A Glastonbury Romance

A monumental book (1120 pages) that took me 3 months to read and knocked me off my reading schedule. Rather than one or two main characters, it has a large caste of characters, including the town and environs of Glastonbury itself. Set in the 1930's, as England is becoming more motorized, there are industrialists and communists, as well as people who are still living a relatively traditional life close to the land. There are adherents of Christianity, believers in the Arthurian legends and Welsh mythology, and atheists. And whether they believe in the legends or not, everyone in the town is aware that Glastonbury is the site of many of those legendary events, as well as the site of a Neolithic lakeside town. The legendary and real history of Glastonbury extends into the present lives of its inhabitants in strange ways. That is partly what the novel is about.

It's not an easy read, which is why it took me so long to get through it. The sentences can be long and abstractly philosophical. I sometimes had trouble keeping track of what was happening in a paragraph because of that. But when Powys focuses on the lives of the human characters, it's magical. His characters are a large collection of men, women, and children from different walks of life, with conflicting agendas (industrialists, communists, traditional farmers, maiden aunts, philandering husbands, unfaithful wives, kissing cousins, messianic town officials, etc). Most of them are real weirdos. Many of them are part of the Crow family, which is in conflict with itself. They are all treated with loving attention by the author, so that you are drawn deeply into their lives and concerns–sometimes against your will.

I mentioned that the town of Glastonbury and its environs is also a character in the story, but there are also other non-human characters, like trees, the sun and moon, lingering consciousness from people who had died in the past, and the First Cause. Another Goodreads reviewer compared them to the gods in Greek myths, which I think is a good way to describe them. The human beings in the story are not necessarily aware of the non-human characters, but they are influential in what happens.

In summary, this is a long, weirdly wonderful book that I feel I barely understood, but I'm glad I persevered and read the whole thing. Bon courage if you decide to take it on.