Philosopher Brad Evans, a Professor at the University of Bath, grew up in the Rhondda valley in Wales. In How Black Was My Valley, he has fused a personal memoir with a people’s history. In recent years, his writings have focused on the novel forms of structural violence and challenged the ideology of “resilience” that has been a focus of liberal elites since the 1970s. The components of this era include precarity, deindustrialization, legalized corruption, and increasing inequality.
Evans’s book is a gripping anti-Hillbilly Elegy. That book, beloved and legitimized by American elites seeking to exoticize working-class and rural whites who rejected Democrats in 2016, helped propel J.D. Vance from a Peter Thiel lackey to the U.S. Vice Presidency. But instead of the resentful, smug prose that J.D. Vance offered in his overpraised book—trashing his own community and using his Yale Law School trajectory as a bogus model for others—Evans offers a radical departure. His tone is elegiac, full of sad pride in his heroes, many of whom have putrid aprons and dirt beneath their fingernails.
Evans’s youth was spent living beside an abandoned pit on the poorest street in an impoverished section of a rusted landscape, what Gray’s Elegy described as “the short and simple annals of the poor.” He describes his small home, a “hilltop beacon of despair” with the “character-building benefits of an outside toilet.”
His narrative is suffused with Welsh history and empathy what he calls “an internal colony.” Images from his talented wife Chantal Meza burn across the pages and cover like dark memories. Throughout, Evans investigates the tragic history of the coal valleys and uses a philosopher’s skill, a blizzard of ponderous questions—throughout, to consider the fresh perils awaiting us. Evans claims, “We don’t suffer from a lack of feeling; we are suffocated by them. What we lack is the capacity to think in ways that free us from dogmatic and morally certain chains. None of this is inseparable from what some identify to be the crisis of the left today, which is a crisis of the political imagination.”
The election of 2024 perfectly exemplified Evans’s thesis about blundering liberals as bland fanatics with contempt for their own voters. But he is also correct about an epidemic of loneliness, especially among white men who are falling “easy prey for those who seek to politicize their anguish” and replace their desire to connect with the bountiful snake-oil of hate.
The book’s setting is a bleak and rusted landscape. Thatcher-era Wales would be familiar to anyone from America’s industrial Midwest where Clinton-era “bipartisanship” de-industrialized and smashed labor. We follow Evans on that most British of journeys, a contemplative walk. He guides us along his grim familiar streets. The buildings are boarded. There is little work. People are exhausted by the times. Even the crows seem to mock the valley dwellers.
The millions of tons of coal extracted by Welsh miners in Rhondda was the chief ingredient to globalization. Yet, during the Great Depression, the Welsh valley’s unemployment rate was 45%. Welsh pits fueled Britain’s industrialization. But those who were called to war service discovered their shabby Empire had no jobs for them upon their return. The book covers a history of consistent betrayal, economic dislocation, and humiliation with slashing prose like Jack Beatty’s excellent Age of Betrayal.
“There is no Marshall Plan for these parts,” he writes. Consequently, in his valley and those like it, epidemics of suicide, depression, drug addiction, obesity, and social breakdown persist.
Yet, Evans takes great pride in his community, thrilling the reader with anecdotes about Welsh heroes and flashes of solidarity that remind me of Orwell’s scenes of worker-led Barcelona. Evans does not merely rely on impersonal forces or economic shifts as culprits. Nor does he lean on victimization, a politics he argues is the worst kind of individualization. Instead, he details the policy decisions that led to social disasters we also witnessed in the United States.
The hellish aftermath he vividly describes was not merely inevitable, as is the cheap excuse today, but instead the clear-eyed policy goal of Margaret Thatcher. Her aim was to obliterate the idea of society—a working-class way of life and the political organization, trust, and solidarity that emerged from it. Similarly, Andrew O’Hagan’s novel Our Fathers, whose protagonist demolishes the hosing towers his grandfather built, perfectly captured the unintended consequences of postwar “Progress” in Britain. For Evans, Thatcher’s crushing reign skipped any pretense of those good intentions and relied on brute force, disinvestment, the collaboration of New Labour, and a consequent shame of working people robbed of work.
But Thatcher won. Her legacy lives in Britain’s Labour austerity where a third of children are projected to live in relative poverty by 2028, according to the Fairness Foundation. Evans’s own disabled father was “a man who wanted nothing more than to live a dignified life.” But in Thatcher-era Britain, he was constantly humiliated, or “means-tested” to prove the persistence of his physical weakness. For Evans, Thatcherism was structural violence defined, a topic he has explored in nearly all his books. He writes, “When Thatcher arrived, we were already destitute. Her shame was to make our poverty feel a million times worse.”
Evans’s draws well-rendered portraits of sinister politicians. Churchill and Thatcher emerge as chief villains, hammering the Welsh at every opportunity. There are pages of melancholy and passages of pure rage. Evans is at his strongest with righteous anger, denouncing moralists, bourgeois liberals wracked by post-colonial guilt, Tony Blair, kick-down-the ladder sellouts, and the callous Oxbridge-educated political class to name a few.
In one vivid chapter on the Aberfan disaster, a colliery spoil tip, we learn about the 144 people (116 of them children) who were crushed by the negligence of the coal companies who threatened pit closures and unemployment when the companies were clearly warned of the risks. The victims ranged in age from 3 months to 82 years of age. Evans calls out nine named individuals responsible for Aberfan —who were largely absolved. None lost their jobs and indeed many went on to work at higher pay grades. History does rhyme, doesn’t it? As of today, no one has been held accountable for the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster. Nor has anyone been perp-walked for Flint Michigan’s water crisis, or the crash in East Palestine, Ohio, either.
Yet, this book is a hybrid of forms, fusing the personal, historical, and topical. Similar to his book, The Atrocity Exhibition, Evans sees technological change enabling the de-politicization of disposable populations. He both looks back on his early setting, the valley’s despair wrought by structural violence, and anticipates looming catastrophes in labor: “The most profound challenge facing humanity is how to find dignity and pride in an emergent economy where the very source of meaning is being undone by automatic systems.”
Will there be a universal income? What is the plan for people displaced by the emergent technologies the new bro-oligarchy is unleashing? He explores themes such as absence, dependency, and the alienation of his younger self, skilled in martial arts, uneasy as a Welsh lad “branded on the tongue” at his university.
When writing about leaving his valley, Evans echoed The Beatles song “Nowhere Man,” who “is sitting in his nowhere land/Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.” Evans writes, “I was born into towns which once stood for something and were populated by people with meaning and purpose. I was born into a nowhere land, full of nowhere people, ghosted by the past, discarded by the rest…I soon discovered that, to overcome this life, it was necessary to educate myself out of the valleys.”
Evans also expertly captures the connection of people to their homes. In How Green Was My Valley, from which Evans borrows his own bleak title, Richard Llewellyn’s narrator offers this: “Of me was the Valley and the Valley was of me, and every blade of grass, and every stone, and every leaf of every tree, and every knob of coal or drop of water, or stick or branch or flower or grain of pollen, or creature living, or dust in ground, all were of me as my blood, my bones, or the notions from my mind. My Valley, O my valley, within me, I will live in you, eternally.”
Evans’s own book would have benefited from a bit more of Llewellyn’s tone, a book that was published in a cruel year, 1939. Also, the book’s weak call to action—listening to others, broader imagination, a need to look more intently at the past, and education—leaves the reader hoping for a few more answers among the flurry of his questions and musings. Digital terrains have not helped politics, he claims. But could they? He denounces those do-gooders who ignore the Welsh valleys and instead go abroad to “give back.” But is this productive criticism for young people seeking to understand and see what is happening to the world?
The book also could have used a more attentive editor. Botched efforts at prose poetry-style description, for dozens of digressive and dour pages, can sink the narrative. So, too, can hollow lines like, “Anyone born into a psychosis of nowhereness never finds that somewhere.”
If there is anything readers will need for what lies ahead, it is a sense of humor, however bitter or ironic. While this quality is quite alive in all working-class communities, unfortunately it is missing in much of this book. However, these are mild blemishes in a story that describes a sublime landscape and powerful scenes of human tragedy and potential.
