Customer Reviews

Wolf Solent: A Novel

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
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This is the most serious comic novel I've ever read. Cowper Powys is not afraid to make his main character, Wolf Solent, at times unlikable, frustrating, self-absorbed, the butt of jokes, but ultimately someone I was pulling for despite (or probably because of) his flaws. Every character in the novel is alive and dimensional, touching, often hilarious, full of frailties and illusions, especially Wolf. What is remarkable about the book is that Cowper Powys shows the transformation of a young man in all its contradictory minutiae. The author remembers and shows everything about the process of growth and change, all the details that most of us gloss over or forget.

The writing itself is like an hallucinogenic dream--half mad, surging with the glories of the senses, and tumbling with emotions. It is alternately exhilarating and exhausting, funny and wrenching, easy and uneasy. I picked the book up and put it down in fits and starts, worn out like a swimmer caught in a large blue wave. Wolf's mystical and very physical journey through illusion, the shattering of illusion, and its aftermath is a celebration of the things of the earth, the power of the pulse of life over the coldness of the grave. It is a torrent of philosophy; a breakdown between mind, spirit, body; between integration, disintegration, and reintegration; a sensual delight. It worn me out, wore thin, then filled me up again.

Wolf Solent--a poetic, mystical, idealistic young man comes to a small town in Dorset, is torn between two loves, discovers Beautiful Truths and Hard Truths, and must find a way to reconcile the contrary currents of life. We follow the details of his soul's journey over the course of a year--sometimes stream of consciousness, sometimes chaotic narrative experience, or funny scenes of people pretending to be civilized but really acting out of the mysterious, instinctual, pagan human heart. This narrative is much like the chaotic jumble inside the head of every person who thinks seriously about life's meaning, and maybe thinks too much. It is about the churning brain, about the bodies which carry these thought-machines around the luminous earth, about the spirit which envelopes both and aches, always, for something more and greater than itself.

I first read this novel twenty years ago and just read it agina in the lovely new Vintage edition. I am happy to say that my youthful opinion holds. This is one of the most beautiful, enthralling novels of the century. It changes one's view of how to live--of how to experience being alive. It refreshes the spirit. But not to sound mystical: It's just great reading.

No other author I've read creates the sights, sounds and smells of a portion of the world as effectively as John Cowper Powys, and this book is typical of his art.

Pick up this book, and you'll find yourself slipping into Dorset of early 20th century. You'll find yourself surrounded by eccentric, but facinating characters who don't always act as you expect them to. You'll begin to notice the small (and large) things that make life interesting.

Beware, however. Powys' is NOT an author to read quickly. Do that and you'll find yourself annoyed by his philosophical and psychological musings. Take plenty of time to read his carefully crafted language and you're in for a wonderful experience.

The cumulative force of this novel is tremendous. The tragedy of "Wolf Solent" is the central tragedy of all lives: it is the tragedy of experience. Powys succeeds without force or melodrama, without wars or kings or suicides. His characters merely exist in the world, and are driven down by it, stripped of their illusions and "mythologies" (to borrow Wolf's phrase). And the writing is stunning. The book reads at times like a prose-poem, and Powys' descriptions of Dorset make one want to flee for the country. It is a towering achievement, and I cannot believe it took me so long to find it.

John Cowper Powys is one of those authors who can be recognized just by the distinction of his prose, employing a style characterized by a picturesque metaphorical lyricism and, particularly in "Wolf Solent," the title character's deep introspection regarding his relationship to the world. Terms like "first cause" and "magnetic" are repeated throughout the novel like motifs, revealing the author's preoccupation with metaphysical forces, motivations, and effects.

Wolf is a 35-year-old man who, at the beginning of the novel, is moving from London to his native county of Dorsetshire to take a job assisting a wealthy man named Urquhart, the Squire of King's Barton, in writing a book about the more scandalous aspects of the histories of local families. Wolf finds Urquhart to be rather eccentric and petty and soon learns that his previous assistant, a young man named Redfern, died under disputable circumstances. This sounds like a setup for an intriguing mystery, especially when Wolf discovers Urquhart's gardener and another man digging around Redfern's grave one night, but the novel is concerned more with the essence of secrecy than with the mechanics of revealing secrets.

The residents of Dorsetshire, with their piquant personalities, rustic sincerity, and realistic complexity, are worthy of a Thomas Hardy novel; no set of characters can expect higher praise than that. They are there not just to drive the plot forward but to act and react against Wolf and each other to create a theater of emotions and passions in which life becomes a colorful, unpredictable masquerade. The principal players include Jason Otter, a morose, temperamental poet; Selena Gault, an ugly old spinster with whom Wolf's father had had an affair; Tilly-Valley, a foolish vicar; and Bob Weevil, a lascivious butcher whose sausages possibly connote something priapic about his role in the community.

Wolf's research brings him to two young ladies with whom he falls in love: Gerda Torp, the stonecutter's daughter, whose stunning beauty and nymphlike nature arouse his sexual desires; and Christie Malakite, the bookseller's daughter, a relatively plain but bright girl who is harboring a vile secret about her father and to whom Wolf relates on an intellectual level. As Wolf's romantic reveries careen between the two women representing two different erotic ideals, body and mind, we see an intense internal conflict building within him, one that threatens to, but somehow never does, unravel his inner peace.

And what is the source of this peace? Simply that Wolf has escaped the modernity and materialism of London to embrace the idyllic antiquity of rural England and to experience "certain sensations" -- not that he knows exactly what these are yet, but perhaps the fun is in not knowing, in exploration and self-discovery. This is also why he is annoyed by the encroachment of automobiles and airplanes into Dorsetshire towards the end of the novel -- twentieth-century technology has no place in the world whose nineteenth-century tranquility he wants dearly to preserve.

The first time I read this book I must admit Wolf's mad ramblings irritated me and I merely skipped through to the "naughty bits". How glad I am that I took it up a second time! John Cowper Powys gives us a malevolant England full of incestous activity - outright, as in the case of Mr Malekite and his two daughters, and in the overtones of Wolf's relationship with his mother and half sister. Indeed, both the girls he falls in love with are described as childlike in different ways, Christie physically and Gerda mentally, and are indeed nearly half Wolf's age. Throw in hints of homosexuality in the clergy, conversations with the dead and twelvemonth corpes being dug up, and you have a very dark veiw of the English countryside indeed. Yet somehow the lush, lyrical prose and mystical torment of Wolf contrive to make this one of the most intriguing and beautiful novels I have ever read.

This book has great poetry on every page. I like dense books (Recognitions, Moby Dick, Catch 22, Master and Margarita) and this may be the best of that bunch. Its a story of a guy's inner strugle and delves deep into the motives that govern people's actions. But there is so much strangeness and incredible writing that it is readible just for the style. I started Glastonbury Romance immediately after I finished it. For being 600 some pages, I still couldn't get enough! This book is truely one of the best ever written.

This is my third Powys novel, after The Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands. I still think Weymouth Sounds the best, representing what Powys called "elementalism" (his own particular form of animism) and a magical, kaleidoscopic whirl of poetic prose seen through the mind's eye of several characters. This book is darker, told through the perspective of the eponymous main character who resembles Powys himself not a little (q.v. Powys's Autobiography), but it still has the trademark mystagogic prose that is unmatched in literature. The other reviewers have done a thorough job of painting the setting and characters. So, I'll just add a quote to give the potential reader an idea of what s/he is in for here:

" ` Don't you ever feel,' he said, `as if one part of your soul belonged to a world altogether different from this world - as if it were completely disillusioned about all the things that people make such a fuss over and yet were involved in something important?'" p.239

If you've ever had intimations of this sort, you'll love this book...and the rest of Powys's novels I might add.

As a footnote, for those interested, the last chapter presents a very droll description of Bertrand Russell in the character of Lord Carfax. Powys and Lord Russell were near contemporaries and neighbours in Wales. They often debated each other in America, and remained on very good terms, despite their diametrically opposite philosophies.

Even better on its second read. In lyricism and the exploration of metaphysical ideas in literature, Powys comes close to the Russian greats. A good starting place for Powys' major works before going on to explore 'A Glastonbury Romance' and 'Weymouth Sands'.

I will balance the other great reviews here with another take on the book.

I found the book to be very heavy going.

Admittedly, the author clearly has a powerful sense of the spiritual, conveying significant insight into the mystical connections between humans, animals and nature. I was very moved by that aspect of the book,with much of his 'cosmic' insight reminding the reader of Mircea Eliade.

However, much of the narrative and prose is stodgy and turgid, requiring a great deal of patience to bear with. Aspects of the story are plain boring, and I found it very difficult to get involved with,and to sympathise and empathise with any of the characters.

Also, much of the book focuses on sexuality,the facing and acknowledging of sexual impulses and the subsequent understanding of the self. Whilst many of these issues must have been of some radical urgency and relevance when the book was written, it's difficult to relate to them, or consider them as compelling or even relevant themes now.

I found it very difficult to wade through an often remarkably dull and parochial story.There are some valuable and deeply original insights to be found in the book, but those 'gems' are covered up by page upon page of an often dull writing style, punctuated in places by a deeply powerful and transcendent style.

That contrast between the beautiful, the uplifting and the banal is the paradox,contradiction, and ultimately, the annoying aspect of Cowper Powys.

Some reviewers have commented that it is surprising that Cowper Powys hasn't been praised as one of the greatest authors of the century,with some even comparing him to Tolstoy : but to be honest, after wading through his work, I am not surprised that some have found him to be frustrating.