Wolf Solent

First published in 1929, now public domain in the US and Canada. A novel like John Cowper Powys’s ''Wolf Solent'' may not appear more than once in several years. It is a perverse and masterfully epic and haunting piece of work, beautiful and yet ugly. Essentially, it is the story of one consciousness — that of a highly endowed, imaginative young man, who returns to his native Dorset village and there lives in a growing struggle with reality amid the savage complexities that make up life. Wolf Solent’s consciousness is a consciousness turned in upon itself, pondering its own problem of good and evil seen in the black and white terms of conventional morality, as the protagonist Wolf fosters the rich growth of his secret life, Wolf has taken refuge in a mythological world of his own invention, his private ‘mythology,’ and attuned to a mystic feeling for nature outside. Wolf also realizes that he and his wife Gerda have little in common and that he has confused love, so is it not a mixture of lust and romance? Can his ''mythology,'' his philosophy of life pass the test of trying to live it out himself in real life, or might the experiment prove a failure?