WHO IS GARETH PARRY?

He is the main character in both of John Gruffydd’s works to date but what do we know about Gareth Parry? It has been suggested that Gareth is really a thinly disguised version of his creator but John Gruffydd is quick to dismiss that idea. Whilst drawing on many of his own life experiences to create the character the author has, in his own words, made Gareth “what I would like to be rather than what I am.”

Gareth Parry is perhaps typical of many whose teenage years were spent amid the rapid social changes of the 1960’s, an idealist whose principles were, of necessity, hardened up during the harsh years of Thatcherism. He remains someone who prizes honesty and integrity, the sort of solicitor who still clung to the unfashionable notion that a lawyer’s duty was above all to his client in preference to his reputation or bank balance. His working years were spent in the unglamorous surroundings of a high street solicitors’ practice in a declining ex mining village and you feel that there is no other way in which he would want to use his training than to help those whom “polite society” has cast aside to negotiate a legal system designed to benefit just such a society.

Gareth is afflicted with what he himself calls “Good Samaritan Syndrome”, the irresistible urge to help those who call out to him whatever the personal disadvantage of doing so. Above all, through all of the challenges he faces, Gareth maintains a deep and instinctive sense of justice and a dry sense of humour that superficial acquaintances might just mistake for grumpiness.

A truly interesting character even after exchanging the demands of legal practice for the indolence of retirement in a small Spanish village, Gareth Parry is someone whom readers can enjoy getting to know and hopefully like through the pages of John Gruffydd’s work.