A Glastonbury Romance, first published in 1932, is Powys masterwork, an epic novel of terrific cumulative force and lyrical intensity. In it he probes the mystical and spiritual ethos of the small English village of Glastonbury, and the effect upon its inhabitants of a mythical tradition from the remotest past of human history - the legend of the Grail. Powys's rich iconography interweaves the ancient with the modern, the historical with the legendary, and the imaginative within man with the natural world outside him to create a book of astonishing scope and beauty.
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From Publishers Weekly
A major English novelist of the 1920s and '30s, Powys's remarkable novels are reprinted from time to time (Harper recently did Weymouth Sands). The present edition marks a long-overdue return to availability of what is certainly his masterwork. Glastonbury is a small town in Somerset that by legend was home to King Arthur, and some of its ruins are infused with the spirit of long-gone ideals like the Holy Grail. Building on that base, Powys has constructed a towering edifice of faith, greed and cynicism, as a wealthy industrialist tries to exploit the town's mines, a skeptic cynically plans to bring in money by exploiting the legends and many people of varying degrees of faith and idealism are caught in between. Powys's gifts are enormous: he has an eye for nature, and its mystical power, akin to Wordsworth's; his sense of rustic scene and character is the equal of Hardy; his sharp-eyed view of business and politics reminds one of Shaw; and his sense of the endless subtleties of the relationships between men and women is, if anything, more encompassing than D. H. Lawrence's. His leisurely tale is told in prose that ranges from poetic miniatures to extended passages of the most dazzling rhetoric. It's a long book that requires the closest attention; but those who fall under its spell will be rewarded by one of this century's masterpieces of the novel.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
The first modern paperback edition of "the only novel produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski." -George Steiner, The New Yorker
"To encounter [Powys] ... is to arrive at the very fount of creation. He makes us witness the consuming fire which rages throughout the universe entire and which gives not warmth nor enlightenment, but enduring vision, enduring strength, and enduring courage." --Henry Miller
"This is a ... great novel. It stands as a gigantic rebuke to a time of minimum-risk writers and readers, and I hope that many among them will be encouraged to attempt it." --The Chicago Tribune
³I am working my way slowly through [Powy¹s] works of which A Glastonbury Romance is the mightiest. Epic in length, this has an important contemporary resonance as all the makings of the modern Glastonbury legends, mirrored and enacted anew at the 1971 Glastonbury Fayre, are prefigured in this remarkable epic taleŠ Weymouth Sands is a book you can live with for a month or more and immerse yourself. Haunting and powerful, strange, absurd and mysterious.² --The Generalist Blog
"To encounter [Powys] ... is to arrive at the very fount of creation. He makes us witness the consuming fire which rages throughout the universe entire and which gives not warmth nor enlightenment, but enduring vision, enduring strength, and enduring courage." --Henry Miller
"This is a ... great novel. It stands as a gigantic rebuke to a time of minimum-risk writers and readers, and I hope that many among them will be encouraged to attempt it." --The Chicago Tribune
³I am working my way slowly through [Powy¹s] works of which A Glastonbury Romance is the mightiest. Epic in length, this has an important contemporary resonance as all the makings of the modern Glastonbury legends, mirrored and enacted anew at the 1971 Glastonbury Fayre, are prefigured in this remarkable epic taleŠ Weymouth Sands is a book you can live with for a month or more and immerse yourself. Haunting and powerful, strange, absurd and mysterious.² --The Generalist Blog
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34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Microcosmic epic of the ancient and the modern,
By A.J. (Maryland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Glastonbury Romance (Mass Market Paperback)
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.
38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Flawed powerful monster of a book,
By
This review is from: A Glastonbury Romance (Mass Market Paperback)
This book is not for the faint hearted.It's a novel set in the small English town of Glastonbury during the early years of the 20th century. Glastonbury has long been associated with the Arthurian and Grail legends, and Powys draws heavily on this material. He explores the different ways in which his large cast of characters respond to the Glastonbury legends, and their different visions of what Glastonbury could become: a place of pilgrimage, an experimental socialist commune, or a modern industrial town. Roughly speaking the main characters in the novel can be divided between the communists, the mystics, the industrialists and the sensualists. There is a chorus of rustic grotesques to provide some light relief. Behind all this is the author's own metaphysical system. This has two particularly striking features. One is its dualism. Everything in existence has both a good and an evil side, and this applies not only to all the human chacaters but also to God (usually referred to here as "the First Cause") and to the host of supernatural beings who are the "invisible watchers" observing Glastonbury. The second feature is that everything, animate or inanimate, has its own point of view and its own consciousness. For instance, we find out what the sun thinks of the Vicar of Glastonbury: it doesn't like him, because he's a Christian rather than a sun-worshipper. The writing is at times completely over the top. If you read the first page (or even the notorious first sentence) you will see what I mean. And there are passages of rhapsodical nature mysticism that are very hard to take seriously if you have ever read "Cold Comfort Farm". Is the book worth reading? If you like very long novels, have a speculative or mystical bent to your personality, and (especially) if you are interested in the Arthurian stories, then the answer could well be yes. If your taste in fiction is for realism rather than magical realism then give this one a miss. For myself, although at times my patience was strained almost to breaking point, I found that the cumulative power of the book, and the tremendous set pieces at the end of each of its two parts, made it worth the effort.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Enchanted World,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: A Glastonbury Romance (Mass Market Paperback)
This work simply comprises too much to be encapsulated in any sort of review I might proffer here.-Realising this essential fact, I'll just confine myself to what makes this work one of the greatest achievements in 20th Century literature.
Powys has a unique depth of insight - and poetic way of expressing this insight - into what makes people who they are and do what they do. He has the rare gift of being able to express this extra dimension to each personality in lovely (almost dancing, I would say)language. This is Powys major accomplishment, and the reason anyone interested in deep, powerful literature should read this deliciously meandering tome. A couple other footnotes here: 1)The Russian writer Powys resembles most is not Tolstoy, but Dostoyevsky, with his insights into the twisted and sinuous dreamworld behind human personality-Only Powys easily betters him. 2) When I looked Powys up in an encyclopaedia of authors, the article on Powys concluded that "his admirers have largely been confined to those readers who share his interest in the esoteric."-This is rubbish. The Arthurian legends, The Grail, The Passion Play and all other "esoterica" here are important only because they represent motives and psychic depths in the characters--One can read this book quite easily and with great appreciation, as I did, and complete it having no further interest whatsoever in the arcana of the Holy Grail legend. Well, let's let Powys have the last word here: The composers of fiction aim at a verisimilitude which seldom corresponds to the much more eccentric and chaotic dispositions of Nature. Only rarely are such writers so torn and rent that they can add their own touch to the wave crests of real actuality as these foam up, bringing wreckage and sea-tangle and living and dead ocean monsters and bloody spume and bottom silt into the rainbow spray! p.666 Quite. Powys does. Read it!
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