This question reverberates through the novel in ingenious, unexpectedly affecting ways, binding together not just Hess and his interrogator but a German P.O.W., accused by his fellow soldiers of cowardice, and the titular Welsh girl, who harbors a shameful secret. Are we who we think we are, or who others judge us to be?” “We have something in common, you and I,” he slyly observes. Instead, on a hillside thick with heather and gorse where the two men alight to admire the view, Hess commandeers the conversation. In the novel as was the case in life, he is in poor health, prone to suicide attempts and self-professed amnesia his encounter with the translator, a half-Jewish German who suffers from another sort of identity confusion - he never met his Jewish father or considered himself Jewish until the Nazis decree him so - yields no useful intelligence. Once the Nazis’ deputy Führer, Hess spent much of the war under British guard in Wales, after undertaking an abortive “peace mission” to Scotland in 1941. Along for the ride is a translator for British intelligence who’s been sent down from London to interrogate Hess. Halfway through Peter Ho Davies’s justly acclaimed first novel, “The Welsh Girl,” set in the final months of World War II, a pair of British officers escort Rudolf Hess on a Sunday drive through the Welsh countryside.
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