If a novel has to be judged, like a dramatic work, by the interplay of its personalities or by the grip with which conflict of wills compels attention to the outcome, then Mr. Rhys Davies's "The Withered Root" … will disappoint. But the title plays fair, and truly suggests that the drab, not the dazzling, is to come. In his first sentence Mr. Rhys Davies takes us to a "dwelling in one of those naked rows, chiefly occupied by colliers, that rise, shrouded in grey coal dust, on the Valley hills." He takes us to the Valley, and there or thereabouts firmly he keeps us. The Valley, one of those many valleys across South Wales which coal has populated, shuts in the book as it shuts in its thousands of inhabitants. In the first chapter Reuben Daniels enters the Valley, not by choice but by being born, and leaves it by death in the last. That is all. It is the story of a man and a people, a man whose force of mind tries to break through the psychological mists that enshroud his fellows, and to show them the light beyond. He wins and he loses; for we are in Wales, and something cracks too soon.

The tale itself is slight. The central figure, Reuben Daniels, for all his "taut strength" is not vital enough to give it life. "Morgan the Bakehouse" nearly, but not quite, lives up to the glamour of his name. The rest are little more than skittles, whom Reuben either bumps up against or does not. Yet, however formless his men and women, Mr. Davies has brought the Valley itself all alive to us. In days that are past, religion held the place of pre-eminence in men's minds there which now politics has usurped. Reuben finds himself acclaimed the leader of a revival…. The revival chapters provide flashes of humour which are surely not so scarce elsewhere in Wales as in this book….

[The] unwillingness to describe emotion except in fleshy physical phrases, [the] attempts to enrich a grey atmosphere with strange wealth of epithets, distract attention from the far more cunning pictures of the Valley and its religious life. When Mr. Davies is describing a Welshman's hilltop dreams or the psychology of semi-sordid lives, his language carries little weight other than adjectival; but his Valley he does know and its "death-worshipping" people with their ornate Sabbath teas. Fair or unfair he may be to that old-and-new Glamorgan religion which is the resultant of Welshmen and coalmining and geographical isolation; he has correctly inserted all the illustrative details.

"New Novels: 'The Withered Root'," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1927; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 1349, December 8, 1927, p. 930.