A Glastonbury Romance

Rating:
Summary: Great work of a unique genius
Review: Powys is a unique literary genius, capable of writing at times with remarkable strength, vision and beauty. Some of this book (please read past the first page) is full of his bizarre nature-religion (the "First Cause"), but the descriptions of people, landscapes and situations are among the greatest the English language has produced. I was completely bowled over by several scenes (Sam Dekker's solo visit to Nell, the pageant play at the end of Part I, and the long scene in Part II at Zoyland's house in particular). Powys has a unique and powerful insight into the human soul and human sensation. I read avidly through all 1120 pages (!), enjoying all of it. His characters all live intensely, and came to life on his pages.

I've visited Glastonbury a couple of times, and found much of the description, particularly the unusual atmospheric effects in that place, to be accurate. I ordered a map of Glastonbuy in 1902 from a website in England, which was very helpful in terms of figuring out where everything was.

I've been perusing Powys' "Autobiography" and my view of the book has been changing slightly, particularly of the character of Owen Evans and Powys' obsession with sadism. Many of Powys' figures seem to be various reflections of his own personality or people he has encountered in his life, which I suppose is true of any writer, only moreso here.

Regardless, I found this book very meaningful and important on a personal level, which is an unusual reaction for a jaded reader like myself. I wouldn't call the book life-changing as much as life-explaining. It was such a refreshing read after so much shallow, empty contemporary garbage that I recommend it especially for those who are sick of modern literature, particularly that written in the past 20 years. This book may not change your life, but it may reaffirm it in ways you had forgotten.

Rating:
Summary: Microcosmic epic of the ancient and the modern
Review: Several attributes distinguish John Cowper Powys as a novelist, and the most prominent, as displayed by "A Glastonbury Romance," is his penchant for long, dense, erudite novels; he is fascinated with mythology and likes to instill his essentially mundane settings with the fantasy and mystique of ages long past; and he tends to be profoundly philosophical in regard to the First Cause. This "Romance" is not a typical heroic epic; the characters are common people who live in the town of Glastonbury, in Somerset County, England, but, like Thomas Hardy's aesthetic successor, Powys creates with his townspeople a vivid microcosm, imitating their peculiar dialect and manners with formidable accuracy.

Structurally, "A Glastonbury Romance" is in the nineteenth-century English tradition of long, labyrinthine novels of the kind composed by Dickens and Eliot, containing dozens of characters and several concurrent plot threads, but it is updated to the early twentieth century with contemporary political and sexual issues. Most of the action centers on a family called Crow who, at the beginning of the novel, have convened in Glastonbury for the funeral of, and to hear the will of, their recently deceased patriarch William. The most successful of William's grandsons is Philip Crow, an industrialist who owns a dye factory and a cave complex called Wookey Hole through which flows an underground river and from which tin is mined.

The novel's conflicts are political, romantic, and spiritual on a grand scale. The town's capitalism represented by Philip Crow is challenged by a small group of communists, led by the idealistic Dave Spear and a local churl named Red Robinson, who want to gain political control of Glastonbury and turn it into a worker-governed commune. "Bloody Johnny" Geard, William Crow's former secretary, is elected Mayor through the support of the communists and becomes Philip's nemesis; although in the novel's concluding flood, a passage of enormous lyrical power and intense drama, the two men agree in a climactic scene on a surprisingly chivalrous course of action that reveals they are more heroic than their personalities originally suggested.

This modern story is immersed in the aura of ancient legends -- Welsh, Celtic, and Biblical, from King Arthur to the Holy Grail to Stonehenge, mystical ingredients in Powys's pungent narrative stew. Perhaps reflecting Powys himself is a Welsh Arthurian antiquary named Owen Evans who has devoted his life to the study of local lore and is writing a history of Merlin the magician. Despite his enthusiastic attentions to the mysteries of the past, Powys is not as much of a misoneist here as he was in "Wolf Solent"; he ungrudgingly allows airplanes in his novel, granting us a brief but wonderful bird's-eye view of Somersetshire.

Although Powys's weighty style greatly appeals to me, this novel is not something I'd casually recommend to just anybody because it does require a considerable investment of the reader's time and concentration, being nearly as long as "War and Peace" and featuring verbose prose that pushes itself to, and often over, the limit. But readers who like to indulge themselves in the colorful and expansive potential of the English language will find "A Glastonbury Romance" a most enriching experience.

Rating:
Summary: Robertson Davies fans - beware!
Review: Wow - if you're determined to buy this book and haven't read a Powys yet, save a few bucks and buy a used one to see if you can stomach this stuff.

I couldn't - and I'm so sorry I paid full price for this! After 200 pages - surely a fair test sample of a 1000+ page book - I hadn't found one character to root for and couldn't bear to plow through 800+ more pages with these "people."

From Robertson Davies' glowing review in "A Merry Heart," I felt like I really had to read Powys right away! I love Davies very much, but this book is nothing like his work - it's m-u-c-h slower and much less far-ranging. It's dull, dull, dull. And the characters are one-dimensional -- either they're pathetic or corrupt.

Just goes to show once again that what deeply moves one person can leave someone who loves the first person cold. Maybe you had to be born in Canada to Welsh parents at the turn of the century and reading this book in the 1930s to get it. I tried, and I couldn't.