Paperback of the week: A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys’s sixth novel, A Glastonbury Romance, first published in 1932, begins with the relatives of Canon Crow descending on rural Norfolk for his funeral and – their true focus – the reading of his will. An unexpected bequest establishes a conflict between two residents of the Somerset town of Glastonbury: Philip Crow, an industrialist who wants to dominate nature with electricity and factories, and the preacher John Geard, companion to the Canon in his final years, who harbours a dream of reinstating Glastonbury as a pilgrimage site.

But describing this novel in such straightforward terms feels like misrepresentation. A Glastonbury Romance is set in the Wessex familiar from Thomas Hardy’s novels, but at the same time takes place in what may as well be another dimension. “Like Tolkien,” Margaret Drabble wrote, “Powys has invented another country, densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien’s, but it is as compelling, and it has more air.”

Despite his own expectations of being awarded the Nobel prize, Powys was and has remained a cult figure – his brother, TF Powys, was the more popular writer in their day. Both are weird, but John’s weirdness is on an altogether more cosmic scale. Within the first couple of chapters of A Glastonbury Romance we have been plunged into the consciousnesses of John and Mary Crow, cousins and lovers, the corpse of Canon Crow (“Annihilation – how strange! A new conscious life – how strange!”), touched on the awareness of a divinity Powys calls “the First Cause”, and even experienced the language of trees: “All this the ash tree noted; but its vegetative comment thereon would only have sounded in human ears like the gibberish: wuther-quotle-glug.”

Yet Powys can also do exquisite social comedy. You never know where he might go next, and it seems he doesn’t either. His prose style is indefatigable, clause following clause following clause; his curiosity searching and his knowledge vast; he is completely indifferent to structure and pacing. These elements combine to swell A Glastonbury Romance to 1,200 pages, which is still 500 pages shorter than the original manuscript. Reading it is a journey of weeks, or even months. It took Henry Miller, a Powys devotee who rationed the experience, a whole year of “joyous sips”.

The book is among the longest single-volume works in English, but despite its length, events that might be considered essential to the plot often take place in the gaps between chapters, referred to only vaguely at a later point. As noted by an academic devoted to the study of Powys’s work (a small but dedicated band): “The sense of excessive length in A Glastonbury Romance is only exacerbated by all of the things that are left out of it.”

Long books can prompt resentment, especially among those who are paid to read them but not by the hour. You can hear the grudgingness in the first line of the TLS review from 1933: “Since Mr Powys’s novel is more than a thousand pages long and contains over 40 principal characters it will be possible to sketch only the broad outlines of the story.” Another contemporary review seems tormented by Powys’s alternate strengths and weaknesses as a writer. “The novel fails brilliantly,” it concludes, “but it fails!”

Given this, you may be wondering if it’s worth it. After all, most of us will probably only read a handful of books of this size in our lifetimes. The Brothers Karamazov or Infinite Jest? Middlemarch or Underworld? Should A Glastonbury Romance be in that conversation? I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly – it’s too obviously idiosyncratic and potentially maddening for that. But it does contain amazing things, and its oddities are of the sort that, for the right people, it will become one of the great experiences of their reading lives. I’ll take that over a competent 250 pages any day.

A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys (Penguin Classics, £18.99). Save 10% at observershop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25

Photograph by Barnard via Getty Images