Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal’s debut fantasy novel paints an alternate setting à la Jane Austen’s Regency England (though this is definitely not a P & P spin-off), in which young accomplished ladies coming of age and out into society must not only develop skills with such things as music, proper deportment, and polite conversation. They also have access to the mystical ether with which they create glamour to enhance their domestic environment with scenic illusions. Young ladies learn how to design, form, and shape the ether’s strands into natural scenes such as a forest glen complete with a bubbling brook, fluttering birds with their songs, and scented flowers in bloom. Jane, the main character, happens to possess a rather advanced talent as a glamourist. Despite her plain-Jane looks, her intellect and skill with the ether as well as other visual arts attracts the attention of famed professional glamourist David Vincent, who is hired by Jane’s wealthy neighbor to create glamour as a means for impressing her prominent guests. Jane’s family is fortunate that she can use glamour to give their home a far better appearance than they could normally afford.

Adventure and intrigue enter the plots of Kowal’s fantasy series (yes, the first sequel, Glamour in Glass, is already in with two more titles coming in 2013-2014) when Vincent and Jane combine their talents, ordinarily reserved for domestic arts and the enhancement of one’s social status, to outwit criminals and defeat armed bandits. Romance is in the picture as well, but the relationship between Jane and Vincent builds gradually as their respect for each other is hard-earned; romance doesn’t dominate the story but infuses it with enough tenderness to appeal to romantic suspense fans.

Other than Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, I’ve not read very much fantasy fiction. This is the first series that has really captured my interest, and I’m quite taken with the characters, the adventure, and the fact that its setting and atmosphere are well-grounded in historical realism. Kowal causes the magic to seem a rather natural element of that time, changing very little else about the culture.

Even though Shades of Milk and Honey is her first novel, Mary Robinette Kowal is no beginning writer, having won the 2008 Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the 2011 Hugo Award for her short story titled “For Want of a Nail.”  I think it’s neat that she also happens to be an accomplished professional puppeteer!

Look for Shades of Milk and Honey and Glamour in Glass in the WRL catalog.

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Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie

Confession time?  I never read anything by Salman Rushdie until I picked up Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002.  I found his essays on everything from “Being Photographed” to “Going to Electoral College” to be funny, pointed, and written in approachable, engaging language.  So what was holding me back?  Perhaps it was that intimidating glare, which makes him look as if you’re going to disappoint him no matter how hard you try.  (Of course, looking for the picture I was thinking of yielded only photos of a smiling, avuncular wiseman.  Strange.)

On a whim, I picked up Haroun and the Sea of Stories and began reading it aloud to my wife.  It quickly became a standing date–9pm each night we’d sit down and I’d dive into The Sea.  Rushdie’s enchanting story drew us along right to the wonderfully satisfying end.  It practically defines what I love to see in totally escapist reading, but with a punch that few writers can pull off.

Haroun is the son of Rashid, a famous storyteller who lives in his own imagination and sometimes visits the “real” world to perform the pieces he finds in his fancy.  Haroun’s mother Soraya sometimes frets over money, but is largely happy until a nasty neighbor poisons her image of Rashid, and the two run off together.  Haroun rejects his father’s fantastic view of the world, and Rashid loses his storytelling facility.

Unfortunately, it’s election time in the country Alifbay, where Rashid has been hired to enchant voters so the politicians can tell equally large whoppers to earn votes.  Without his skill Rashid cannot perform, and only professional pride makes him go to his last gig in the isolated Valley of K to entertain provincial voters.  Haroun talks them onto a wild bus ride with a driver named Butt, who delivers them to their putative employer Snooty Buttoo and his fantastic houseboat.  But aboard the houseboat, Haroun finds himself flown away to an invisible moon that houses the Sea of Stories.  An immense ocean whose currents of standard storylines flow together to create new tales, the Sea is also being poisoned by “popular romances” which have turned into “long lists of shopping expeditions, and “talking helicopter anecdotes” that are spoiling the rich imaginative source that has nourished both tellers and listeners for all of human history.  The poison leads back to the enemy of storytelling, “Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech” Khattam-Shud, whose name means “The End.”

With Haroun’s assistance, the good Guppees, the Plentimaw fish, and the people of P2C2E (Processes Too Complicated to Explain) defeat Khattam-Shud and his Chupwalas, and balance returns to the moon.  With the Sea of Stories saved, the world undergoes a transformation that ensures the defeat of the colorless and the victory of the whimsical.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is called a children’s story, but it would be an exceptional child (indeed an exceptional reader of any age) to catch all the puns, literary allusions, political caricature, and meaningful verbal tics Rushdie gives his magical characters.  Haroun is a marvelous stand-in for readers living in the dull world.  His sudden gift of a wildly psychedelic experience reminds of what we set aside as we “grow up.”  It must have been a Chupwala who decided it belonged outside the realm of those who need it most.

Check the WRL catalog for Haroun and the Sea of Stories

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Skellig, by David Almond

David Almond’s first book for young people is Skellig, which was written in the late 1990s.  I missed this when it first came out, but recently picked it up.  It wasn’t “edge of your seat” thrilling, but instead sweet and magical. I kept turning pages to see what would happen next.

Michael has experienced a lot of stressful changes. His sister was born prematurely.  Although she was released from the hospital, she isn’t doing well at home.   Everyone is worried about her health, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for Michael.  Additionally the family has recently moved to a new house, which needs a lot of work. Once his dad gets a chance to get the rooms painted and the garden cleaned up, it should be great for their growing family.  But now… all Michael can think about is how far away he is from his friends.

One of the features of the property is a dilapidated garage that Michael is not supposed to go near for fear it will collapse—but of course, he does.  There he discovers a strange-looking old man hiding behind a tea chest in the corner.  Michael is scared, but instead of telling an adult about his discovery, he goes back a second time to get a better look.  Then a third time to bring the man food and aspirin.  At last he decides to confide in his neighbor, Mina, and brings her to meet Skellig.

As Michael’s sister returns to the hospital for another surgery, he and Mina move Skellig to a safer place.  They agree that he is an extraordinary being, but is he a man, angel, owl or ghost?  And is there any chance he can save Michael’s sister?

According to the reviews, this book is for children ages 8 and up, but I found it a great story about friendship for all ages.  Mina is wise beyond her years and the lessons in the book will stick with me for a long time.

Check the WRL catalog for Skellig

Almond has recently released Mina’s story in My Name is Mina.

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Kraken, by China Miéville

The squid’s been nicked, to begin with.

But curator Billy Harrow has more to worry about than the theft of a 28-foot Architeuthis from London’s Museum of Natural History. He’s being interrogated by members of the extremely unorthodox Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime unit. He’s being followed by squirrels. And then he’s recruited by an underground cult of Kraken worshipers who consider squids to be saints and Billy to be their… John the Baptist?

For Billy the unwilling prophet and Dane Parnell, a renegade Krakenist, there isn’t much time to figure out who’s got the squid. Welcome to the latter days: word on—and under—the streets of London is that the apocalypse is right around the corner. Possibly more than one.

It’s tough to summarize this book without its sounding like a terrible made-for-SyFy movie (“CEPHALOPOCALYPSE*: The Squid… Are… RISING”). Nonetheless, it’s the most fun I’ve had between book covers all year. Miéville has a great ear and enthusiasm for words; his prose is a dictionary set to music. The city of London becomes a character in itself, along with several creepy, memorable villains and one great cop (bad odds, those).

The story is fueled by pure, gleeful invention. Malevolent ink, homicidal origami, strikes in the afterlife, and iPod djinn—the sense of an author brainstorming overtakes the plot at some point, and we move from a fairly normal London, in which the weird is just breaching the surface of the mundane, to a city teeming with more seers, familiars, and dueling magical crime lords than could ever possibly be concealed from public view. But for prose like this, I was glad to go along for the ride—even when it was a ride in the back of a speeding lorry, with a bunch of entrail-reading Londonmancers and a preserved squid in a tank.

*“APOCALOCTOPUS”?

Check the WRL catalog for Kraken.

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The Magicians, by Lev Grossman

The comparisons to Harry Potter are inevitable, but when Quentin Coldwater is recruited by Brakebills, a magical university hidden in upstate New York, he’s no wide-eyed eleven year old. Smart, anti-social, competitive, and melancholy, he’s designed his life to please Princeton’s admissions office. He took up performing magic tricks so that he could claim an extracurricular activity without actually having to interact with other people. Then he has one of those through-the-looking-glass, or rather, through-the-back-of-the-wardrobe moments, and finds himself on the grounds of Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, taking an incomprehensibly weird entrance exam. When it turns out there’s real magical talent contributing to his sleight-of-hand, Quentin takes about two minutes to realign his career goals. Magicianship beats his depressing real life any day of the week.

Although I may after all prefer the antics of schoolchildren to those of moody college kids and postgrads—sex, drugs, and nihilism, man, St. Elmo’s Fire with sorcery—I enjoyed Grossman’s easy, clever prose and the details of his invented magic. I particularly loved passages describing the cataloging of Brakesbills’s books, which bring an entirely new meaning to the phrase “mobile library:”

“… in which the books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own power in response to searches… enormous atlases soaring around the place like condors….The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory.”

Sometimes charming, sometimes quite dark, it isn’t always clear whether this is a love letter to children’s fantasy or its shocking exposé. From Quidditch to Ents, devoted fantasy readers will enjoy the allusions to the literature of their childhood, and in particular to Narnia (“Fillory” is its thinly-disguised counterpart in the novel), where life is somehow truer and more meaningful and schoolboys become kings. But Quentin’s attempts to find love and fathom meaning in his life just do not get any simpler from one magical world to the next. A fantasy novel about whether you should make fantasy worlds your refuge, it has more in common with Neil Gaiman’s “The Problem of Susan” than with Hogwarts.

Check the WRL catalog for The Magicians.

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Angels of Destruction, by Keith Donohue

On a very cold January night, in a small Pennsylvania town, a nine-year-old girl with glasses shows up on the doorstep of Margaret Quinn. Margaret is a lonely widow whose only daughter, Erica, ran away from home as a teenager ten years earlier in 1975 with her boyfriend Wiley and hasn’t been seen in town since. The bespectacled girl says she’s an orphan and has never known her parents. She was looking for a warm place, and saw Margaret’s light. She begins to write her name, NOR, and Margaret finishes it, calling the girl Norah.

Margaret decides to keep the girl and tells everyone that Norah is her granddaughter, Erica’s daughter. People in the neighborhood knew that Erica ran away, and they talk of some “trouble” Erica and Wiley were involved with on their trip out West. They are surprised to hear that Erica had a daughter and that she sent her to her mother’s without coming back herself, but they don’t question things too hard.

Norah is sent to the local elementary school and makes friends with a lonely neighbor boy named Sean Fallon. Sean’s father had left him and his mother just the year before and he is in need of a friend. Norah and Sean get along as any young friends do, sometimes with teasing and suspicion, mostly with love. As the months go by, Norah demonstrates strange powers which start to get her into trouble at school.

Who is this little girl, where did she come from, and why did she show up at Margaret’s door? There’s also a man in a brimmed hat, a stranger to the town, who hangs around in the cold and seems to have something to do with Norah. Perhaps, as he wrote once in the frost on a windshield, the girl’s name is really Noriel. Perhaps he knows where she comes from and what she really is.

The story of Norah and Margaret in 1985 is alternated with the story of Erica and Wiley in 1975, when Wiley’s radical political views prompted him to take Erica out to California to join the anarchistic group Angels of Destruction. The stories converge as the little girl demonstrates more of her strange powers and the people of the town clamor to get Norah to leave their children alone.

I loved Keith Donohue’s The Stolen Child, about a group of fairies who swap one of their own for a human child, a changeling. I was eager to read Donohue’s newest, Angels of Destruction, and was absolutely delighted to find it was just as good, if not better.

Check the WRL catalog for Angels of Destruction

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The Shadow Speaker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

It’s 2070, and we’re in next-generation West Africa. Fourteen-year old Ejii Ugabe has supernatural “shadow speaking” talents that she hasn’t fully grown into, not least because her power-hungry estranged father didn’t believe girls should be educated. Her world has already been through an enormous Change, resulting in an unpredictable mix of magical and physical laws, and it’s about to undergo another one.

Ejii’s “shadow” advisors compel her to travel to a peace conference, the Golden Dawn Meeting, between representatives of merging realities. If the talks don’t go well, there are warmongering worlds that would like to destroy us, and as if those stakes aren’t high enough, the journey itself could kill her.

She travels in the entourage of Sarauniya Jaa, the Red Queen of Niger, a great leader and swordswoman with two husbands (one of whom used to be a sandstorm). I loved Jaa. Red flowers drop from the air whenever she speaks. Also, she chopped Ejii’s father’s head off with a sword. As her protégé, Ejii is torn between reluctant admiration and concerns that Jaa, who’s bringing the sword, may not be the best person to represent Earth at a peace conference. (Jaa: We come in peace! Whack.)

From sentient desert sandstorms to thriving garden cities with literal house-plants, houses that are plants, the strength of this novel is its magical-realist African setting. Okorafor loads her writing with sensory detail and imaginative doodads like electric lizards, digital ghosts, and, my personal favorite, flocks of carnivorous hummingbirds.

Ejii is an interesting young woman, trying to balance her innate calling to be a peacemaker with the occasional need to knock somebody’s teeth out. (I see The Shadow Speaker is on ALA’s 2009 Amelia Bloomer List, which recommends feminist books for children and teens.) The action is very episodic, which may be why I felt the story skewed a little younger than the occasional strong language would suggest. The secondary characters were well-drawn, and we’re likely to hear more about them in the sequel that is in the works.

Check the WRL catalog for The Shadow Speaker

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The Quiet Girl, by Peter Høeg

Peter Høeg’s The Quiet Girl is one of the most interesting and complex books that I have recently read. Its twisting plot, multi-faceted characters, and elements of magical realism all require the reader to pay attention. It is attention well-rewarded though. Høeg writes beautiful sentences that resonate in the ear and on the tongue.

Probably best known for his dark and icy thriller Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Høeg here has crafted another captivating story that has a compelling mix of mystery, philosophy, science, and action. The Quiet Girl begins with Kasper Krone, circus clown, heavily-in-debt gambler, violinist, and a man who can hear that “SheAlmighty had tuned each person in a musical key.” Krone’s extrasensory abilities are the hub on which the plot of the story turns. He discovers that he is not alone in hearing people’s music, and when a young girl, who has her own extrasensory abilities, goes missing, Krone is recruited to help recover her, a job that will possibly enable him to avoid prosecution for tax fraud and deportation to a Spanish prison.

The book is jumpy and shifts from scene to scene sometimes without a clear view or resolution. This constant movement adds to the tension of the story, but does require attention from the reader. The Quiet Girl is not really a crime novel, though it has elements of mystery writing, nor is it a fantasy story, though there are times where Høeg takes the reader beyond the walls of our normal world. Instead, Høeg blends stylistic pieces from several genres, writing on what Michael Chabon described as “the borderlands” of fiction (see the essay “Trickster in a Suit of Lights” in Chabon’s Maps and Legends). The Quiet Girl also has a strong sense of place. The city of Copenhagen becomes a part of the aural landscape of the story, as Kasper’s unusual hearing abilities allow Høeg to describe the sounds of the city in a new way. The Quiet Girl offers readers many entry points, beautiful writing, fascinating characters, and a thrilling plot. Give it a try.

Check the WRL catalog for The Quiet Girl

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Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff

My friend and library colleague Christine recommended this book to me. I encouraged (i.e. hounded) her into writing the review.

Here’s what she had to say:

Willie Upton’s life is in shambles, so she’s going home. But going home to Templeton, New York brings bigger problems for Willie. On top of a few “small” dilemmas including an affair with her professor, abandoning research for her dissertation, and that little problem called pregnancy, Willie’s bohemian, hippie, wild-child mother Vi has embraced religion.  Now that she’s found God, Vi reveals Willie’s father is not some unnamed hippie from a commune, but rather a respected member of the community, someone in town — someone Willie knows.

Willie takes the few clues her mother provides and begins her journey to find her father, understand her town, and deal with her life.

The audio version of this title is highly recommended. Narrator Ann Marie Lee brings to life Willie, the town of Templeton, the many generations of Templetonians, and the magical lake monster, Glimmey. Ms. Lee’s voice lends to the magical quality of the story that carries the listener through an amazing fantastical journey. Although not necessary, I would recommend keeping the book nearby for the family tree and the many photographs that give life to the characters.

And my own two cents:

There are many layers to this story – and many voices from the present and past help create the fabric of the Upton history. That can be both exciting and frustrating. I wanted to reread the story once I reached the end to make all the connections I’m sure I missed. But whether you spend extra time going back through or reading it all once, you’ll enjoy the mystery of Willie’s family story and all the magical elements.

Check the WRL catalog for The Monsters of Templeton.

Check the WRL catalog for the audiobook.

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God Knows, by Joseph Heller

This week I’m looking at books that I think are worth rereading – and that I’ve reread more than once. These stand up to my tests, and I’ll try to articulate what it is I like about them. If any of them intrigue you, I hope you’ll give them a shot. I envy you the first-time experience.

I once saw a program on forensic science that showed a six-foot tall granite wheel, perfectly shaped, perfectly balanced, and perfectly placed so that each revolution sliced a tissue sample thin enough to put on a microscope slide. At his best, Joseph Heller is like that wheel, as carved by Dali. His stories revolve easily on the axle of a single weighty incident, but in mad loops and twirls that randomly, inexorably peel thin layers until he lays bare an awful truth.

Heller is best known for his signature work, Catch-22 (which is probably #1 on my “most reread” list), but in my humble opinion he missed the unique voice and structure of that groundbreaking novel in his other books. Except for God Knows. A first-person omniscient narrator who is both deeply spiritual and worldly, details that are anachronistic yet incredibly accurate, and characters who defy every expectation combine to throw light on the biblical story of King David.

As everyone who ever went to Sunday School knows, David slew Goliath, played the harp and wrote Psalms, and became King. More advanced readers might know that he married Bathsheba under suspicious circumstances. Even more knowledgeable people might know that he was a rebel, was in turn rebelled against by his son Absalom, and survived palace intrigues over the succession to his throne. Heller incorporates all these stories, going to the books of Samuel, Chronicles, Psalms, and Kings to reconstruct the timeline of David’s life. Of course, being Joseph Heller, he develops that timeline in his own order, following themes and whims to convey David’s story.

David also has full knowledge of his future representation in art and literature – Michelangelo, Shakespeare, the controversy over his relationship with Jonathan – and mocks or defends himself against those interpretations. Heller’s dark humor suffuses the story, but it’s filtered through a layer of tragedy and self-pity, even as Yossarian’s was.

I reread this for Heller’s sympathetic but unyielding portrait of “a man after God’s own heart” whose very humanity loses him the relationship he wants the most. His secondary characters – the nearly idiotic Solomon, the menopausal Bathsheba, David’s vain sons, and the half-mad Saul – are caricatures, but memorable in their own right. Most of all, I read this for the devastating impact of the last line, which is the effective climax of the story. Don’t read that last line first – savor the experience of Heller’s incredible writing and David’s violent and tragic life.

Check the WRL catalog for God Knows

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Aegypt, by John Crowley

Aegypt, by John Crowley, is my favorite book, ever. It has recently been repackaged and retitled as The Solitudes, but Williamsburg Regional Library has a copy of this 1987 novel with the original title.

Books within books, stories within stories, histories within histories. Is there one history of the world, or are there many? When scientists of the past believed in alchemy, was it real? Was astrology? Are the structures of alchemy and astrology real, but disguised and hidden under layers of modern scientific belief? Do beliefs create our histories?

Pierce Moffett, a teacher of history, has been let go from one college and is on his way to interview at another college for the new school year in upstate New York. The bus in which he is riding breaks down in the idyllic town of Blackbury Jambs in the Faraway Hills, and as he awaits the substitute bus, he sees an old friend, Brent Spofford, shepherding a flock across the road. Moffett cannot possibly make his appointment at the college and wasn’t very excited about the new school anyway, so when Spofford invites him to stay for a while, he decides to take him up on the offer.

There is a library in Blackbury Jambs where Moffett finds old copies of books by Fellowes Kraft, books he used to read and love as a young boy. These books are biographies of such historical figures as Shakespeare, occultist/philosopher Giordano Bruno, and mathematician and alchemist John Dee. Fellowes Kraft once lived in the Faraway Hills, and when the executor of Kraft’s estate offers Moffett a job to read through an unfinished manuscript, he accepts.

While in Blackbury Jambs, Moffett gets to know some of the residents, and he falls in love. Spofford, Spofford’s sometimes girlfriend Rosie Rasmussen, Rosie’s ex-husband and their daughter, and Rosalind Ryder make up his circle of friends.The time is the seventies, when new-age thinking had even penetrated this small town. The stories of Doctor Dee, Shakespeare, Bruno and other subjects of Fellowes Kraft’s works are intertwined with the story of Pierce Moffett.

Aegypt is a dense book, not light summer reading. I’ve read it at least twice, and I know there is still much more to the novel I will find on re-reading. This is the first of four novels in the Aegypt series, but I have not yet been able to penetrate the second book, Love and Sleep. I know, that probably doesn’t make it sound like fun reading, but it is!

Check the WRL catalog for Aegypt

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The Sugar Queen, by Sarah Addison Allen

I enjoyed Sarah Addison Allen’s first book, Garden Spells, so I picked up her second title, The Sugar Queen, to see if it continued to delight with quirky characters and interesting plot lines. It does!

Josey Cirrini is trapped by guilt and fear in the house she has grown up in – torn between her sense of obligation to her cold, demanding mother and fear of change. She finds comfort in her secret stash of sweets and travel magazines hidden in her closet.

One morning Josie wakes up to discover a woman, Della Lee, hiding in that closet. Josey wants Della Lee to leave – but Della threatens to tell Josey’s mother about her sweets (it’s an embarrassing mountain of bad-for-you food). Her fear of being a bigger disappointment to her mom and the hint of desperation in Della Lee’s voice, convince Josey to let Della Lee stay until she can get herself together. What really happens is Della Lee helps Josey get herself together.

With the encouragement of this odd adviser, Josey makes a good friend, finds true love and gains the courage to leave the past behind her.

Allen weaves interesting magical elements through out the story – in addition to Della Lee living in Josey’s closet, there’s a man who is able to steal women’s souls, a family that must keep any promise made, and (my favorite) a woman to whom books appear out of nowhere.

If you can suspend your disbelief, you’re in for a real treat.

Check the WRL catalog for The Sugar Queen

Check for The Sugar Queen on audio CD

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The Girl with No Shadow, by Joanne Harris

It’s four unkind years after the events of Chocolat, and the vivacious, nonconformist Vianne Rocher of Harris’s previous bestseller has fallen on hard times. Dressed in drab colors, suppressing her talent for magic, and worst of all, selling factory chocolates from her Montmartre storefront, she’s close to selling out for financial stability by marrying a man she doesn’t love. Where is the Vianne Rocher we knew and admired?

Her daughter is wondering the same thing. Anouk, Vianne’s precocious eleven year old, is just hitting her rebellious years, arguing with her mother and struggling at her first regular school. She finds a badly-needed confidante in the book’s third narrator, who is unfortunately also the villainess. Charming and amoral, Zozie de l’Alba shows up like a fabulous fairy godmother in stiletto heels and before long has insinuated herself into every aspect of their lives. She chats up the customers of the suddenly thriving chocolaterie, counsels Anouk on the social politics of the schoolyard (while teaching her a few forbidden spells behind her mother’s back), and generally makes herself indispensable. But among her other secret foibles, Zozie acquires and discards identities like another woman might change purses. As an identify thief, she’s professionally interested in other people’s secrets, and the Rocher family are hiding quite a few.

The writing in this novel is livelier and tighter than in Chocolat, even while its tone is darker. Themes of adolescence, mother-daughter relationships, identity, and identity theft play off of one another well, supported by the language and symbolism of fairy tales. You may as well acquire some Godiva or Ghirardelli before you start, the darker the better. Harris’s writing appeals to the senses and you’ll be craving something chocolate before long.

Check the WRL catalog for The Girl with No Shadow

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A Glastonbury Romance, by John Cowper Powys

One of the small sorrows of my life is that I’m unable to talk about my favorite novel with my friends. No one has read it. I have badgered any number of people into giving it a try, but most quit somewhere in the middle of the first paragraph.

Who can blame them? Just for openers, A Glastonbury Romance is 1120 pages long—the longest undivided novel in English. There are stretches of incomprehensible West Country dialect. For instance: “Thee’s ‘ooman be biding along wi’ Missus for thik party.” Powys is bombastic, windy, and utterly lacking in good taste. There is an unforgettable scene involving an enema. He is prone to phrases like “the divine-diabolical soul of the creative energy beyond space and time.” I love it!

In Glastonbury, England, the nexus of Christian legend and Celtic and Arthurian myth, great events are stirring. Johnny Geard, a low-church preacher who revels in the blood of Christ, is elected mayor. Young Bolsheviks establish a commune. Adulterous love affairs are consummated. The arrogant industrialist Philip Crow plans to electrify the local cave, Wookey Hole. And the Holy Grail is appearing. The cast of characters eclipses anything Dickens ever created: saintly and lustful Holy Sam, tormented sadist Owen Evans, cold-hearted Persephone Spear, and a whole battalion of country folk with names like Isaac Weatherwax and Tossie Stickles. Merlin is in there somewhere, too. And those are just the human characters. Powys, a mystical pantheist, tells of the thoughts and dreams of trees, rocks, the Sun, a stalk of lemon verbena. The novel’s climax is an apocalyptic flood—told from the point of view of the flood.

I have a challenge: read the first paragraph. Yes, it is bombastic and syntactically challenged. But if it makes you laugh, read on. Your reward will be the experience of what George Steiner calls “the only novel produced by an English writer than can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.” It throbs with life: myth, sex, nature, greed, dualism, mysticism. Let me know if you make it to the end.

Check the WRL catalog

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