A Glastonbury Romance Paperback – November 1, 1996

This book, as well as the author, often get compared to the likes of Tolstoi and Dostoyevski and I don't think that's wrong. However, what Powys does different than the Russian giants is he has no fear of explaining his very erudite, introverted takes on sexuality, spirituality, and the supernatural. The Russians explain life and behavioral motivations better than anybody. Powys does this too, maybe not necessarily as well as they do but it's certainly there. However, what Powys exceeds at, better than any fiction author I've ever read, is explaining the sexual motivations, often repressed, that drives much of psychopathic and neurotic behavior as well as describe the spiritual and occult forces that drive and determine much of the human will and it's in these that he is absolutely brilliant.This book is a slow burner but once you get to page 100 or so (of it's ruthless 1120) you will be hooked. This may be in my top five all-time. This book helped me understand so many aspects of life that are largely ignored, repressed, or thought repellent.This is not an easy book. There will be many words that you have never seen before, and English words at that, but, if you commit to it, I promise it becomes a living, breathing organism that is beautiful, terrifying, awe-inspiring, and utterly fantastic.Much like writers such as Dostoyevski, Jung, Gurdjieff, Shakespeare, and Bacon, you get the sense that Powys really and truly understands the realities, both material and immaterial, we call life, better than any modern author I'm aware of.Just a quick aside, Powys, so much like Dostoyevski, really seems to understand what drives political motivation on both Western sides, be it Tory and Labour, Republican or Democrat, and all the rest. He understands the "'ate" that underlies the Jacobites and much of what modern day Socialism has become but also the individual, blind greed that drives Capitalism.This is a truly epic magnum opus of a work and the kind of work every author dreams of writing. It's content, as well as it's sheer size, will keep most of society away. But for the "initiated" lot out there, look no further, this is what you've been searching for.

This work simply comprises too much to be encapsulated in any sort of review I might proffer here.-Realising this essential fact, I'll just confine myself to what makes this work one of the greatest achievements in 20th Century literature.Powys has a unique depth of insight - and poetic way of expressing this insight - into what makes people who they are and do what they do. He has the rare gift of being able to express this extra dimension to each personality in lovely (almost dancing, I would say)language. This is Powys major accomplishment, and the reason anyone interested in deep, powerful literature should read this deliciously meandering tome.A couple other footnotes here:1)The Russian writer Powys resembles most is not Tolstoy, but Dostoyevsky, with his insights into the twisted and sinuous dreamworld behind human personality-Only Powys easily betters him.2) When I looked Powys up in an encyclopaedia of authors, the article on Powys concluded that "his admirers have largely been confined to those readers who share his interest in the esoteric."-This is rubbish. The Arthurian legends, The Grail, The Passion Play and all other "esoterica" here are important only because they represent motives and psychic depths in the characters--One can read this book quite easily and with great appreciation, as I did, and complete it having no further interest whatsoever in the arcana of the Holy Grail legend.Well, let's let Powys have the last word here:The composers of fiction aim at a verisimilitude which seldom corresponds to the much more eccentric and chaotic dispositions of Nature. Only rarely are such writers so torn and rent that they can add their own touch to the wave crests of real actuality as these foam up, bringing wreckage and sea-tangle and living and dead ocean monsters and bloody spume and bottom silt into the rainbow spray! p.666Quite. Powys does. Read it!

Gothic Novel beautifully and poetically written

Powys was has a poet's touch like John Donne. In this century, where we like our books spoon fed to us with short, declarative sentences, simple plot lines and melodramatic "realism" one might consider his books "overwritten" because of their intensely descriptive and sometimes breathless language. Personally, I find all that criticism to be nonsense. While it's true, that like many novelists from the early part of the 20th century, Powys wrote from his particular place and time, he was imbued with the history and linguistic elegance of the past, but the sheer wight of the beauty in his prose, its passion and intense spiritual and psychological vision is almost unequaled. He was a mystic whose view was almost b Buddhist in how he could tune in to the voices of the natural world, and hos suspect he was of the human soul who denied their power. The plot is complex, unhurried (after all, this book is over 1000 pages), and its characters rich, complex and above all believable as beings whose natures are by design quite contradictory, full of depth and desire. This novel will reward anyone who willingly and persistently goes through the rabbit hole of time and space with him. A Glastonbury Romance is a masterpiece of English language fiction.