Border Country by Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams’ Border Country is a novel, first published in 1960. As a novel it can be found firmly in the ‘fiction’ section of your local bookshop or library. The book is about a family and community in the fictional village of Glynmawr in rural Wales close to the border with England.

The story centres on Matthew Price, a lecturer in Economic History, living and working in London. Matthew is from Glynmawr and early in the story is called back home as his father is unwell. This sets up a chapter by chapter back and forth between Matthew as a young boy, his school days and eventual move to Cambridge University as a student and the present day as a lecturer returning back home to be with his family during his father’s ill health.

Key to the book is Matthew’s relationship with his father – in the present an ageing man and his lecturer son, having left for Cambridge and London and returning to be with his ill father. This is contrasted with the past telling the story of a railway worker guiding his young son in a time of industrial and social change. In the past, industrial action and a general strike looms over the community, creating tensions as values and ideals clash with practicalities and everyday life. The novel looks at social and the economic change of Glynmawr

and its community but also the change of Matthew, crossing the border literally from rural Wales to suburban and cosmopolitan Cambridge and London but also metaphorically from his working class background to academic.

I started this piece, describing the novel as ‘fiction’ (the quotes were very intentional). The author, Raymond Williams was from a village in Wales, part of a small working-class community and the son of a railway worker. Williams went on to study English at Cambridge. Here you can see that the fiction genre is being a little blurred and smudged by Williams. He went on to work in his academic field of English, but, no doubt influenced by his father and background, he developed an interest in language and society. His work took on a more sociological feel and he was one of the founders of the field of cultural studies and remains influential across disciplines today.

Williams was a pioneer in many ways, one in his border crossing but also in his approach to society and cultural studies – he invented the discipline. It still feels subversive and different to write a story in the sciences about your research and life but Williams was doing this in the 1960s. There was also a field emerging at the time called New Journalism which included a more personal and immersive approach to news reporting. More recently this has been called post-qualitative research in the social sciences and Creative Nonfiction in the humanities.

Why can’t we write stories of our experiences in a research-informed and still creative manner? Thanks Raymond, on many fronts!