Product Description

The story of Ianto: the feral, inarticulate, inbred, ignoble savage; haunter of mountains, killer of innocents. 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 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 weekender' barbecue 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 information into unspeakable savagery - embodying our most primal fears of physical threat, a world beyond our control.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36604 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 266 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Written in rough, tough and fiercely native prose, Sheepshagger is a coming-of-age ensemble novel about a bunch of promiscuous, disenchanted, druggy Welsh youngsters, growing up in a world from which they feel disconnected, surrounded by a beautiful countryside they struggle to understand. In the middle and somehow pivotal to this motley Celtic crew is Ianto: a genetically unfortunate ne'er-do-well who yet possesses the spiritual centredness the others lack. It is Ianto who relates to the rurality around them: "the lightning blasted blackthorn", the "same soil his forefathers dug in". As a result of the strange, totemic figure he cuts, Ianto manages to hang with the others and become something of a mascot to them, even though they tease him mercilessly about his virginity. The dialogue is vivid and believable, in an expletive-rich Irvine Welsh way. The intervening descriptions are spare and impressive, although they sometimes strain too hard towards lyricism: "he is like something dredged from the harbour long sodden in silt and brine, a being discarnate of mud and stagnant water". The book culminates in a rural cop-chase; however the true poetic essence of the book is its very contemporary take on Welshness. Griffiths' second novel is a modern-day elegy to the put-upon man-of-the-woods, the long-oppressed Celt, the deracinated Taff, the Sheepshagger. --Sean Thomas

Guardian
‘Sheepshagger is never less than compelling; the range of Griffiths’s achievement is as exhilarating as the reach of his ambition’

Independent
‘Niall Griffiths is in complete command of his material…A hymn both ancient and modern to place and to unsentimental belonging’

Customer Reviews

Particularly Significant in Current Political Climate...
A fantastic novel, even exceeding the feat that was Grits. The novel was even more poignant to read given the current controversy over the release of Jamie Bulger's killers. Who is worse; the criminal who commits the atroscity or the vigilantes who jump on the cause as an excuse for further violence? I loved this book as much as I loved the last Griffiths wrote...

Llainfair a go go
Too many italics, this was a narrative device also employed by Simon Armitage in Little Green Man and it's *dated* as all heck.

Also, most of the paragraphs are too long, this is like reading Faulkner but not in a literaty type of way.

Opeless Ianto, opeless.

Depressing, but difficult to put down
By the time I had finished this book, I felt that I had witnessed some of the bleakest possible lives. None of the characters seemed to have any direction in their lives, getting relentlessly smashed on booze and a variety of drugs. Their behaviour is at the best anti-social, and at the worst actively ruining the lives of others around them with horrific and graphic violence. And they don't even seem to enjoy getting stoned.
And then the writing is over-elaborate, long detailed sentences overflowing with similes, the sentences bursting with adjectives like popcorn in a cinema bucket; looks grand but has little taste.
Yet I couldn't put the book down. I read it in 2 days (skipping some of the popcorn). After finishing it, I threw the book away, not wanting to inflict the depression on anyone else.