An eye for oddity and a past without end

My bond to Wales, unwarranted though it may be, has made my joy in discovering Byron Rogers all the greater. Though he is well enough known in Britain and a number of his books are available here, he is a new writer to me. His work is marked by a fascination with curious characters, a penchant for bringing himself into every story, and a view of the world that sees the past as ever present. He is exactly my cup of tea.

The only son of a carpenter and his wife, Rogers was born outside a little village in South West Wales and spoke only Welsh until he was 5, when the family moved to the town of Carmarthen. He went on to make his way in the world by his pen, writing in English as a journalist and biographer, and for a short, strange time, as a speechwriter for Prince Charles. I have now read three books by him, among them his just-published, highly episodic memoir, “Me: The Authorised Biography’’ (Aurum, $22.83). The incident that propelled him to write this work - or so he claims, and it does get things off with a bang - was receiving a four-page letter, appreciative and detailed, from a sexually gratified woman. From this, and subsequent letters and phone calls from other women, he gathered that another man, posing as Byron Rogers, was going about London seducing lonely middle-aged ladies. Whoever and whatever else he may have been, the imposter was clearly accomplished in the amorous arts, and the complaints coming in were only of being stood up. Rogers eventually decided to track down the fellow - which he did with middling success, but with wonderful story-telling brio.

Rum characters and odd birds are Rogers’s stock in trade, and they populate the pages of “On the Trail of the Last Human Cannonball’’ (Aurum, paperback, $15.95). Here, as you might expect, you will meet the last man whose job it is - or was, as of 1998 - to be shot from a cannon, a Hungarian called Osci Tabak (“ ‘I always been a acrobat,’ said the lunatic, a gaunt man with shoulders like a coat hanger. ‘Doing something unusual you know. I find no human cannonball left in Europe. I think to myself, Christ is time I start.’ ’’) Also in these pages you will find a group of good people attempting to revive the Welsh language by promoting the writing of pulp fiction in that tongue - though, as the essay’s title notes, “There Is No Word for Orgasm.’’ Present, too, is a vivid reimagining of the Battle of Agincourt in the company of an immense modern-day archer. All the ingredients that make Rogers so congenial to me are here: His total immersion in history and persistence in seeing the past as never gone; his fascination with bygone expertise; his encounter with a man on an unusual mission; and his own irrepressible self always edging toward center stage.

Rogers’s way of telling stories is as arresting as the oddities and eccentrics who are their subjects. The talent is no doubt acquired from his Welsh antecedents who reveled in language. In the foreword to his marvelous collection of what we may call feuilletons, “The Bank Manager and the Holy Grail: Travels to the Weirder Reaches of Wales,’’ (Aurum, $27.50) he describes his 15-year-old self listening to his Welsh-speaking father and a companion discussing sermons: “But it was not theology that interested them, it was the word play of the old preachers they could quote by the yard. . . . I listened as they roared with laughter at the metaphors and the rhetoric.’’ At the time, soon to go up to Oxford, he felt a condescending irritation with this and toward them, for, as he notes, “I was . . . full of myself, as anyone might be, who in purple ink and three different handwriting styles had just completed an essay on the Prioress’s Tale from Chaucer.’’

Rogers’s writing has a loose, meandering charm punctuated by inspired characterizations, and perhaps it is this - and his own indisputable Welshness - that led to his being called upon to help the Prince of Wales pull his speeches out of the slough into which they forever drifted. Charles’s melancholy and sense of futility - he had only recently begun to believe the monarchy made any sense - showed up in his speeches, which tended to begin “along the lines of ‘Ladies and gentlemen, what on earth am I doing here?’ ’’ Rogers’s sojourn as a royal speechwriter, covered in “Me,’’ was not terribly long, but was a passage through an alien realm of reds and golds and creaking protocol, a world in which it was thought strange, indeed, that he actually expected to be paid for his labors.

Elsewhere he treats of his family and friends, paying special attention to their latter days. The end of things, of past ways of living and conversing, is clearly on his mind, not just because his years are approaching three score and ten, but because he emerged from a world that has been rubbed out. He is both acidic and funny on the depredations of triumphal bureaucracy and the ruinous rationale of the marketplace, concluding with the high-handed closing of one of the last perfect pubs on the face of the earth by its distant, corporate owner.

Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.