Product Description

This is 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". John Cowper Powys has been acclaimed by some of the greatest minds of this century, from Henry Miller ("my first living idol") to George Steiner ("supreme in English fiction after Hardy") to Robertson Davies ("a great writer"). "A Glastonbury Romance", first published in 1932, is his 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #369530 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1120 pages

Review
"To encounter [Powys]... is to arrive at the very fount of creation. He makes us witnessof 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"

About the Author
John Cowper Powys is the author of ten novels, including Weymouth Sands and Wolf Solent, as well as many works of criticism and philosophy. Born in Derbyshire, England, he was the son of a vicar, and the descendant of the poets Donne and Cowper.

Customer Reviews

A maze of different believes more up to date than ever
25 years ago I bought this book, more on account of the beautiful cover than on the content, and on the somewhat cryptic summary that this would be the Lord of the Rings for a new generation. As noticed by others it was difficult to get through the first pages and I laid aside my brand new edition for a while - 25 years. After some maturation I've picked it up again this year and I'm surprised how complex and intriguing this Fellowship of Glastonbury inhabitants actually is. A mixture of pagan, druidic, christian and arthurian believes with a large portion of greek mythology and the most complex of mental states, namely being in love, makes this book a stunning adventure and more up to date in a world that contemplates these issues more intensly than ever. It's also fascinating that all these thoughts were concentrated in the mind of one writer and that this mind could focus them within the environment of some old ruins coming to life through these eternal questions that his characters are possesed by. Through the increasing strength of TV-satellites and IT websites many of these different and dispersed believes of our world come together today, but they will not get a much better setting than the one of John Cowper Powys' Glastonbury. Highly recommended!!

Majestic lunacy
In some ways this is the most amazing novel I have ever encountered. Its imaginative range, its gorgeous language, and its mesmeric power lift it far above almost anything else. Some of the characters and images - Geard, the mayor and founder of a new religion; Evans, the tortured antiquary; the haunting vision of the Grail-Aquarium; and the invisible naturalists studying the town's population all come to mind - are unforgettably original. The book is by turns sinister, astonishing, mystical and comic. Think of a kind of Dickens meets Hardy meets Lawrence meets Blake, and you'll have some idea of what to expect.

The last two names point also, unfortunately, to the book's flaws. Like Lawrence, Powys can be embarrassingly gushing, and like Blake he can bore or bewilder when he isn't firing on all cylinders. His mystical flights occasionally spill over into bathos! and his style moves from the sublime to the downright infuriating! In particular, I really wish he had vowed never to use another exclamation mark before beginning this book! More broadly, the text is very long indeed and needs some determination in places.

But these are trivial complaints. Powys is a truly unique writer in the whole history of English literature, and his intricate, minutely-detailed yet cosmic vision is one you'll never forget. Not light reading, but the rewards along the way dwarf those of most other twentieth-century works.

Unique
Powys must be one of the strangest authors ever to have written in the English language. Like Dickens, he revels in character, but unlike Dickens, his baroque, time-slowed flights of literary fancy occasionaly take us into the thoughts of a passing insect or nearby tree — even into the ‘superhuman vibrations’ of ‘the soul of the great blazing sun’. But what is strangest of all is that this is not in any way affected. I’m convinced Powys did experienece the world in this way — everything connected, conscious and alive. As to what actually happens in the book, I can’t remember! But it’s far less important anyway than the strange intensity with which his characters live their everyday lives.