Porius: A Novel [Hardcover]

Margaret Drabble wrote an essay about the author in TLS ( November 14, 2007). I may have seen his name before, but never seriously considered reading John Cowper Powys. Drabbles essay was about a new biography by Morine Krissdóttir "Descents of memory", and a new edition of Powys' "Porius". I promply ordered both. I like excentric englishmen, and Powys seems to fit the bill, having a society, or more precisely, his family has a society: The Powys Society, and a sense of exclusiveness about his authorship that I like (being a snob in such matters).

I'm now halfway into Porius and hooked. This is really an amazing novel! It's set in Wales in the week from 18 to 25 october 499. The setting is Arthurian, but not your standard Arthur-fantasy. Not that the setting matters much (it probably does btw), its a fairly complex novel with several figures and many questions covered. It contains a mix of modern and ancient thought, so reading is like dipping in and out of the unknown. There is pagan, ancient greek and even christian elements here, but mostly what easiest can be described as nature mysticism (or paganism if you prefer that term). (There's even mentions of Mithras, which led me to order Manfred Clauss' "The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries"). But there's more, much more!

It's a help to have a guide to all the names and (a few) concepts, so put "John Cowper Powys's Porius: A Reader's Companion" into Google.

A Glastonbury romance is on the way (from the same publisher), to ensure that something is at hand when I'm through with Porius.

This book is a truly humbling one to review. It is also difficult to convey to the prospective reader exactly what it is that makes the work so monumental and important or why the editors of The Atlantic chose this book - written 50 years ago and only now published as Powys intended - as THE ONLY book of fiction worth the serious reader's time to emerge for the whole of last year. I shall endeavour, however, to do my best:
The two striking qualities that will immediately begin to strike the engaged reader about the characters and setting (Wales, 499 A.D.) of the novel are a SLOWNESS and what I can only call a MUFFLEDNESS about it all. These qualities arise, not only because it is set in a pre-agrarian tribal society, but because Powys is interested primarily in the various impressions flickering through the souls of the characters and how they, gradually, come to assume, not to lose, the name of action. The manner in which Porius ruminates upon his decision to find and, if needs be, fight the Cewri might just as well that of the reader as he/she plunges into these pages:

"This was decided. This was settled. And yet there hung about the whole project something dreamlike and unsubstantial, not so much unreal, as subreal, like a decision under water, or in the soft persistent falling of snow upon snow."

We have, in today's post-industrial, "tweeting" age lost the consciousness of the connexions with faint odours, shifts of light, lingering memories that affect our moods, our states of conscience. Powys' book slowly restores our awareness of these senses in us, as well as "the wisdom of every creature in reconciling itself as well as it could to that mysterious mingling of Nature's purposes with accident and chance, which is the only world we know."

The relations between the sexes and, indeed, the sexual impulse itself are - again, slowly - revealed to us as matters of a complex sensorium, as when Sibylla is leading Brochvael through the forest:

"Her complicated new feeling, so fiercely reverential, for the man she was guiding, were as intimately associated with leaves and mould and moss and mist as his were with his fireside at Ty Cerrig...Yes, she was listening, after her fashion; and hearing, amid oak stumps and pine-tree trunks and under that shapeless silveriness of the sky, more, it may well be, than he was saying."

More than anything, the book presses into the persevering reader an awe at the mysteriousness of our souls and of our world, no better represented than in Powys' description of a morning mist:

"By imperceptible degrees the first infinitely faint change in the warm dark bosom of the night reaches us like the tolling of a bell under water and with a tragic greyness, far more deathlike than anything to be found in the comfortable embrace and kindly oblivion of darkness; and there comes into existence, thrusting itself between the familiar alteration of light and day, a death-cold, corpselike, alien entity newly arrived upon the earth from heaven knows where."

Ultimately, the reader is drawn into a world of which his/her primordial senses are keenly aware, which deeply underlies all our lives, but which is lost to us in our day-to-day lives. The time spent (about 60 hours for me) reading this book restores to awareness the odours, sights, smells, chance occurrences which mould our inner lives and eventually determine our actions. Like Proust, and only a few other great authors and poets I can think of over a life devoted to reading, it is a book of wisdom literature. This review doesn't do it justice. No rating I could give it does it justice. -----Like all such works, you don't so much read it. It reads you.

Not the easiest read in the world, but what of JCP is? This triumphal work is an attempt to get at the true essence of Arthurian legend, with a mix of the very ancient with the Celtic with asides on life--I feel that this may be the author's opus. I particularly enjoyed the long descriptions of nature or of the individuals involved. Beautiful work and sadly neglected.

PS: Another reviewer whined about the names--gee, last time I checked, the names from Tolkien or Star Wars are pretty unusual too--these are traditional Welsh names, so get over it!