[Mr. Rhys Davies is of a lively and independent nature. In A Time to Laugh he] takes an idealistic young doctor living in a mining valley in Wales and pushes him into the middle of the working-class conflict at the beginning of this century. The doctor breaks with his bourgeois girl, who is very well drawn—how well we know one another, we bourgeois!—marries a working-class girl—not so well known—and goes to live in the toughest slum of the town. There is some romantic wish-fulfilment going on here, but the material is excellent, in the first place because the Welsh are a nation of toughs, rogues and poetic humbugs, vivid in their speech, impulsive in behaviour and riddled with a sly and belligerent tribalism. Mr. Rhys Davies handles this expertly. He is passionate, athletic, comical and lyrical by turns. He is out in the streets when the windows smash. The doctor and his Daisy are romantic types, of course, presented without criticism. Indeed, original sin vanished from the leading people in political fiction; the only crimes and the only virtues are ideological. There are some excellent minor stories in the book, which is dramatic and alive from the beginning down to the marvellous New Year party at the end.