RECENT NOVELS

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 49, 26 August 1933, Page 19

RECENT NOVELS

SOME FOR ALL TASTES

A new novel, and- a very long one at that,., which'is likely to be- welcomed by some as an outstanding effort in fiction, and to bo condemned by others as tedious and exasperating, is "A Glastonbury Romance," by John Cowper Powys. It is not an easy book to read, but to skip a page, or even a paragraph, is to run the risk of being hopelessly befogged. It is a panoramic story of the struggle between good and evil, and as' across the stage flit men and women—landowners, merchants, tradesmen, labourers, domestic servants, madmen, and criminals—to fall in love in their several fashions or take their part in the town's affairs, it.^s seen that the great struggle today more or less centres in two men, neither of whom, as it happens, is a native. On the one hand there is the unspiritual but ambitious Philip Crow with his dye-factory, a man whe dreams of an industrially prosperous town which has been for all time rid of its "stupid superstitions"; on the other there is tho strange, unworldly Mayor Geard, with his religious pageant and'his holy well, hoping to give back to Glastonbury its old position as the first religious'city of .the world. Into the struggle j the Communists intrude as a third party. That is the main theme, but there are innumerable lesser themes which work themselves into it. Almost all these- men and women of Glastonbury have their own individual struggles: John, the amiable cynic who is lucky with his much-beloved Mary and yet never wholly at peace; his friend Tom, who must flit from girl to girl until his marriage with Tossie, when he is so dreadfully killed; the archaeologist who is tortured by his truly horrible vice; Sam, the vicar's sou, who loves Will Z.oylaud's wife and gives her a child, but leaves her when a vision of the Holy Grail is vouch safed him; poor Crummie, who never gets her man; and Mr. Wallop, who alone continues to look at everything unperturbed.