Christopher Meredith: Review of Melog

A review from The Independent

Melog, by Mihangel Morgan, trans Christopher Meredith (SEREN £7.99) Dr Jones, a full-time Welsh academic ("that is he was out of work and living on social security"), first sees Melog standing naked on top of the local town hall, apparently trying to kill himself. Although tempted to join in with a crowd of cynical onlookers imploring the thin, white-faced young man to go ahead and jump, Jones feels a sudden rush of pity: "He would have given anything in the world if he could stop him and rescue him or if they could change places." When Melog is eventually saved, Jones takes the boy into his care.        It transpires that Melog is a refugee from Laxaria, a distant country mysteriously absent from any map - as is its neighbour, Sacria, which brutally colonised it. Melog tells Jones that he is in Wales to retrieve an ancient Laxarian book called the "Imalic", a vastly important work containing all that nation's myths, taken to Wales by Melog's great uncle to preserve it from the Sacrians.        This novel contains some fine comic touches, all wonderfully skewed in support of the Welsh nation (this publication is the first English translation of the original Welsh text). Melog, for example, speaks excellent Welsh thanks to a strange young teacher called Cadwaladr who travelled to Laxaria and, with great enthusiasm, taught the local youths English. The children became more and more proficient in "the world's greatest language" until a school inspector revealed that Cadwaladr had, in fact, been teaching them Welsh. Although the pace is sometimes a little too frenetic, Melog remains a highly original, alternately hilarious and poignant satire on political oppression and a moving tale about loneliness.

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