Once in every generation a book comes along which rips up all our ideas and invites us to see the world anew. Just such a book is The Reporter’s Tale by award-winning Welsh writer Tom Davies, a memoir which contains a world-shattering revelation which will change everyone who reads it.
We meet Davies as a young Rousseau scampering around the streets of Cardiff with rock ‘n roll ringing in his ears, falling in and out of love, working on the paddle steamers in the Bristol Channel and searching Tiger Bay for meanings which aren’t there.
He wants to become a writer and conceives of his life as a search for God. This search keeps him travelling around the world and he ends up in African brothels and a mass brawl on a cargo ship in Melbourne. He journeys to America and becomes a social worker in the sweltering slums of the Lower East Side of New York. There are more affairs and meetings with famous people.
After graduating he becomes a volunteer teacher in Malaya and, in an astonishing few days of blistering revelation, God finds him. He is working on a book full of sex and violence which blows up on him and he is shown a world under attack by artists such as himself. We are living in an age of black rain he is told.
Later he journeys through the media, beginning with the Western Mail and then to top London newspapers. During this work he slowly unravels the meanings of his Malayan visions, arriving at conclusions which are both terrifying and world shaking.
Our global media, particularly our film industry, has long been a template for mass murder and the growing crime and violence of our streets, he asserts. Terrorism has also found a home and voice in the media because terrorism and modern journalism have, albeit unwittingly, got into bed with one another. Our media seized hold of a major blip in the Northern Rock bank and, with its natural talents for alarmism and exaggeration, both triggered the recession and then went on to fuel it on a world-wide basis.
With a new take on the death of John Lennon and a fresh explanation for the Hungerford massacre and the attack on Ronald Reagan this book must add up to the most violent and vicious attack ever mounted on the mind of the modern media. It is written in a storm of righteous wrath by a man who has seen a vision and cannot lay it down and has won widespread praise from such as Jan Morris, Max Boyce and Ian Jack. But, perhaps inevitably, the media won’t go near it, not even to damn it.
When you put The Reporter’s Tale down you will ask yourself only one question: how have we allowed such an empire of evil to take over our lives? It’s time to wake up.
Many critics have called 'The Reporters Tale' a masterpiece. One critic (Amazon) compares it to the work of CS Lewis.
Columnist Ian Jack calls Davies “a religious visionary” and adds that the book is “as strange and compelling as the Book of Revelation”.
Entertainer Max Boyce describes Davies as one of Wales’ most passionate and creative writers.
Canon Michael Saward writes: “unmissable as it grapples with faith, sex, the media and the horrific implications of fictional violence on our disturbed society”.
Poet and broadcaster Stewart Henderson calls the book “a sensuous and at times harrowing pilgrimage, something which John Bunyan might have written had he joined that pub crawl to Canterbury. Be inspired.”
"A terrific writer. All heart." Novelist Jilly Cooper
"Now we wait for the film version." TV presenter Anne Robinson.
