John Cowper Powys (1872–1963)

It is a very rare occurrence, but I have abandoned the attempt to read this book. I got through the first three or four chapters, skipping more and more verbiage on each page, until I couldn't stand it any longer. Ye gods! and I thought Henry James was tough going.

I should have known, really. Many years ago, a friend gave me A Glastonbury Romance solely because it was the only book he had found that was thicker than The Lord of the Rings. The prose style was so turgid, so convoluted, so pretentious, that I caused much hilarity among my schoolfellows by reading out a sentence or two from the first chapter. This book is no better. Powys is verbose; relenstlessly verbose; oppressively verbose. He never uses one word where six would do; he stacks ideas and piles up subordinate clauses until the reader is desperately grasping, or gasping, for the end of the sentence. He ladles in classical reference in such a way that you feel he is giving you information about his mythological sources, but you seem to end up none the wiser, and battered by the onslaught of names and attributes. After several pages of philosophizing and rumination on the part of a range of mysteriously sentient characters such as a fly, a moth, a large wooden club, and a pillar of Odyseuss's palace, the author has both exhibited and then obscured whatever deep and cosmic idea it was that motivated his writing.

I just lost patience with it. Life is really too short to spend time on such an annoying book!

MB 31-iii-2024… (mere)

What a slog. Interesting at first to read something so clearly influential to writers I hate, like Lawrence, and love, like Murdoch. The weird self-obsession of Wolf, and the intensity with which Powys delves into it, starts out fun but by half way, all the fun is gone (to quote Curious George). It turns into a Lawrencian mope-a-long in the company of a total drip. On the other hand you have a cast of real eccentrics, the satanic Squire Urquhart and the self-doubting vicar Tilly-Valley being typically Murdochian types. In the end though, I was completely unable to stomach another cup of tea, pointless self-reflective walk in the country, or obscure reference to someone’s “life illusion” or “mythology”.… (mere)