A Sense of Place
I had not heard of Cowper Powys until I read a write-up in a recent English newspaper and was sufficiently intrigued to buy 'A Glastonbury Romance'. The size of the novel is daunting: 1200 pages with a cast list of 'Principal Characters' running to 40-odd names displayed at the front. But within a few pages I was drawn in. The novel begins in East Anglia in dramatic fashion with the reading of the will of Canon William Crow and the dashing of the hopes of his neglectful family when he leaves the bulk of his estate to his former secretary John Geard of Glastonbury.
The action soon moves to Glastonbury in the west of England where, coincidentally, several members of the Crow family have settled along with John Geard who is soon elected Mayor of Glastonbury. The central strand of the novel is a tussle between Geard, who is persuaded by a motley bunch of hangers-on to set up a 'commune' that aspires towards a new English Utopia in opposition to Philip Crow, the local tycoon who is determined to drag Glastonbury into the modern 20th century with factories that will provide employment for every neer-do-well in Glastonbury.
Running alongside the central theme are many subplots featuring the lives of numerous other Glastonbury characters of every social stratum whose affairs and intrigues weave around the main storyline. One of the eye-openers for me was the amount of sex going on in the early 1930s: affairs between first cousins, between lords and commoners, children born out of wedlock - not at all the image that is normally presented of pre-1960s England - and written in a very open, sympathetic and heart-warming style: quite explicit without using language that would have been unacceptable at the time.
The other major character in the novel is the English landscape and the objects within it. Cowper Powys is clearly writing about parts of England that he knows intimately and loves deeply and his enthusiam for the landscape comes across very strongly; too strongly at times when the novel diverges into somewhat overlong soliloquies on the magic of nature and Cowper Powys's unconventional beliefs in animism come to the fore. But overall the strong narrative thrust and engaging sideplots carry the novel along to a very dramatic and satisfying conclusion: Glastonbury is assailed by the forces of nature and is severely flooded with dramatic events ensuing among its human population. The flood and its aftermath demonstrate nature's sway over the puny ambitions of men.
Cowper Powys does not have the deep insight into the human character of George Eliot but in its sweeping structure and huge cast of characters A Gastonbury Romance is reminiscent of Middlemarch and similary enjoyable. Definitely recommended.
