This post is a highly uncritical piece about Rachel Trezise, who is hands down, one of my favourite new authors. I’ve just read Dial M for Merthyr a second time and loved it again. Dial M… chronicles Rachel’s travels with the band Midasuno, making it sort of a Welsh ‘Almost Famous’ tale. But the book is about so much more than an obscure band, which I had previously never heard of- it’s about teenage social rejects, modern day Wales, small town life, love of rock ‘n roll, and about Rachel herself. She writes often of the fact that a music fan puts his or her own emotions into the music they are listening to and the music experience is so powerful when it is thus personalized, it is as if the band were singing directly to the listener.

She writes:

“It is the secret, highly emotive parts of us where the relationship between the adorer and the adored begins. The fan immediately believes, because a chord has been so palpably struck, that the artist knows them tremendously well, and that they in turn know the artist in some way, as if there’s a kind of telepathy between kindred spirits occurring. It’s frenetic stuff (p 127, Dial M for Merthyr.)

And:

“I see for a moment, exactly what I want to; five kids from a post-industrial wasteland with no real meaning left in their lives; the children of socialists who have been put out to pasture and who are really fucking angry about it; people who are just like me. Sure, they don’t look like they care much about politics and they’re singing this supposedly Marxist anthem to a flock of kids who look like the only revolt they’re capable of starting is a skirmish with a McDonald’s employee about their Big Mac not coming with Super Size fries, but as a fan I need the band to make me feel less alone, to be people who have experienced the same thing as I have and to speak my words when my voice can’t be heard” (p 139, Dial M for Merthyr.)

This phenomenon of perceived emotional connection with a rock band is also something which can be experienced with a gifted author. Part of Rachel’s skill with writing is that her own experiences are easily translatable into experiences and emotions with which the reader is familiar. So while she is writing about her love for Midasuno, I am reading about my own adoration for the Manic Street Preachers. (As it turns out, Rachel has impeccable taste in music and Midasuno are indeed a very exciting band.)

A few years ago, as part of a Welsh literature class, I read In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl, and it’s haunted me ever since. Goldfish Bowl is Rachel Trezise’s semi-autobiography (or perhaps entirely autobiographical) debut novel, which is about a young girl surviving a severely abusive childhood in the Rhondda Valleys. It’s an Elizabeth Wurtzel-style book set in Wales, with a less whiney protagonist. As with Dial M for Merthyr, this book managed to be definitely Welsh and definitely about Rachel, while also being about small towns and childhoods everywhere.

So now I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of her short story anthology Fresh Apples, and am contenting myself, in the meantime, with reading her blog and the few stories which are available on her website at http://www.racheltrezise.co.uk/

Oh, and because she isn’t bad ass enough, she also writes for the Big Issue.