Maiden Castle

If you like to read and are a book worm like me - this is for you. Like the Weymouth sands the author transports you to another time and another place with characters that leap from each page and discriptive writing that only a great master can do. Lines you find yourself saying aloud because they are so fantastic. Enjoy every well put together page in this classic, master work. My other favorite writers are E.F. Benson, P.D. James, AJ Cronin, Andrew Pepper and Peter Robinson.

This book, of the four Powys novels I've now read (plus his Autobiography), is at once somehow the least polished and the most deeply disturbing. It is eerie in an exceedingly dark and profound sense that rather creeps up on one and that did not begin to affect me until I was over three hundred pages well into it. I think the reason for this quality, is that, in many ways, it is more deeply autobiographical than Powys's actual Autobiography. Powys here opens up his "Elementalism" - a sort of Wordsworthian Animism - and puts it to a severe trial by fire, from which our main character, Dud No-Man, makes a narrow, but harrowing and wounding, escape. But of more interest is the other main character, Urien, who does not escape. Both of the main characters (as anyone who has read any of Powys's other novels would expect) are based partly on Powys's himself. What so disturbs one about this novel is that Powys's puts on fierce display a part of himself, and by Powsyian inference, a part of all humans, in which that way madness lies. The notion plumbed here is that we all have our own "life illusion" or "personal mythology" as Powys, by turns, is pleased to call it, stripped of which we rapidly disintegrate. Powys portrays this disintegration so convincingly that I can safely say that it's one of the most disturbing novels I've ever read (and from Malcolm Lowry to Cormac McCarthy, I've read many). What I find a bit irking and unpolished about the style of the prose is Powys's constant appropriation of phrases from other authors, particularly Shakespeare, particularly Hamlet. The nonpareil example here is the use of "bare bodkin" for unsheathed knife, in the phrase "Dud's words cut into her like a bare bodkin...." I venture to say that you could spend the rest of your life searching for the alliterative "bare bodkin" and would find it in only two places, this book and the most famous soliloquy in the English language. Yet, somehow again, this presumptuousness ceases to rankle after some time due to the deeply chilling nature of the narrative. There's really no way, of course, of conveying this quality in a review aside from proffering a few quotes, which I shall proceed to do: "Every life, if the truth were known, contains experiences of monstrous grotesqueries." "These deep conflicts aren't misunderstandings, as both sides love to affirm: they are understandings. They know each other too well!" "Don't you see what force there is in sterile love? Why, my dear boy, it's the strongest force there is! Rampant desire unfulfilled - why, there's nothing it can't do. Stir up sex till it would put out the sun and then keep it sterile! That's the trick! That's the grand trick of all spiritual life." "...the abominable loneliness of every person in the world, the loneliness of our pain, of our despair, of our insanity, sent a shiver through her that made her feel sick and weak." "Does our real conscience only get roused by a madness that reduc

This book is about Dud Noman. Never has there been a more appropriate name for a charachter. The book takes place in the early decades of this century and revolves around a completely pathetic soul that the reader will both relate to and sympathize with. It is the story of his struggle to survive and live and really causes the reader to reflect upon their own existence. The characters are all multi-faceted and complex, but that is one of my favorite things about Powys. Like all Powys novels this one is well worth the effort.