A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys (March 1932)
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Overview: A Glastonbury Romance is about a small Somerset town shrouded in Christian and pagan mysteries. The spirit of Arthur, Rex Futuris, hangs over its pages like a mist over Avalon, while the main characters are all in thrall to the Grail, or appalled by it. The main story is rooted in a struggle between John Geard, who wants to recreate the Glastonbury of legend to attract visitors from all over the world, and Philip Crow, who wants to build factories that provide work for the locals.
The book is an exploration of those internal forces that shape our lives; of the perpetual struggle between reason and imagination, order and anarchy, creation and destruction. The sacred and blasphemous are present, as are birth and death, and many interpretations, some of them highly original, of the Christian faith. Above all, the novel emerges from the emotional divergence of the Saxon and Celtic worlds, and the meshing of flesh and spirit. Powys interweaves the ancient with the modern as he probes the mystical and spiritual ethos of the small English village of Glastonbury and the effect upon its inhabitants of a mystical tradition (the legend of the Grail) from the most remote past of human history to create a novel of astonishing scope and beauty.
First published in 1932, panoramic in design, charged with scenes of great vividness, and informed by John Cowper Powys’s own towering genius, A Glastonbury Romance is an epic novel of terrific cumulative force and lyrical intensity that still astounds new generations of readers.
Genre: Fiction, Literary
"A major English novelist of the 1920s and ’30s, Powys’s remarkable novels are reprinted from time to time. 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." ~Publishers WeeklyDownload Instructions:
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