From Publishers Weekly
Published to critical acclaim last year in the U.K., Sheepshagger, the amazing second novel from Niall Griffiths (Grit), is as raw and unsettling as its title. Ianto is an orphan, raised by his grandmother in the Welsh countryside. Ugly, withdrawn and semiretarded, he is the classic outcast, finding solace first in nature, later in drugs and the company of a few mates. The ramshackle family farm is sold and his fury at his displacement ultimately impels him to murder. Griffiths's prose matches the savage intensity of his protagonist: stoned reminiscences by Ianto's friends are woven with flashbacks (both wondrous and horrible) of Ianto's childhood and the events leading up to the murders, creating a chilling portrait that is nearly mythological in its intensity and pathos. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Danny, Marc, Griff, and Llyr spend their time taking as many drugs as they can afford, which they mix with quantities of cheap liquor. On the night of the novel, they are trying to make sense of the murders committed by one of their circle, Ianto. A skinny, inarticulate young man, Ianto has brutally killed three people in the mountains near their home. Welsh author Griffiths (Grits) tells his story in three narrative strands: the profane ruminations of Ianto's mates; flashbacks to the recent events that led up to his murderous, inchoate rampage; and scenes from Ianto's childhood that are by turns glorious and brutal. The tragedy of the young man's life is the tapestry of this novel, woven with brilliant images of nature and the squalid reality of a life in which the only release from despair is drugs and liquor. The novel's profanity and graphic brutality will put off many readers, but the power of the narrative is undeniable. Sheepshagger belongs in most adult fiction collections. Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Taking its title from the derogatory term for the rural Welsh, Sheepshagger is the searing account of Ianto, a feral Welshman who lives on the outskirts of society. After having withstood a horrifying upbringing laced with abuse, Ianto loses his family's ancestral cottage (a de facto hovel on the mountainside). Pushed to the edge, Ianto slowly succumbs to his graphic visions of death and destruction as he plots the destruction demise of those who have wronged him. Griffith's narrative skips nimbly through the events of Ianto's history, from key moments in his childhood to after his death, when his contemporaries struggle to comprehend Ianto's ultimate acts of violence. Even as Ianto's actions and visions grow more monstrous, Griffith's sympathetic characterization takes care to illustrate Ianto's frustration over his powerlessness to effectively change his situation. Griffith displays a sure ear for the Welsh dialect, deftly capturing the cadences of the mining community where the story takes place. Readers who can stomach the Peckinpah-esque violence and graphic language will be rewarded with a powerful and humanistic tale. Brendan Dowling
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
The New York Times Book Review
"With...snatches of lyricism, Griffiths transcends the brutality of Ianto's life and connects to something timeless and profound."
Review
?Haunting and intensely imagined, layered with chilling humour and charged with linguistic energy... a powerful and disturbing novel.? ? A.L. Kennedy
?Sheepshagger is never less than compelling; the range of Griffiths?s achievement is as exhilarating as the reach of his ambition.? ? Guardian
?The power of Griffiths? language is astounding, steeped in the wild forces of nature that have helped make Ianto what he is, by turns lyrically beautiful and tumultuously violent.? ? The Times
Book Description
This is the story of Ianto: the feral, inarticulate, inbred, ignoble savage; haunter of mountains, killer of innocents. Ianto is a sheepshagger -- a yokel, a Welsh redneck. But Ianto is also a seer, a visionary -- the genius loci -- who comprehends nature with a Blakean intensity, and is at one with the world he lives in: the moss and lichen, the lamb and the raven, the summit and the scree.
Robbed of his ancestral home -- a near-derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales -- Ianto pledges revenge not only on the English yuppies who have turned his grandmother's cottage into a weekenders' barbecue party but on all those who have violated him and the land that is his. The oppression and abuse that Ianto has faced triggers his lurid imagination into unspeakable savagery -- embodying the most primal fears of physical threat and a world beyond his control.
An extraordinary prose amalgam of Old Testament prophecy and demotic slang, of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, Sheepshagger is written in a language charged to the highest level: lyrical and hieratic, saturated -- like nature -- in beauty and violence. And the spirit of its place, Ianto, at once both Caliban and Prospero, will hang in the memory of all who read his story like a devil or a god.
Sheepshagger FROM THE PUBLISHER
Sheepshagger is the story of Ianto: the inarticulate, inbred, ignoble savage. It is also the story of Ianto the seer, the visionary who comprehends Nature with a Blakean intensity, at one with the world he lives in. The novel is both these stories, both these people, and the character that emerges is one of the great creations of contemporary fiction. Robbed of his ancestral home - a near-derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales - Ianto pledges revenge not only on the English yuppies who have turned his grandmother's cottage into a weekenders' barbeque party but on all those who have violated him and the land that is his. This latest act of colonial oppression and desecration triggers his lurid and strange imagination into unspeakable savagery - embodying our most primal fears of physical threat, a world beyond our control.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Published to critical acclaim last year in the U.K., Sheepshagger, the amazing second novel from Niall Griffiths (Grit), is as raw and unsettling as its title. Ianto is an orphan, raised by his grandmother in the Welsh countryside. Ugly, withdrawn and semiretarded, he is the classic outcast, finding solace first in nature, later in drugs and the company of a few mates. The ramshackle family farm is sold and his fury at his displacement ultimately impels him to murder. Griffiths's prose matches the savage intensity of his protagonist: stoned reminiscences by Ianto's friends are woven with flashbacks (both wondrous and horrible) of Ianto's childhood and the events leading up to the murders, creating a chilling portrait that is nearly mythological in its intensity and pathos. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Danny, Marc, Griff, and Llyr spend their time taking as many drugs as they can afford, which they mix with quantities of cheap liquor. On the night of the novel, they are trying to make sense of the murders committed by one of their circle, Ianto. A skinny, inarticulate young man, Ianto has brutally killed three people in the mountains near their home. Welsh author Griffiths (Grits) tells his story in three narrative strands: the profane ruminations of Ianto's mates; flashbacks to the recent events that led up to his murderous, inchoate rampage; and scenes from Ianto's childhood that are by turns glorious and brutal. The tragedy of the young man's life is the tapestry of this novel, woven with brilliant images of nature and the squalid reality of a life in which the only release from despair is drugs and liquor. The novel's profanity and graphic brutality will put off many readers, but the power of the narrative is undeniable. Sheepshagger belongs in most adult fiction collections. Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Griffiths comes storming out of Wales, much as James Kelman and Irvine Welsh have from Scotland, in an angry, violent, lyrical American debut about a rural killer. The Welsh countryside may be a bleak place where children are conceived through "a knee-tremble in an outhouse," the abandoned lead mine still "sweat[s] its sly venom," and the rugged landscape defeats any attempts to walk upright, but the halfwit orphan Ianto loves it fiercely, the more so after he is dispossessed of his ancestral home. When he grows up to commit horrendous crimes, his former mates-hardly more articulate than he-try to understand how and why, or whether, to "Just fuckin accept-a fact that yer are things in-a world that yew'll never fuckin be able to understand." Their ongoing conversation in dialect is one thread of a three-fold narrative. Italicized sections in simple yet poetic prose offer scenes from Ianto's childhood, with the violence of the natural world stirring and disturbing his senses. The story of his adult years is told in elevated diction that often soars, sometimes evokes the naturalist's expertise (in a single paragraph about a sheep tick are "scutum," "dermal," "capitulum," "chelicerae," "hyposteme," and "palps") but occasionally overshoots the mark (bodies left on a battlefield are "defenestrated"). It also features a murder so graphic that some readers will want to skim, while the aimlessness of the main characters-unemployed, their Welsh cultural birthright replaced by a culture of casual brutality, drugs, and alcohol-sometimes makes the attention falter. The nationalist agenda portrays the posh English as regularly abusing the locals with verbal and sexual as well as economic violence: theone decent person here is an old woman who feeds and cleans Ianto and speaks only Welsh, the native language he cannot himself understand. Powerful, mostly successful mix of primordial savagery and contemporary malaise told in fierce prose.
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