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fionnualalirsdottir 's review for:
Wolf Solent
by John Cowper Powys
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.