Duncan Bush's Welsh Petrofiction: Energy Transition and Neoliberalism in 'Glass Shot'

Duncan Bush’s novel 'Glass Shot', set in south Wales during the 1984 Miners’ Strike, registers the social effects of the final shift from a south Walian economy and community organised around the extraction of coal to one based on individual consumption and the servicing of oil-based products . I argue that the novel critiques the car as a symbol of a dangerous individualism that – through its attendant ideas about the backwardness of Welsh coal communities and the future-orientation of American petroculture – lays the ideological groundwork for the ‘breaking of the miners’ and the neoliberal economy that follows. By making this case, I hope to show how a petro-critical approach to Welsh literature can deepen understanding of our own energy history, and remind us, as we embark on a green energy transition, of the need to put community and social justice at the heart of any change.