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...