A Glastonbury Romance
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A Glastonbury Romance is generally esteemed the greatest of John Cowper Powys's six major novels, the other five being Wolf Solent, Weymouth Sands, Maiden Castle, Owen Glendower and Porius. On its original publication in 1932, the late J. D. Beresford wrote, "I believe that A Glastonbury Romance is one of the greatest novels in the world, to be classed with Tolstoy's War and Peace." C. S. Forester regarded it as "one of the most significant and notable books of the century," Hugh Walpole thought that, "with the single exception of Thomas Hardy, no English novelist of the last thirty years has evoked the very stuff of the English ground with the power and the poetry which Mr. Powys has at command," and Sir Gerald Barry summed it up as "really a tremendous boo. It makes the competent little novels that week by week are hailed as 'masterpieces' look silly. In searching for comparisons, one finds oneself using such names as Hardy or Hamsun….In breadth, rhythm, and intensity A Glastonbury Romance has something of the mighty pantheism of Rubens."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A major English novelist of the 1920s and '30s, Powys's remarkable novels are reprinted from time to time (Harper recently did Weymouth Sands). The present edition marks a long-overdue return to availability of what is certainly his masterwork. Glastonbury is a small town in Somerset that by legend was home to King Arthur, and some of its ruins are infused with the spirit of long-gone ideals like the Holy Grail. Building on that base, Powys has constructed a towering edifice of faith, greed and cynicism, as a wealthy industrialist tries to exploit the town's mines, a skeptic cynically plans to bring in money by exploiting the legends and many people of varying degrees of faith and idealism are caught in between. Powys's gifts are enormous: he has an eye for nature, and its mystical power, akin to Wordsworth's; his sense of rustic scene and character is the equal of Hardy; his sharp-eyed view of business and politics reminds one of Shaw; and his sense of the endless subtleties of the relationships between men and women is, if anything, more encompassing than D. H. Lawrence's. His leisurely tale is told in prose that ranges from poetic miniatures to extended passages of the most dazzling rhetoric. It's a long book that requires the closest attention; but those who fall under its spell will be rewarded by one of this century's masterpieces of the novel.
