‘You’re not in Wales anymore. You’re in America’: Cars and Coal in Duncan Bush’s Glass Shot

Duncan Bush’s novel Glass Shot is set in south Wales during the 1984 Miners’ Strike. Narrated by Cardiff tyre fitter and all-round car enthusiast, Stew Boyle, it registers the social effects of the final shift from a south Walian economy organised around communities and the extraction of coal to one based on individual consumption and the servicing of oil-based products made elsewhere. I argue that the novel registers how the car offers Boyle a mobility that fundamentally changes his relation to place and community in Wales. 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.