Steve Griffiths’ An Elusive State – Entering al-Chwm  gives an account of an imaginary civilisation called al-Chwm, with its own history, its values and customs, a fragmentary poetic story covering a vast, even geological timescale, always playing with the idea of Utopia (and Dystopia), and investigating some themes that confront us here and now.    It is subject to transformations and shifts backward and forward in time.  

The book is conceived under the influence of the European flowering of fragmented, shifting narrative in prose, particularly Calvino.   

The book’s Utopian moments are inevitably shadowed by failure, which is evaded by creating an elastic timespan where fragmentary speculations range.   This permits a great deal of shapeshifting, from a place which is fundamentally a rural civilisation, though it appears to have a shady imperial alter ego among other transformations.      The narrative, if there is one, keeps coming back to a reference point at the beginning of the 21st century, mostly as a remembered time.   

It has a strong spiritual dimension which is shot through with scepticism, maybe arising out of the Sixties generation’s fantasies of progress, and the subsequent disappointments, cynicisms, the sometimes unexpected fulfilment, and the author’s own growing capacity for amusement.      Steve Griffiths tries, though sometimes he fails, for a note of detachment which might suggest a fictional anthropology.   Calvino’s Invisible Cities have been a guiding spirit, though Griffiths’ work is less static and less beautiful,  because there’s more that’s willed here, more of the politician than in Calvino’s Venice-centred masterpiece.   

It’s been a bit of an explosion for Steve.    It began with a vision in the province of Granada which merged a twilight in the hill town of Montefrio with one in his home village in Anglesey, North Wales, as the lights came on one by one.   As al-Chwm begins to accumulate its own history and pathology in a transformed Anglesey landscape, it grows into a book about maturity, history, mistakes, places, death, democracy, power, laughter in the dark, science in the context of these matters, glasses half full or half empty, cups overflowing and the advantages and disadvantages of this.

Laura Thomas, a BBC Radio producer working on a radio adaptation of the collection, has described ‘An Elusive State’ like this:

“A man hits fifty. He grew up surrounded by a belief in progress. Now he, and the world around him, are not so sure.    He creates a Utopia to comfort himself.   An Elusive State charts the life of a mythical place from the first moment of its existence to Steve Griffiths' reluctant destruction of the world he had created, in Al-Chwm's final poems: "The last two poems represent an assassination – the willed death of the flawed Utopia I had lived and played with for four years."     An Elusive State explores the comforts and terrors of utopia, and what it's like to create and destroy your own imaginary world.   

It’s a parallel universe, a magical epic, a comfort, a mystery”.