiction.
Ho Davies’ first book, The Ugliest House in the World, is notable for the different worlds to which the reader is taken. That they are completely convincing, and that they are evoked with an exhilarating and vivid attention to detail and a depth of feeling which is not at all fashionable in modern literature, is Ho Davies’ triumph. In his second collection, Equal Love, there is a more consistent theme, what Margot Livesey has described as ‘the impossible compromises of love.’ It is this themic unity which gives Ho Davies’ second book a more polished coherence than its predecessor. There is still the same impressive range of subject matter and voices (The Literary Review described it as a ‘feat of ventriloquism’) yet there is a certain refinement, a more pronounced sense of purpose. The majority of the stories are set in the United States where Ho Davies lives and works. Equal Love is a series of meditations on the bonds and ties of love, particularly between parents and children, but it also examines the ebb and flow of power and relevance across the generations. 'The Hull Case' deals with a couple who cannot have children; 'Small World' with the impending arrival of a child, and 'Frogmen' with the consequences of the death of one. The title story examines the relationship between two friends who, on the point of committing a very awkward adultery observe their respective son and daughter kissing and with a simple, ‘oh well’ and a pat on the back, think better of what they have been about to do and go to meet their, ‘glowing, lying children.’ Equal Love improves upon Ho Davies’ first book without a radical transformation in style or daring leaps into the unknown. It is full of a quiet grace and is suffused with warmth and humour; even at its bleakest moments it has the power to make the reader believe in the need for compassion and understanding.
One finds a longing, and a reaching melancholy in Ho Davies, a belief in humanity and a corresponding awareness of its failings. His first two books are refreshingly free of cynicism, which makes the experience of reading him quite novel, in a time in which the cynical is the default emotional setting of the contemporary imagination.
Garan Holcombe, 2004
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