'Some men will poke anything. Tell you, boy, whoring,
back-handers, Y'know trumps, and a cushy place on the coal, they go together in
Pencaer'.
Berry's style is compresses to the point of obliquity, but
serves the admirable purpose of shedding a sudden and vivid life on his
creations. We have this for example, as a first description of one of his
heroines: 'Elsie wiggled her ballooning figure, round breasts, belly
and buttocks, but her hands and feet were tiny, immaculate, the symmetry of
fairyland'.
Berry is a stylist, a literary man. For all the harshness
of his settings, his concerns and his narrative, he uses this concision and
this brilliance of texture to stab home one insight after another. A death from
smallpox is described thus: ...carted away in a black van, spectators ranged out wide,
his toothless widow screaming lament like a Breughel arrest'.
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