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4.17 AVERAGE
4.17 AVERAGE
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
funny
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
A Glastonbury Romance is one of the most moving works of fiction a person can find. Wolf Solent is the precursor to GR and worth a look just for that. It's a simpler story with just one close protagonist, and the kaleidoscopic veering that Powys's fiction takes at any given moment to delve deep into the smallest unseen dramas between the animals or elements or life forces or cosmic adversaries is only here in its initial form. The riveting moments are more flourishes than they are part of a symphonic tapestry--they're good, but most all of them immediately forgettable.
The drama of a person being torn by an elemental true love and the love he has for his wife plays out in an interesting way here. Much of it focuses on the fatalistic burden between heart and body. There are some moments between sensuality and romantic rage that are very nice and deep, similar to Lawrence, but that's not the whole book.
The Faustian drama also at play, though, isn't well realized. It was hard to really even get 100 years later. And between these two melodramas, Solent's 'losing his mythology 'and not having his closer love, the story is a murk between deep and comic (i.e. ridiculous). Maybe with the right criticism I'd see Wolf Solent in a more moving light, but really, I don't think the drama lands well. And the time the reader spends with the side characters is...not great. It's just kind of there.
So in short, if you already know and love Powys, this is a must just to get those early elements of his writing and philosophy--all of his themes are very much there. But as a story, although I never wanted to leave the book unfinished, I knew I was being short changed from the greatness I was looking for.
If you're looking here and haven't read Glastonbury Romance yet, just go there first.
The drama of a person being torn by an elemental true love and the love he has for his wife plays out in an interesting way here. Much of it focuses on the fatalistic burden between heart and body. There are some moments between sensuality and romantic rage that are very nice and deep, similar to Lawrence, but that's not the whole book.
The Faustian drama also at play, though, isn't well realized. It was hard to really even get 100 years later. And between these two melodramas, Solent's 'losing his mythology 'and not having his closer love, the story is a murk between deep and comic (i.e. ridiculous). Maybe with the right criticism I'd see Wolf Solent in a more moving light, but really, I don't think the drama lands well. And the time the reader spends with the side characters is...not great. It's just kind of there.
So in short, if you already know and love Powys, this is a must just to get those early elements of his writing and philosophy--all of his themes are very much there. But as a story, although I never wanted to leave the book unfinished, I knew I was being short changed from the greatness I was looking for.
If you're looking here and haven't read Glastonbury Romance yet, just go there first.
"In a sane world, the name of John Cowper Powys would be as famous as that of D. H. Lawrence or James Joyce" is how A. N. Wilson begins his curmudgeonly introduction to this novel. Perhaps Wilson is putting on a bit of the curmudgeon act in this introduction, but I find his apparent indignance that the fames of Lawrence and Joyce are undeserved or somehow at the expense of Powys' own fame extremely unfair and quite ridiculous. Ridiculous, because what kind of strange world is Wilson imagining in which Powys would ever be considered popular? A world populated by lots of other A. N. Wilsons? (I think here also of Charles Lamb's dejection over reprints of The Anatomy of Melancholy: "What need was there of unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion to modern censure? What hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever becoming popular?") Part of Powys' charm is surely the idiosyncrasy, the sense of very English pastoral remoteness -- perhaps part of the reason that Powys considered Horace his 3rd favourite poet, after Shakespeare and Milton, because, like Jonson, he was not working for the crowd but happy with a few readers ("neque, me ut miretur turba laboro:/ Contentus paucis lectoribus.") -- or the "fit audience, though few". Nevertheless, while I feel I am always an admirer of especially individual writers, and I feel I will always admire much of what Powys does here, I do feel this idiosyncrasy is Powys' weakness as well as his strength.
The comparison with Lawrence is, of course, the major one, and the one among whom one would assume to be one of Powys' major influences who is curiously unmentioned... without stating the point too hard, there is presumably a sense of literary competition between the two (Powys was older than Lawrence, but he published this nearly two decades after Lawrence's death). But Lawrence has had significant popularity and Powys has had lesser, and I believe the reason is maybe because Powys is to Lawrence as Jonson was to Shakespeare. Yes, Wilson is correct that we encounter Powys' "personality so vividly" in this work, but the problem is that it is a constant encounter, it is the Jonsonian/Horatian personality who can rarely let his reader know that they are not encountering a work written by the author. Whereas Lawrence, like Shakespeare, in the great masterpieces of the The Rainbow and Women in Love, reaches towards a more universal form of poetry and sensitivity, towards the Deus absconditus whose invisible hands are paring their fingernails away from the work -- as the Brangwen family develops, Lawrence appears almost increasingly forgotten. Yes, the final chapter title of Wolf Solent comes from Shakespeare, whom Powys is very fond of quoting, but the character of Lord Carfax is strikingly a Jonsonian authority figure who come to close out the muddled, rustic comedy. He's an Adam Overdo or a Lovewit, and the whole novel is revealed to be something of a Bartholomew Fair or (tellingly, for its magical and mystical asides?) The Alchemist.
I think this distinction between individuality and universality applies also to how Lawrence and Powys treat their epiphanic realisations and mystic communions with nature, which in this novel come under the blanket term of Wolf's "personal mythology". This "mythology" for me in the novel is at once both extremely idiosyncratic in its portrayal and at once instantly recognisable. I instantly recognise the impulses that Wolf has, in a desire for every moment to be charged with some cosmic importance ("huge invisible cosmic transactions"), to be at the center of some great, secret, invisible battle of metaphysical forces ("deep occult struggle going on in the hidden reservoirs of Nature"), and the use of paranoid associations charged with numinous meaning ("Nature was always prolific of signs and omens to his mind") -- these kinds of introverted impulses were especially frequent during my teenage years though in an admittedly far more rudimentary and less eloquent form, and have subsequently died down, but I find the reintroduction to these kind of thought patterns -- however cringy (!) -- very invigorating and nostalgic. There is something self-consciously cringy about Wolf Solent's very frequent ecstatic, ineffable realisations about the meanings of Nature and life, and I think this is very much because it is a "personal mythology", which to my mind is an oxymoron. It is no surprise that Wolf believes towards the end of the novel that his "personal mythology" has died and is gone from him -- for trivial reasons that are almost as ineffable and incomprehensible as the mythology itself -- and it is because any personal mythology cannot survive. We surely do have a special community and reciprocity with Nature, but it is not one that can ever be purely individual, personal, or owned by us. I do think this is a criticism of Wolf, one to which Christie Malakite (who I think is about the most well-formed of a cast of characters who have not subsequently left so much of an impression, apart, of course, from the superbly portrayed Wolf) that Wolf really refuses "to understand other people" is a self-conscious criticism by Powys on Wolf and perhaps to an extent his own art.
These kind of strange epiphanic realisations about Nature, these impressionistic, ineffable notions about the most important metaphysical questions, are also however frequent in Lawrence, but there is much less of the "personal" about them, and there are far more frequent moments of self-transcendence. For Lawrence, to be very reductionist and blunt, the mystic answer to the riddle of the universe is in sex. A. N. Wilson again cantankerously complains that Powys is Lawrence's superior because Lawrence "created unintentional comedy by overt depictions of the sexual act" whereas "Powys writes about the intensity of erotic feeling". But perhaps this is an apt delineation of the distinction between them and another point in which Lawrence really supersedes Powys: for Lawrence the heart of life is in true reciprocity with the Other and thus the self-transcendental power of sex, but for Powys only in the mere yearning contemplation of the Idea of the Other. Wilson is right that it is a "Hegelian manner of observation" in which Powys founds his novel, Wolf's refusal "to believe" that there is never "such a thing as "reality", apart from the mind that looks at it" but I do also wonder if it is as "profoundly Hegelian" as Wilson believes, and whether Powys actually suffers from a sense of quite Kantian isolation? I mean that for Wolf/Powys, reality's dependence on the mind/Spirit is a matter of refusal and belief, whereas for Hegel their interconnectedness is a matter of knowledge. Reciprocity with the Other is achievable for Hegel in recognition, whereas for Kant there is a fundamental noumenal Other which is unreachable, which could only ever be yearned towards -- in which yearning Wolf appears to find his most profound relationship, the yearning for the ethereal Christie. It does make sense that Wolf's salvation is not in love itself, or real reciprocity, which is rarely if ever noticeably exhibited in his relationships with Gerda and Christie, but in the Platonic Idea of love, embodied in a tomboyish Madonna with whom sex is impossible. It is the Idea of Love for him.
There is a deep sense throughout Wolf Solent that we do not escape Wolf Solent's mind, his ideas and sensations ever, and any epiphanic realisation that Wolf achieves is that which exists for him but not, ultimately, translatable to others. And perhaps this is the reason that the epiphanic realisations in the final chapter become almost manic, mad, ludicrous, or even bathetic: how he is seeming "to visualise the demiurge of the universe as so much diffused subconscious magnetism submissive to nothing but commands" or how he seems to see all the instantiations of gold across Greek mythology (eg. the golden fleece, Titan's cloud of gold, Zeus' flame of gold, etc.) "not in their concrete apperances, but in their platonic essences". (But can we ever know things solely in their platonic essences, isn't that just an abstract fantasy? Can we know the dance from the dancer?) Powys' grandiloquent and here (literally) aureate language verges on self-parody often, and no doubt much of this bathos is intentional -- after all, the novel ends, after all these manic, silent epiphanies, with Wolf deciding to get a cup of tea. But despite this self-consciousness I don't think Wolf is meant to be a parody of the mystic, idealist, Romantic bookworm personality to such an extent as Wolf verges on being, because it is somewhat evident how much Powys shares in personality with Wolf from the short preface. So it is a shame when Wordsworth and the Immortality Ode is invoked in the final chapter and one feels a sense of distance in Powys' work from the Wordsworthian epiphany, a sense of real communion with Nature, and Wolf's almost too regular epiphanies, occasionally isolated, artificial, performative, self-imposed.
Nevertheless, (and I find myself coming back to a similar point to the ending of my review of Marius the Epicurean), even if Wolf Solent doesn't achieve the heights of Wordsworth's divine epiphanies -- and nor, Mr. Wilson, do I think that Powys has been unfairly eclipsed whatsoever by Lawrence's fame -- what Powys does achieve in the intricate portrait of the deeper recesses of consciousness is still remarkable and perhaps instantly recognisable by certain tender-minded, sensitive, bookish, and British personalities who will doubtless be drawn continually to this novel for some time to come.
The comparison with Lawrence is, of course, the major one, and the one among whom one would assume to be one of Powys' major influences who is curiously unmentioned... without stating the point too hard, there is presumably a sense of literary competition between the two (Powys was older than Lawrence, but he published this nearly two decades after Lawrence's death). But Lawrence has had significant popularity and Powys has had lesser, and I believe the reason is maybe because Powys is to Lawrence as Jonson was to Shakespeare. Yes, Wilson is correct that we encounter Powys' "personality so vividly" in this work, but the problem is that it is a constant encounter, it is the Jonsonian/Horatian personality who can rarely let his reader know that they are not encountering a work written by the author. Whereas Lawrence, like Shakespeare, in the great masterpieces of the The Rainbow and Women in Love, reaches towards a more universal form of poetry and sensitivity, towards the Deus absconditus whose invisible hands are paring their fingernails away from the work -- as the Brangwen family develops, Lawrence appears almost increasingly forgotten. Yes, the final chapter title of Wolf Solent comes from Shakespeare, whom Powys is very fond of quoting, but the character of Lord Carfax is strikingly a Jonsonian authority figure who come to close out the muddled, rustic comedy. He's an Adam Overdo or a Lovewit, and the whole novel is revealed to be something of a Bartholomew Fair or (tellingly, for its magical and mystical asides?) The Alchemist.
I think this distinction between individuality and universality applies also to how Lawrence and Powys treat their epiphanic realisations and mystic communions with nature, which in this novel come under the blanket term of Wolf's "personal mythology". This "mythology" for me in the novel is at once both extremely idiosyncratic in its portrayal and at once instantly recognisable. I instantly recognise the impulses that Wolf has, in a desire for every moment to be charged with some cosmic importance ("huge invisible cosmic transactions"), to be at the center of some great, secret, invisible battle of metaphysical forces ("deep occult struggle going on in the hidden reservoirs of Nature"), and the use of paranoid associations charged with numinous meaning ("Nature was always prolific of signs and omens to his mind") -- these kinds of introverted impulses were especially frequent during my teenage years though in an admittedly far more rudimentary and less eloquent form, and have subsequently died down, but I find the reintroduction to these kind of thought patterns -- however cringy (!) -- very invigorating and nostalgic. There is something self-consciously cringy about Wolf Solent's very frequent ecstatic, ineffable realisations about the meanings of Nature and life, and I think this is very much because it is a "personal mythology", which to my mind is an oxymoron. It is no surprise that Wolf believes towards the end of the novel that his "personal mythology" has died and is gone from him -- for trivial reasons that are almost as ineffable and incomprehensible as the mythology itself -- and it is because any personal mythology cannot survive. We surely do have a special community and reciprocity with Nature, but it is not one that can ever be purely individual, personal, or owned by us. I do think this is a criticism of Wolf, one to which Christie Malakite (who I think is about the most well-formed of a cast of characters who have not subsequently left so much of an impression, apart, of course, from the superbly portrayed Wolf) that Wolf really refuses "to understand other people" is a self-conscious criticism by Powys on Wolf and perhaps to an extent his own art.
These kind of strange epiphanic realisations about Nature, these impressionistic, ineffable notions about the most important metaphysical questions, are also however frequent in Lawrence, but there is much less of the "personal" about them, and there are far more frequent moments of self-transcendence. For Lawrence, to be very reductionist and blunt, the mystic answer to the riddle of the universe is in sex. A. N. Wilson again cantankerously complains that Powys is Lawrence's superior because Lawrence "created unintentional comedy by overt depictions of the sexual act" whereas "Powys writes about the intensity of erotic feeling". But perhaps this is an apt delineation of the distinction between them and another point in which Lawrence really supersedes Powys: for Lawrence the heart of life is in true reciprocity with the Other and thus the self-transcendental power of sex, but for Powys only in the mere yearning contemplation of the Idea of the Other. Wilson is right that it is a "Hegelian manner of observation" in which Powys founds his novel, Wolf's refusal "to believe" that there is never "such a thing as "reality", apart from the mind that looks at it" but I do also wonder if it is as "profoundly Hegelian" as Wilson believes, and whether Powys actually suffers from a sense of quite Kantian isolation? I mean that for Wolf/Powys, reality's dependence on the mind/Spirit is a matter of refusal and belief, whereas for Hegel their interconnectedness is a matter of knowledge. Reciprocity with the Other is achievable for Hegel in recognition, whereas for Kant there is a fundamental noumenal Other which is unreachable, which could only ever be yearned towards -- in which yearning Wolf appears to find his most profound relationship, the yearning for the ethereal Christie. It does make sense that Wolf's salvation is not in love itself, or real reciprocity, which is rarely if ever noticeably exhibited in his relationships with Gerda and Christie, but in the Platonic Idea of love, embodied in a tomboyish Madonna with whom sex is impossible. It is the Idea of Love for him.
There is a deep sense throughout Wolf Solent that we do not escape Wolf Solent's mind, his ideas and sensations ever, and any epiphanic realisation that Wolf achieves is that which exists for him but not, ultimately, translatable to others. And perhaps this is the reason that the epiphanic realisations in the final chapter become almost manic, mad, ludicrous, or even bathetic: how he is seeming "to visualise the demiurge of the universe as so much diffused subconscious magnetism submissive to nothing but commands" or how he seems to see all the instantiations of gold across Greek mythology (eg. the golden fleece, Titan's cloud of gold, Zeus' flame of gold, etc.) "not in their concrete apperances, but in their platonic essences". (But can we ever know things solely in their platonic essences, isn't that just an abstract fantasy? Can we know the dance from the dancer?) Powys' grandiloquent and here (literally) aureate language verges on self-parody often, and no doubt much of this bathos is intentional -- after all, the novel ends, after all these manic, silent epiphanies, with Wolf deciding to get a cup of tea. But despite this self-consciousness I don't think Wolf is meant to be a parody of the mystic, idealist, Romantic bookworm personality to such an extent as Wolf verges on being, because it is somewhat evident how much Powys shares in personality with Wolf from the short preface. So it is a shame when Wordsworth and the Immortality Ode is invoked in the final chapter and one feels a sense of distance in Powys' work from the Wordsworthian epiphany, a sense of real communion with Nature, and Wolf's almost too regular epiphanies, occasionally isolated, artificial, performative, self-imposed.
Nevertheless, (and I find myself coming back to a similar point to the ending of my review of Marius the Epicurean), even if Wolf Solent doesn't achieve the heights of Wordsworth's divine epiphanies -- and nor, Mr. Wilson, do I think that Powys has been unfairly eclipsed whatsoever by Lawrence's fame -- what Powys does achieve in the intricate portrait of the deeper recesses of consciousness is still remarkable and perhaps instantly recognisable by certain tender-minded, sensitive, bookish, and British personalities who will doubtless be drawn continually to this novel for some time to come.
Tried this twice and just couldn't get into it.
I find I am not as sympathetic to Powys as I once was. But then this is in many ways a book about a selfish man who has to come to terms with his own failings and not being able to get all his own way. As ever all of nature thrills through his veins and those of some of the other characters. And what a gorgeous collection of characters too.
I bought one of this author’s novels - Weymouth Sands - from a secondhand bookshop in Sedburgh a few years ago and have not yet got round to reading it. Then I saw an article in the Telegraph (it’s ok fellow lefties, someone gave it to me!) about Wolf Solent and this spurred me into action.
This seems to be one of the few books by this author you can buy new. I’ve since found a battered paperback of A Glastonbury Romance on Amazon.
He appears to be an author out of fashion. While I can understand in a way - his style is highly descriptive and sometimes elusive - I think I’ve been missing out and can’t wait to read that battered copy!
I can’t be doing with book reviews which tell you exactly what happens in the book so I’ll just try and sum up some features of the book.
Newspaper articles seem to describe him as a mixture of Hardy, Lawrence and Blake. Landscape and nature is described in detail, as it would appear that the characters’ fates are bound to where they live. Sex is talked about frankly, without there being any detail about sexual encounters. It seems that such frankness is because it arises directly from nature. Much more than this is the idea (and this is where the author seems so original) that our minds are so affected by natural surroundings as to be almost an aspect of it - everything is matter.
This seems to be one of the few books by this author you can buy new. I’ve since found a battered paperback of A Glastonbury Romance on Amazon.
He appears to be an author out of fashion. While I can understand in a way - his style is highly descriptive and sometimes elusive - I think I’ve been missing out and can’t wait to read that battered copy!
I can’t be doing with book reviews which tell you exactly what happens in the book so I’ll just try and sum up some features of the book.
Newspaper articles seem to describe him as a mixture of Hardy, Lawrence and Blake. Landscape and nature is described in detail, as it would appear that the characters’ fates are bound to where they live. Sex is talked about frankly, without there being any detail about sexual encounters. It seems that such frankness is because it arises directly from nature. Much more than this is the idea (and this is where the author seems so original) that our minds are so affected by natural surroundings as to be almost an aspect of it - everything is matter.
Whoa. How had I never heard of this book before? This was an epic, claustrophobic, beautiful, meaty, exhausting and wonderful novel.
Wolf Solent is a 35 year old school teacher who lives with his sarcastic and dominating mother in London where he has recently been fired for an uncontrolled outburst ("dancing his 'malice dance'") in front of his class. The novel starts as Wolf rides the train to a small town in Dorset, in the southwest of England, to take a job as a secretary/ghostwriter for Squire Urquhart who is compiling a history of all the scandals and perversions in the county going back to the beginning of its written history. Twenty-five years ago, Wolf and his mother left this same small town for London after Wolf's father had multiple affairs. His father continued his depravations and ended up dying in the workhouse and being buried in a pauper's grave.
Wolf quickly falls under the spell of Gerda Torp, the beautiful daughter of the local headstone carver (and sister of the amazingly named Lob Torp -- actually everyone has amazing names in this book....), and the strange attraction of the plain and intellectual Christie Malakite, the daughter of a local bookseller who knew his father. The reader is quickly drawn into Wolf's visceral experience of nature, light, and color, as well as his hard-to-pin-down "mythology" or "life-illusion" that touches all of his experiences, until it leaves him forever. It is impossible for me to cram the intensity of the plot and characters into this review, but much revolves around Wolf's lust for Gerda and philosophical connection with Christie, the push and pull of small town secrets, and (most of all) his sensual and ecstatic experience of nature.
Powys published this book in 1929, when he was in his early 50s, and it was his first successful publication although he had seen professional success as a charismatic lecturer in America, where he lived from 1905-1930. Philosophical, but earthy, with some of the most rich and loaded sentences I've ever read (and they just keep coming!). There are scenes and characters in this book that will stay with me forever. The book leans on Thomas Hardy's pastoral settings but has the sensuality and romantic overload of D.H. Lawrence. Really, though, this novel is one of a kind. It is an undertaking at 600+ pages, but my goodness it is worth it.
Wolf Solent is a 35 year old school teacher who lives with his sarcastic and dominating mother in London where he has recently been fired for an uncontrolled outburst ("dancing his 'malice dance'") in front of his class. The novel starts as Wolf rides the train to a small town in Dorset, in the southwest of England, to take a job as a secretary/ghostwriter for Squire Urquhart who is compiling a history of all the scandals and perversions in the county going back to the beginning of its written history. Twenty-five years ago, Wolf and his mother left this same small town for London after Wolf's father had multiple affairs. His father continued his depravations and ended up dying in the workhouse and being buried in a pauper's grave.
Wolf quickly falls under the spell of Gerda Torp, the beautiful daughter of the local headstone carver (and sister of the amazingly named Lob Torp -- actually everyone has amazing names in this book....), and the strange attraction of the plain and intellectual Christie Malakite, the daughter of a local bookseller who knew his father. The reader is quickly drawn into Wolf's visceral experience of nature, light, and color, as well as his hard-to-pin-down "mythology" or "life-illusion" that touches all of his experiences, until it leaves him forever. It is impossible for me to cram the intensity of the plot and characters into this review, but much revolves around Wolf's lust for Gerda and philosophical connection with Christie, the push and pull of small town secrets, and (most of all) his sensual and ecstatic experience of nature.
Powys published this book in 1929, when he was in his early 50s, and it was his first successful publication although he had seen professional success as a charismatic lecturer in America, where he lived from 1905-1930. Philosophical, but earthy, with some of the most rich and loaded sentences I've ever read (and they just keep coming!). There are scenes and characters in this book that will stay with me forever. The book leans on Thomas Hardy's pastoral settings but has the sensuality and romantic overload of D.H. Lawrence. Really, though, this novel is one of a kind. It is an undertaking at 600+ pages, but my goodness it is worth it.
Monday, October 26th.
Thoughts at page 360
I should have set down my impressions of this very long and intense book earlier because I've already lost a bunch of them on the way to page 360, which is the halfway point, so now I'm going to try to record what I remember. Main character Wolf Solent's own thoughts on life and nature are a big part of the narrative but there is a curious plot too which is growing more complicated as the pages turn. I find myself swinging wildly between preferring the sections where Wolf's interior world dominates and dismissing the plot as melodramatic, to getting completely absorbed in the plot and becoming impatient with Wolf's decisions and indecisions, plus his never-ending series of epiphany moments.
But even while I'm veering between those two axes, I'm getting more and more caught up in the triangular landscape that is the backdrop to the plot. There are three main locations, and it seems to me that each has a further key site within itself. There's the Dorset town of Ramsgard where the key site is the Abbey Cathedral with its lofty fan tracery ceiling which induces a state of heightened consciousness in Wolf whenever he visits it. The second main location is the nearby town of Blacksod with the key site being the hill called Poll's Camp that dominates it and which Wolf experiences as being almost animate. Then there's the village of King's Barton, the third point of the triangle as it were, where the key site is a lake of dark water known as Lenty Pond which fascinates Wolf in a strange way. From time to time, the narrative is interrupted by a reference to a further location, Waterloo Station in London, as if there were an invisible thread that links it to the other main locations.
To add to the intricacy of the narrative landscape pattern that's emerging, there is another element to be taken into account: the malicious, spider-like Squire of King's Barton who owns Lenty Pond and employs Wolf Solent as a secretary. The Squire is composing a history of the region. His project is not a regular history but a scandalous one, a catalogue of all the shocking and even malignant episodes that occurred over the centuries. Meanwhile there are heavy hints of evil doings in the present...
Wednesday, October 28th
page 404
I've had the thought that my wildly swinging response to this book mirrors the swing between good and evil. It also mirrors Wolf's wild swings between supporting his mother's choices in life (sometimes seen as positive, sometimes negative) and supporting his dead father's choices (which are also seen as both positive and negative). Wolf is constantly feeling the need to ally himself completely with one of his parents to the exclusion of the other and vice versa. In fact his behavior is full of such contradictory impulses. He loves two very different women in two very different ways and suffers from the coexistence inside himself of these two extremes of feeling. At one point he describes them as one the horizon, the other the sold ground beneath him. His mood makes extreme swings too—you might say it swings as frequently as his walking stick. I mention the walking stick because there is hardly a page where it doesn't appear. Quite a bit of the narrative happens outdoors as Wolf walks between the three main locations. The stick is like a barometer of his moods. When his mood is extatic, the tip of the stick swings high. When his mood is bleak, the tip is invariably poking at some debris on the ground beneath him, whether a piece of rubbish stuck in the mud of a laneway or a dead plant beside his father's grave..
Saturday, October 31st
P456
Moments as perfect as this required death as their inevitable counter poise
Death is very present in this book. Death and cemeteries. I talked about key sites earlier. It's now clear that the cemetery in Ramsgard is also a key site, as is the cemetary in King's Barton in which some very eerie scenes take place involving the possible digging up of a dead body (I'm noting today's date as I write this). There's no cemetary in the third key location, Blacksod, though there is a funeral-monument maker's house there which has certain deathly significance. However there's even more deathly significance in the bookshop in Blacksod where many scenes take place. The daughter of the bookshop owner is described as a waif-like otherworldly creature and I worry that she's destined for death before the end of the narrative...
Tuesday, November 3rd.
Something in the Dorset air had the power to elongate the very substance of time.
Well, I've finally finished reading this book which I feel I've been immersed in for what seems like an entire year! Incidentally, the book narrates exactly one year in Wolf Solent's life, finishing on the anniversary of the day it began, the day Wolf first arrived in the town of Ramsgard from London. There's a certain sense that the entire book is a kind of curve of recurrence with incidents from early sections being mirrored in later sections, and Wolf constantly walking the paths he's walked before. The idea of a curve is also present in the way the happenings constantly revolve between the three main locations, and also circle the key sites within those locations.
And so I seem to have circled 360 degrees back to the point with which I began this review back on October 26th: the landscape of the narrative and the narrative landscape, and the key places and key plot elements that link them both together.
I'm not likely to forget this book for a long long time.
Thoughts at page 360
I should have set down my impressions of this very long and intense book earlier because I've already lost a bunch of them on the way to page 360, which is the halfway point, so now I'm going to try to record what I remember. Main character Wolf Solent's own thoughts on life and nature are a big part of the narrative but there is a curious plot too which is growing more complicated as the pages turn. I find myself swinging wildly between preferring the sections where Wolf's interior world dominates and dismissing the plot as melodramatic, to getting completely absorbed in the plot and becoming impatient with Wolf's decisions and indecisions, plus his never-ending series of epiphany moments.
But even while I'm veering between those two axes, I'm getting more and more caught up in the triangular landscape that is the backdrop to the plot. There are three main locations, and it seems to me that each has a further key site within itself. There's the Dorset town of Ramsgard where the key site is the Abbey Cathedral with its lofty fan tracery ceiling which induces a state of heightened consciousness in Wolf whenever he visits it. The second main location is the nearby town of Blacksod with the key site being the hill called Poll's Camp that dominates it and which Wolf experiences as being almost animate. Then there's the village of King's Barton, the third point of the triangle as it were, where the key site is a lake of dark water known as Lenty Pond which fascinates Wolf in a strange way. From time to time, the narrative is interrupted by a reference to a further location, Waterloo Station in London, as if there were an invisible thread that links it to the other main locations.
To add to the intricacy of the narrative landscape pattern that's emerging, there is another element to be taken into account: the malicious, spider-like Squire of King's Barton who owns Lenty Pond and employs Wolf Solent as a secretary. The Squire is composing a history of the region. His project is not a regular history but a scandalous one, a catalogue of all the shocking and even malignant episodes that occurred over the centuries. Meanwhile there are heavy hints of evil doings in the present...
Wednesday, October 28th
page 404
I've had the thought that my wildly swinging response to this book mirrors the swing between good and evil. It also mirrors Wolf's wild swings between supporting his mother's choices in life (sometimes seen as positive, sometimes negative) and supporting his dead father's choices (which are also seen as both positive and negative). Wolf is constantly feeling the need to ally himself completely with one of his parents to the exclusion of the other and vice versa. In fact his behavior is full of such contradictory impulses. He loves two very different women in two very different ways and suffers from the coexistence inside himself of these two extremes of feeling. At one point he describes them as one the horizon, the other the sold ground beneath him. His mood makes extreme swings too—you might say it swings as frequently as his walking stick. I mention the walking stick because there is hardly a page where it doesn't appear. Quite a bit of the narrative happens outdoors as Wolf walks between the three main locations. The stick is like a barometer of his moods. When his mood is extatic, the tip of the stick swings high. When his mood is bleak, the tip is invariably poking at some debris on the ground beneath him, whether a piece of rubbish stuck in the mud of a laneway or a dead plant beside his father's grave..
Saturday, October 31st
P456
Moments as perfect as this required death as their inevitable counter poise
Death is very present in this book. Death and cemeteries. I talked about key sites earlier. It's now clear that the cemetery in Ramsgard is also a key site, as is the cemetary in King's Barton in which some very eerie scenes take place involving the possible digging up of a dead body (I'm noting today's date as I write this). There's no cemetary in the third key location, Blacksod, though there is a funeral-monument maker's house there which has certain deathly significance. However there's even more deathly significance in the bookshop in Blacksod where many scenes take place. The daughter of the bookshop owner is described as a waif-like otherworldly creature and I worry that she's destined for death before the end of the narrative...
Tuesday, November 3rd.
Something in the Dorset air had the power to elongate the very substance of time.
Well, I've finally finished reading this book which I feel I've been immersed in for what seems like an entire year! Incidentally, the book narrates exactly one year in Wolf Solent's life, finishing on the anniversary of the day it began, the day Wolf first arrived in the town of Ramsgard from London. There's a certain sense that the entire book is a kind of curve of recurrence with incidents from early sections being mirrored in later sections, and Wolf constantly walking the paths he's walked before. The idea of a curve is also present in the way the happenings constantly revolve between the three main locations, and also circle the key sites within those locations.
And so I seem to have circled 360 degrees back to the point with which I began this review back on October 26th: the landscape of the narrative and the narrative landscape, and the key places and key plot elements that link them both together.
I'm not likely to forget this book for a long long time.
Wolf Solent put me in mind of [b:Modern Temper: A Study and a Confession|447370|The Modern Temper A Study and a Confession|Joseph Wood Krutch|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1174855690l/447370._SY75_.jpg|436034] by Joseph Wood Krutch, also published in 1929: "[W]e cannot deny that life is made paler and that we are carried one step nearer to that state in which existence is seen as a vast emptiness which the imagination can no longer people with fascinating illusions." Writing in the same era, H.P. Lovecraft went even further and melodramatically speculated that "[t]he sciences . . . have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." Lovecraft was a horror writer, of course, but there clearly was a sense of malaise or disquiet among the intellectuals of the 1920s arising from the trauma of the Great War (made possible by advances in engineering and chemistry), the death knell it sounded for the optimistic Progressive movement of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and the inexorable march of science and technology far beyond anything known to human experience.
Powys's hero is this collective existential crisis distilled to a single individual. Wolf has always been something of a space cadet and romantic, who on occasion feels himself uplifted to an inner dimension of arcane beauty and mystical idealism. It is this "mythology" that gives his life a depth and richness he otherwise perceives as lacking in the cold new world of trains and aeroplanes. His cosmology is very concerned with duality: good and evil, imagination and reality, ecstasy and collapse, and so forth, which is all rather simplistic and naive. Much social justice ink has been spilled critiquing the West for its obsession with labels and binaries (e.g. black/white, male/female, gay/straight, civilized/savage) and discomfort with ambiguity and porousness. Perhaps that explains my so-so reaction to this book, which so many other people seem to love and consider a masterpiece. Why does Wolf have to be either/or? Why does his mythology have to die so completely instead of evolving with his changing perspectives of life and the people in it?
Krutch wondered if the Age of Science was the ultimate stage or if another paradigm would supplant it, just as science itself replaced the scholasticism and deductive logic of the Middle Ages. Powys is maybe closer to Lovecraft minus the monsters. There is either spiritual uplift and transcendence, or there is dead materialism, and he devotes six hundred pages to this oscillation. Or maybe I'm the one oversimplifying things.
Powys's hero is this collective existential crisis distilled to a single individual. Wolf has always been something of a space cadet and romantic, who on occasion feels himself uplifted to an inner dimension of arcane beauty and mystical idealism. It is this "mythology" that gives his life a depth and richness he otherwise perceives as lacking in the cold new world of trains and aeroplanes. His cosmology is very concerned with duality: good and evil, imagination and reality, ecstasy and collapse, and so forth, which is all rather simplistic and naive. Much social justice ink has been spilled critiquing the West for its obsession with labels and binaries (e.g. black/white, male/female, gay/straight, civilized/savage) and discomfort with ambiguity and porousness. Perhaps that explains my so-so reaction to this book, which so many other people seem to love and consider a masterpiece. Why does Wolf have to be either/or? Why does his mythology have to die so completely instead of evolving with his changing perspectives of life and the people in it?
Krutch wondered if the Age of Science was the ultimate stage or if another paradigm would supplant it, just as science itself replaced the scholasticism and deductive logic of the Middle Ages. Powys is maybe closer to Lovecraft minus the monsters. There is either spiritual uplift and transcendence, or there is dead materialism, and he devotes six hundred pages to this oscillation. Or maybe I'm the one oversimplifying things.