Dave's Book Blog: "A Glastonbury Romance" by John Cowper Powys

A huge book in which a number of members of a Norfolk family wind up in Glastonbury where there are culture wars between a capitalist businessman, various left-wing would-be revolutionaries, and a lay preacher and faith-healer with miraculous powers.

E M Forster, in Appendix A of Aspects of the Novel, says “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” A Glastonbury Romance is supposed to have half a million words in it; my print copy ran to 1120 pages. Writing something of that length is a considerable achievement and testimony to the endurance of the author. But AGR is not on my list of great literature.

For John Burnside, however, as reported in The Guardian of 3rd February 2024, this was the book that made him want to become a writer.

In 2006, Margaret Drabble wrote in the Guardian that "Words poured from him, and he was famous for never rereading any of them." A friend of mine who is in the John Cowper Powys society says that he certainly revised some of his books but perhaps not AGR. I think this shows. The reader (and, I suspect, the writer) is overwhelmed by the flood of words. Some readers say they loved that feeling of inundation, that they abandoned themselves to it and luxuriated in it. I just felt suffocated.

It is written in the past tense with an omniscient point of view, head-hopping through the consciousnesses of the characters, including insects.

There is a huge cast of characters, from all social levels, though most of the lower-class characters seem to be there principally to create entertainment and background colour. To call the characters Dickensian is both accurate and a back-handed compliment. Most characters are eccentric and can be described quite easily. For example, Owen Evans is obsessed with Merlin but also has sado-masochistic fantasies which he finds difficult to suppress. Philip Crow is a businessman intent on making money and obsessed with his cousin's wife (although he is very supportive of his own wife, despite his repeated philandering). Many of the principal male characters (John Crow, Sam Dekker, Owen Evans, Mayor Geard) have extensive spiritual lives, although their spirituality seems to be different aspects of the same thing, making them both distinct from one another and somehow weirdly similar. The women are fundamentally concerned with attracting a male (although there are several lesbians) and keeping house. My JCP society friend says, however, that JCP is good at describing elderly spinsters and thinks that Euphemia Drew and Aunt Elizabeth are successes. Voice is used to distinguish social classes rather than individuals. Opportunities to develop characters are often missed. For example, John has spent years living on his wits in Paris and is described as having a rather wolf-like nature but when he gets to Glastonbury he settles down, gets a job and gets married and his distinctive personality seems to merge in with the others; it's almost as if JCP became bored with John and his attention was distracted by other characters. I suspect that it is not possible, even over 1120 pages, for an author to properly explore characters when there are so many of them. But Mayor Geard is an interesting character as is Sam Dekker.

I was desperately disappointed by the plot (my JCPSoc friend says he is less interested in plot as he grows older). Two of the major plot developments are the creation of a commune in Glastonbury and the murder of one of the main characters. Both of these rely on characters who spring into action only in the last third of the book, as if they are afterthoughts. Most of the book therefore seems to be preamble. There was little feeling of structure. Margaret Drabble says "the plot rambles".

But my JCPSoc friend points out that even if the structure is missing, there are patterns, for example in the opposition between the 'heathen triangle' of John, Mary and Barter and the Christian triangle of Sam, Nell and Matt; also the opposition between the triumvirate of Dave Spear, Paul Trent and Red Robinson against the vested interests of Philip.

There is an awful lot of mystical clap-trap, such as: "It is a natural fact that there Two Twilights are propitious to psychic intercourse with the First Cause while other hours are malignant and baleful." (Ch 2). This, to be fair, seems to be the catnip that generates many of the five star reviews. JCP sets the tone from the first sentence: "At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred with a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar system one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occurs when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe." (Ch 1) There's a lot of this sort of thing, both in terms of its long-windedness and its mysticism: scarcely any of the principal characters can perform any action without a vast amount of soul-searching in terms often as obscure as this. In the end I agreed with Ned Athling when he said "I feel somehow ... as if all these Grail stories, all this mediaeval mysticism, had grown tiresome and antiquated." (Ch 17)

Several of the characters have mystical experiences. John Crow has a vision of Excalibur being flung from Pomparles Bridge. Sam Dekker has a vision of the Grail coupled with a sensation of a spear being thrust into his bowels ... which makes him either Jesus on the Cross of, more likely, the Fisher King. Other Christ-like figures include Owen Evans who apparently dies when enacting crucifixion during the Pageant but revives at the hospital and Geard who is a faith-healer, curing cancer and raising from the dead, who finally sacrifices his life for another, dying while clinging to an aeroplane which has a cross-like shape.

Don't get me wrong; when I was a kid I loved books in which children battled with mystical forces that had somehow been woken and were intruding into the world: books such as Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, or Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper, or Earthfasts by William Mayne. Later, these morphed into adolescent dramas on TV such as Raven in 1977 starring Phil Daniels and The Owl Service, based on the Alan Garner book. So I am not averse to this style of fantasy. I don't think I've grown out of it. I just think that fiction should involve seductively persuading the reader to suspend their disbelief but JCP's approach is so unsubtle as to make it seem ridiculous.

There is the usual 1930s assumption that racial characteristics are innate and eternal. John says: "we Crows are plain sea-faring Danes ... We haven't the goodness of the Saxon, not the power of the Norman, not the imagination of the Celt." (Ch 2) Later we are told: "Though Lord P's bastard had never sailed the sea, his Norse ancestors had, and that manner of life lay deep in his blood." (Ch 26) Enduring (in this case for more than thirty generations) racial consciousness might have been fashionable then but it nowadays sounds racist and eugenicist.

JCP has a lot of fun with regional accents, although only servants and other working-class people speak like that normally:

"He do say that Miss Mary over the way have a cousin come to town what be lodging wi' Mr Evans, the new Antiquities man whose looking after wold Jones' shop, who's to Hospital again with one of they little cysteses what do trouble he." (Ch 4)
"There do come to I, of nights, the shaky-shivers, as ye might say, when, as I lies awake in thik girt white ward, where thro' they cold windies be blowin' every draught of Heaven; and I do hear they ghosties come out of they Ruings, brother, and go whush, whush, whush over all the roofs, and I feel, for sure, that some girt change be coming over this town." (Ch 13)
"They tease I terrible ... they call I 'Bastie, Bastie'. They did run after I in dinner-hour yesterday ..." (Ch 13)

There's a lot of sex, although it is sometimes difficult to be sure exactly what is going on. The phrase 'make love' didn't, in those days, refer to full sexual intercourse; when two lads sleep together that doesn't necessarily mean they are having sex, even when they have both previously been described as having a crush on another male character. Many characters are, apparently, chaste even after they appear to have had sex. Thus John and Mary 'make love' almost from the start but she is unbedded even after marriage, for a few days at least. Sam Dekker's goings on with married Nell have scandalised the neighbourhood but they don't have sex till much later. Nevertheless, sex is omnipresent and acknowledged. Nell's husband Will suggests that they live with Sam as a menage a trois. Mrs Legge rents out rooms to unmarried couples. Philip has an illegitimate child and sleeps with his married cousin Persephone (who in turn has a lesbian affair and then an affair with Will) and Tom Barter has a string of conquests among the servant class before impregnating Tossie.

Somehow the attitude to sex seems typified by Sam Dekker who enjoys his (only?) sexual experience with Nell so much that he decides not only to abandon her and the child he has fathered but also to forswear sex for the rest of his life and become a sort of saint. I found this difficult to believe.

Punctuating all the spiritual stuff is everyday life including mountains of bread and butter and oceans of tea. One aspect of JCP's work that I admired was the way his characters perform strange little actions, the sort of thing that we all do in our everyday lives, moments of subconsciousness, such as when the reverend, at the moment that his son leaves home, picks up a dead fish from his aquarium and "raising it to his nostrils, sniffed at it with inquisitive interest!" (Ch 28) This is a moment of surreal nonsense but it suddenly lends verisimilitude to the whole scene.

My JCPSoc friend believes that JCP has attempted to write a novel encompassing the universality of life, its "slowness and constant irrelevancies" and at the same time the abstract, spiritual side of life. That's certainly some ambition and if he has failed, he should surely get full marks for trying.

One thing I didn't admire was JCP's prolific use of exclamation marks. He obviously thinks they add tension. He also uses italics a lot to mark the key moments of a thought or speech ... which is at least useful given that they are so many unitalicised words swamping the important ones.

But what do I know? John Cowper Powys was regarded as a great author by novelists as diverse as Henry Miller, Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble. Hermann Hesse admired AGR.

Other reviews:

Space cadet on Amazon: "rather like watching paint dry, although taking much, much longer."
Dr Enoch on Amazon: "mannered and constipated"
Paul Bryant on goodreads: "this may be the most flawed five star novel ever"

Selected quotes:

"Jealous and exacting are all the gods, and a divided worship is abhorrent to them." (Ch 1)
"They formed a loquacious group around the car, uttering those spontaneous and lively genialities which among human beings imply instinctive relief at being able to get rid of one another." (Ch 5)
"A girl isn't a bottle of wine for a man to lock up in a cupboard, to take a sip from whenever he wants to!" (Ch 6)
"Here in these back alleys lived the failures in the merciless struggle of life." (Ch 9)
"We are all a herd of gibbering monkeys in a madhouse of inherited superstitions; and the maddest and wickedest of these superstitions is the idea that private people have a right to be rich." (Ch 9)
"'Tis not be tormenting folk that good parsnips be growed and good 'taties be dug." (Ch 19)
"The history of any ancient town is as much the history of its inhabitants' nightly pillows as of any practical activity that they perform by day." (Ch 24)
"We are all scales, scurf, scab, on the same twisting, cresting dragon of the slime." (Ch 25)
"We can't all dig, Will. That's true enough; but we'd all dodge it if we could. I'd be content if those who did the dirty work got more pay than the rest of us - instead of much less; and being looked down upon us as well." (Ch 26)
"He looked like a deboshed verger who had turned billiard-marker in some fifth-rate club." (Ch 27)
"A limit there must be, thought Sam, to the sympathy one soul can give to other souls - or all would perish. Absolute sympathy with suffering would mean death. If Christ had sympathised to the limit with the pain of the world it would have been hard for him to have lived until the day of his Crucifixion. ... Sympathy with pain kills happiness. There comes a point when to live at all we must forget!" (Ch 28)
"A man's backside be a turble squeamy pleace." (Ch 28)
"Three's company ... and two's immorality." (Ch 28)
"He do trust nature; whereas I do say, 'tis nature what did the damage. Us must go further afield for the cure of thik damage. Us must go to Science." (Ch 28)