Wolf Solent

This is my third Powys novel, after The Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands. I still think Weymouth Sounds the best, representing what Powys called "elementalism" (his own particular form of animism) and a magical, kaleidoscopic whirl of poetic prose seen through the mind's eye of several characters. This book is darker, told through the perspective of the eponymous main character who resembles Powys himself not a little (q.v. Powys's Autobiography), but it still has the trademark mystagogic prose that is unmatched in literature. The other reviewers have done a thorough job of painting the setting and characters. So, I'll just add a quote to give the potential reader an idea of what s/he is in for here:" ` Don't you ever feel,' he said, `as if one part of your soul belonged to a world altogether different from this world - as if it were completely disillusioned about all the things that people make such a fuss over and yet were involved in something important?'" p.239If you've ever had intimations of this sort, you'll love this book...and the rest of Powys's novels I might add.As a footnote, for those interested, the last chapter presents a very droll description of Bertrand Russell in the character of Lord Carfax. Powys and Lord Russell were near contemporaries and neighbours in Wales. They often debated each other in America, and remained on very good terms, despite their diametrically opposite philosophies.

Like the one-star reviewer I found it difficult, to start. I'd owned one or another of his novels since reading his Autobiography (and other non-fiction; Visions and Revisions, and Rabelais) ~ten years ago. So, I was pretty sure that I wanted to read his novels. And the ice finally broke. I was well and slowly along before I realized that I don't usually read novels, but that I was doing so because I liked to read Powys think. The story (as I expect will be the case in the rest of them) is mere framework for John to expound, not on the nature that is part of us, but on the nature of which we are part.

Beautifully written. One of those books that you can’t skip over a single word let alone a sentence. Filled with the love of nature and the earth and the joys and foibles of what it means to be human

I really enjoyed the book. The writing was insightful into the minds and emotions of the characters...which most people can identify in some way, but may try to hide.

I love this novel its slightly dated but gives great insight into the mind set of the time. Not much happens but if you like your novels cerebral with the odd cup of tea you will love this under rated author.

Unfortunately I was not able to read it as the format for kindle was something more like a photo file - in tiny print and not able to be enlarged. Kindle purchasers beware of this. I was most disappointed as I had been looking forward to trhis book tremendously. Should have returned - but didn't.

As one plunges deeper into the wilderness of this work, it becomes increasingly difficult that to keep in mind that it is not the first novel of a very young man indeed. All the usual signs are there: the complete absence of objective grasp; the interminable soul-searchings of the hero; the megalomaniac inconsequence of the plot; the feverish effort to get everything in. To these generic defects Mr Powys adds a conscience condemned, by the lack of fixed principles, to constant overwork, and a style of such unsophisticated badness as becomes, in the long run, almost endearing. Wolf Solent is a man of 35, whose inner life, through a prolonged or rather petrified adolescence, has ben entirely in daydreams, to which he attaches a mystical significance and which, his adult acquaintance having presumably outgrown them, he believes peculiar to himself. This belief the author seems, unfortunately, to share. Wolf's return to his native Dorset, and his experiences there, drive him out into reality a little, but how far the reader must be left to decide; for none of Wolf's irrelevant and repetitive musings are ever spared him, and they resemble each other very closely from first to last.The bok is full of the grandiose beginnings, loose ends and meaningless gestures of the amateur. It is, on the whole, heavy reading, for Mr Powys does not attempt to select -- his aim is to transcribe.This is no doubt a form of sincerity, but still, sincerity is only a means; and an accumulation of detail merely puzzles the mind, as the car is puzzled by a succession of unrelated sounds. A Novelist, besides, must leave out something. Mr Powys' method is to leave out the difficult things. Important transitions, the growth of relationships, her passes over in silence, assuming in the next chapter, that they have taken place, and leaving the how and the why for ever a mystery to the astonished reader. To say that a book is without selection, proportion, or logical development, is to condemn it at once as lacking the qualities of mind. Now there may be art forms in which the will and the intellect have a subordinate place, but the novel is not one of them. The novelist must know his own mind before he can advance a step; otherwise, concerned as he is with life directly and as a whole, he is obliged to put everything in. Anything that presents itself may, for all he knows, be the essential thing, and besides, if he leaves it out he feels it will be lost for ever. Great novels are based on principles, and Mr Powys, for lack of them, is a prey to all the bugbears of the imagination. Wolf Solent has two bugbears-- will and energy. They take in his mind the forms of modern civilisation and sex. The first he escapes, though it continues to haunt him at intervals, by returning to Dorset and living in a small workman's villa: beautiful houses are apparently too voluntary and coherent for him.Sex he cannot escape, being as much attracted as repelled by it. Sex, therefore is, what this book is about. It is treated with a mixture of pedantry and superstition hard to describe; indeed, Mr Powys quite loses his head over it. For example: the bad Squire has engaged Wolf as his collaborator in a history of Dorset; he is introduced with every circumstance of the sinister and hair-raising; then he begins to talk about his history: " We must select, my friend, we must select. All history lies in selection. We can't put in everything. We must out in only what's got pith and sap and salt. Things like adulteries, murders and fornications." Wolf, however, continues to take him seriously; indeed, he is shocked. He is in a continual state of shock; shocked at his friends, shocked at himself, shocked still more when he is not shocked.; shocked by sex particularly, but not exclusively." Behind the pigsty! It seemed to him odd that he had lived there a whole year and never seen this familiar shed from the back. It was queer how he always shirked reality, and then suddenly plunged-- plunged into its inmost retreat! Behind the pigsty! It was only when he got desperate that he plunged into the nature of human beings-- that he got behind them! Ay! how coldly, how maliciously, he could dive into people he knew and see their inmost souls...from behind, from behind! Poison and sting...the furtive and the sex clutch, yes, a spasmodically jerking, quivering ego-nerve, pursing its own end-- that what was behind everyone!" He torments himself unflagging over his ideals without having any clear notion what they are, or any impulse to sit down and think them out. In fact, Mr Powys has rediscovered the hundred per cent. romanticism of Sturm und Drang-- and he does not appear to entertain the lats suspicion that it has been discovered before. His moral sensitiveness, indeed, and patience in recording impressions might give this book some value if he had command of English enough to do them justice. Unfortunately, he has not. At the end of a long, serious, introspective sentence, suddenly you come upon an exclamation make: it strikes on the ear like the blunder of a too genial guest at a gentel and rather strained tea-party. This hearty symbol, however, recurs so often that one comes to take it in the right spirit, as a mere confession of inadequacy. Mr Powys' literariness is a more consistent shock. 'Miss Gault's face,' he says, 'was like an ancient amphitheatre full of dusky gladiators.' Faces, interpretated by Mr Powys, are seldom without some monstrous oddity. Smiles are reflected in them like bunches of honeysuckle. In fact, this book is so strenously over-written that it was hardly possible it should be expressive. It has been grossly over-praised.

This is a powerful and curious story about a young man's journey of self-discovery in the soft, secret enclaves of north Dorset, set in the 1920s. It is demanding, but the effort is re-paid.Wolf Solent, the eponymous, 34-year old protagonist, in whose mind we generally dwell, is a clever dreamer, with an intense but partially unaware gaze both outwards and inwards, unable to harmonise his outer and inner worlds. Throughout the novel, he is searching for meaning in a God-emptied, Darwinian world - where sexual obsession or frantic scrabbling after control lurks beneath the surface of human life. He finds his own 'secret mythology' - in which he battles intellectually with the primal forces of creation - more real than the actual life he inhabits, in which he is an undistinguished teacher of history in a rural grammar school. This makes Wolf peculiarly subject to the whims of his instincts, because he lacks mature self-awareness. Yet, he is also highly receptive to natural landscape and to those around him, because of a certain, non-judgemental detachment.Powys has a marvellous ability to bring the reader into complicity with his creation, especially when Wolf is communing in a heightened state of intellectual awareness with a woman - be it his lithe, wife-lover, Gerda; his elfin mind-heart, Christie; or his possessive and sensualist mother.Equally, the receptive reader is mesmerised in the moonlight-bathed dark lanes and valleys of semi-mythic Dorset. Powys uses descriptions of landscape as simple but eerily effective devices for transporting the reader to the powerful shadowlands of the subconscious, where he can convey a horizon-flashing instinct, at once philosophical, particular and brazen. Then, a paragraph later, this protean writer might distance his reader from an intimate passage in Wolf's mind by breaking off to refer (as the suddenly-intruding author) to his subject's 'skull'.Wolf Solent, published in 1929, was the fourth novel and first notable success of John Cowper Powys (1872-1963). The book has a modernist focus on consciousness and sensuality in a world stripped of certainties by Freud’s insights and Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’. In this respect, it is comparable to the novels of his younger but shorter-lived contemporaries, DH Lawrence (1885-1930) and James Joyce (1882-1941), whose great novels were published before Wolf Solent, and which were surely influential on him. However, unlike Joyce and Lawrence, Powys did not break free from Victorian language and perspective. Thus, Powys’s land and mind-scape descriptions unfold slowly, decorously and in disembodied detail. For example, in the middle of the story (pages 305-306 in the paperback Penguin 2000 edition), Powys writes of 'simple, sensuous well-being' in the Dorset countryside, where Wolf is 'enabled to enter, by a lucky psychic sensitiveness, into some continuous stream of human awareness - awareness of a beauty in the world that travelled lightly from place to place, stopping here and stopping there, like a bird of passage, but never valued at its true worth until it had vanished away.' The passage continues in this ethereal vein for a number of pages.Yet – for me - the novel Wolf Solent works, marvellously and surprisingly. It has an attractive mix of realism, mysticism and sensuality. Powys’s penetrating and delicate writing brings out the extraordinary nature of ordinary life. The scope of the novel is daringly wide, and there are many luminous chapters (I particularly liked the brilliant Lenty Pond section, chapter 23). Wolf and the host of subsidiary characters are psychologically credible and their conflicts spark realistic drama, while the central character’s metaphysical-philosophical musings are refreshingly engaging.Powys also can evoke a Dorset local character and accent masterfully, not least in the language of the amiable and blunt Mr Torp ‘stone-cutter of Chequers Street’, father of the girl whom Wolf marries, whom Mr Torp regrets ‘aint got the durned consideration to comb her own hair; and it might be mighty silky too, when it be combed out’ but instead she stays ‘sitting around, strong as a Maypole’.Nevertheless, in the end perhaps one sees hints of why John Cowper Powys never made it to the Western canon (while it existed) and why he is mostly unknown to the general reader today - assuming, which might be quite wrong (?), that his other great novels are approximately similar in broad approach to Wolf Solent.Most obviously, there is the problem, for a world in haste, of a writing style which is languid and elaborate: Powys might take six pages to describe what others would do in six lines. I found it necessary, and rewarding, to read slowly and to be more than usually attentive, or I would have missed the slow, deeper rumblings (and surely I still missed much of this many-layered work). The second difficulty is that Wolf Solent comes across as quite old-fashioned, for its time, particularly because the story is told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator.However, at least one of these caveats could apply to any number of highly esteemed writers, ranging from George Eliot and Thomas Hardy to Proust, Woolf and Joyce. It is perhaps the combination of these characteristics with a third, which one might call a lack of sufficient engagement with the ‘otherness’ of life, which may have condemned Powys to relative obscurity. Wolf Solent is intensely conservative in his response to the external aspects of modernity, and is a fierce detester of aeroplanes and materialism - but this is not a problem, and can be seen as a strength. The trouble, as I see it, is a profound, inner conservatism of emotion and the spirit: Wolf is too fearful to let go of what he knows and is too self-absorbed to interact deeply, except with his own, self-limiting instincts and thoughts. In a word, he is too cerebrally selfish: his experiences are writ large, but only inside his head; outside, he is a fairly passive conformist who ducks the challenges of life and who fails to risk a profound encounter with other human beings.As his supposed 'great love' Christie says to Wolf (page 598), 'you great, stupid, talking fool ... what do you know of my real life?' He, and we, never learn.Wolf strides on and Christie lets him off the hook. His more-or-less unexplained 'secret mythology' has been smashed - that 'sense of huge invisible cosmic transactions, in the midst of which he played his part' (page 610) - but Wolf's blithe self-absorption remains, albeit with a dawning realisation that his life is 'an empty husk'.Wolf doesn't truly empathise with anyone: he shows no tenderness to the much-damaged Christie, who waits in vain for his affection; and he is aware but does not really care about hurting his vulnerable young wife, Gerda. He pours scorn on Gerda's modest desires to spend money on their house and a holiday in Weymouth. This ignites an elemental reaction in Gerda which leads to a definitive crack in the edifice of Wolf’s high-walled self-esteem, and to the destruction of her innocence: he is 'cuckolded' by 'the water-rat', but it is his own pride and loss of control over his 'sweet girl' which concerns him, not Gerda's motivation or suffering.He is, in truth, a devoted mummy's boy, willing to 'sell his soul' for £200 to finish the squire's book about sordid Dorset ways, in order to have the money to fund his mother's tea-shop ambitions, rather than see her take a loan from a man whom he loathes - though he neglects to ask his mother if she wants his money, and she rejects it later.And yet, at first, I found this total lack of worrying about others rather refreshing. In Wolf Solent, Powys’s characters rarely fear that they have been misunderstood or that they are ignorant or destructive. There is what AN Wilson (in the introduction to the Penguin 2000 edition) called a 'robustness' about his perspective. His hero has no self-doubt (until near the end), no ironic detachment or clinging sense of worthlessness. He is not a victim or beset by the self-victimising neuroses of others. He is frank about sex, religion, class - and about his own callousness.For all his naturalness and worldly wisdom, Wolf is cut off from connectedness to other people and transforming emotion. Even though, in the last pages, ‘Nature’ comes to the rescue as the healer and over-arching presence, the protagonist - and the reader - is left with a sense of profound, if stoically born, pessimism. Near the end of the book, after a tormented night walk (page 620), Wolf’s febrile mind is too exhausted to prevent 'the simple chemistry of his body ... coming to its own conclusions ... while his soul ... wriggled and squirmed somewhere above his head!' (This long sentence ends with a characteristic exclamation mark.) His feverish intelligence has got him nowhere, and it is the animal experience of the long, solitary pounding in the hills which brings Wolf into harmony with 'the unutterable ... heathen goodness' of nature - which he seems to forget a few pages later, and from which he appears to draw only limited strength.Thus, after returning from his walk, the narcissistic Wolf - surely a lonely sheep in wolf’s clothing - shrinks from confronting his latest bête noire, Lord Carfax, when he peers through the window of his cottage and sees that the old goat has Gerda sitting on his knee. Instead, Wolf escapes to 'the amazing gold of the meadow beyond' for a further five pages of luxuriating, Wordsworthian reverie, released to 'enjoy life ... with absolute childish absorption in its simplest elements'.Wolf's self-obsessive, if imaginative, character is not in itself a problem – he is a brilliant literary creation. The difficulty is that the pessimistic attitude to life which Wolf develops (and which Powys appears to be promoting) is not sufficiently deeply grounded: he has only popped his head out of his shell now and then, and has failed to risk vulnerable, deeper experience. With his illusions shattered, but still shuttered inside himself, Wolf accepts a bleak future, believing that the 'inmost soul' of any human is a 'furtive coil,' a 'quivering ego-nerve,' and that he (like all beings) is alone and 'diseased' – he has not been able to escape the ‘inert despair’ of the tramp whom he saw (at the beginning of the book) on the steps of Waterloo station. This, thinks Wolf (and Powys, it seems?), is 'stronger than the Christian miracle', negating love and any sense of a benign (but not necessarily Christian) cosmos. All that is left is to endure, and to enjoy haphazard moments of ecstatic wonder in nature, which is the dual and ‘secret bestower of torture and pleasure.' That, and the humble pleasure of a 'cup of tea’.

This is one of the oddest books I have ever read. I am astonished to think it was published in 1929. While not explicit, there are themes of adultery, nymphophylia, pederasty, incest: the character of Wolf Solent is writing up a history of the debauchery and scandalous goings-on of the area. Wolf arrives in Dorset, almost immediately marries a beautiful young girl he meets, and swiftly moves to a magnetic attraction for another woman. We are inside Wolf’s head, his frenzied, demented mind’s workings, metaphysical musings, his peculiar fixation on his “mythology,” his “sense of huge invisible cosmic transactions in the midst of which he played his part,” his need and dependency on scenes from nature to stabilise him. Sometimes I laughed out loud at his oddity, when his mother in law approaches him at a fete he bellows at her at the top of his lungs, and when he sees a leaf detached from some twigs on pavement he is determined to reunite the errant leaf with its fellows to prevent their distress at the separation.Wolf is torn between his conscience, which tells him to remain faithful to his wife, and also whether to refuse to continue writing the odious history of the depravity of the locals for his unpleasant employer Urquhart. He is torn between two women, one he sees as his “horizon” and one “the solid ground beneath him.”James Joyce summed up his aloneness with the mantra “silence, exile, cunning.” Wolf Solent’s final mantra is “Alone! Endure or escape.”Nature, our natural surroundings, free of the “brutality of mechanism,” plays such a vital role in the book I do not think it could not be written now.

A page-turner!

A forgotten classic.

Wonderful book. Happy to have it