This is my third Powys novel, after The Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands. I still think Weymouth Sounds the best, representing what Powys called "elementalism" (his own particular form of animism) and a magical, kaleidoscopic whirl of poetic prose seen through the mind's eye of several characters. This book is darker, told through the perspective of the eponymous main character who resembles Powys himself not a little (q.v. Powys's Autobiography), but it still has the trademark mystagogic prose that is unmatched in literature. The other reviewers have done a thorough job of painting the setting and characters. So, I'll just add a quote to give the potential reader an idea of what s/he is in for here:

" ` Don't you ever feel,' he said, `as if one part of your soul belonged to a world altogether different from this world - as if it were completely disillusioned about all the things that people make such a fuss over and yet were involved in something important?'" p.239

If you've ever had intimations of this sort, you'll love this book...and the rest of Powys's novels I might add.


As a footnote, for those interested, the last chapter presents a very droll description of Bertrand Russell in the character of Lord Carfax. Powys and Lord Russell were near contemporaries and neighbours in Wales. They often debated each other in America, and remained on very good terms, despite their diametrically opposite philosophies.

The first time I read this book I must admit Wolf's mad ramblings irritated me and I merely skipped through to the "naughty bits". How glad I am that I took it up a second time! John Cowper Powys gives us a malevolant England full of incestous activity - outright, as in the case of Mr Malekite and his two daughters, and in the overtones of Wolf's relationship with his mother and half sister. Indeed, both the girls he falls in love with are described as childlike in different ways, Christie physically and Gerda mentally, and are indeed nearly half Wolf's age. Throw in hints of homosexuality in the clergy, conversations with the dead and twelvemonth corpes being dug up, and you have a very dark veiw of the English countryside indeed. Yet somehow the lush, lyrical prose and mystical torment of Wolf contrive to make this one of the most intriguing and beautiful novels I have ever read.

In a search through the more obscure corners of 20th century literature I came across this novel and was swayed by all the positive endorsements to read it. While I can agree to some extent with the origin of all this praise, I considered "Wolf Solent" a good novel, that while often compared to works by Shakespeare and Tolstoy, struck me as rather clumsy Proust, or really good Woolf. While this book could be picked up by a slick self help guru and turned into his, or her holy book, I would like to warn prospective readers not to expect an "Anna Karenina" or "Crime an Punishment".

All previous Amazon reviews have provided quite a bit of detail of the story of the small town boy, who after spending time in London returns to the country town of his birth to "find himself" in its idyllic nature setting. This to some extent is correct. Yet, I was struck that this story's archetype, Sophocles' "Oedipus" remained unmentioned. This main theme and the clear "Yorrick" references in Woolf's internal dialogs with his father's buried skull constitute the true center of this bildungsroman.

Nature revives Woolf's senses; he follows his father's path of falling in love with two girls and marrying one of them and goes to a prolonged and often torturous inner conflict, that comes to a rather dull and anticlimactic resolution in the final pages. I, for one, considered the "endure" epiphany rather ludicrous for someone surrounded by the so ably described beauty of nature.

In modern terms, Woolf's elongated struggle is due to his lack of understanding that "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem". While a George Costanza character has been used so successfully to illustrate this potentially humorous vicious circle, I considered the characterization of this book as a comedy quite a misnomer. Though the protagonist's unlikability and the three-dimensional supporting cast are in themselves strong points of the book, I considered this struggle with the windmills of Woolf's mind more tedious than revelatory.

Yet, this book's substance is not so much in the plot structure as in its idyllic description of nature and the little quirks of the villagers. Throughout the prose is beautiful and evocative, resulting in a rich and rewarding read.

Poor Woolf, he (and we) could have been spared so much if he had just paid a little more attention to these two words engraved on the outside of Apollo's temple in Delphi "gnooti seautou".

I took a previous reviewers advice and initiated my experience with Powys upon reading WOLF SOLENT. I found it a very rewarding reading adventure.POWYS packs his pages with profuse imagery,pagan and otherwise.He extracts profound symbolism from the most ordinary enviorments/characterizations.
His writings here are mystical...drawing upon pre-christian archetypes as well as modern day affinities.The characters are believable,likable, and frought with imperfections which only add to the otherworldly strangeness of his literary style.This book is over 600 pages so's it might be a little while before I proceed with more works of his, but I have already purchased WEYMOUTH SANDS and look forward to reading more of his peculiar "vision".

John Cowper Powys is one of those authors who can be recognized just by the distinction of his prose, employing a style characterized by a picturesque metaphorical lyricism and, particularly in "Wolf Solent," the title character's deep introspection regarding his relationship to the world. Terms like "first cause" and "magnetic" are repeated throughout the novel like motifs, revealing the author's preoccupation with metaphysical forces, motivations, and effects.

Wolf is a 35-year-old man who, at the beginning of the novel, is moving from London to his native county of Dorsetshire to take a job assisting a wealthy man named Urquhart, the Squire of King's Barton, in writing a book about the more scandalous aspects of the histories of local families. Wolf finds Urquhart to be rather eccentric and petty and soon learns that his previous assistant, a young man named Redfern, died under disputable circumstances. This sounds like a setup for an intriguing mystery, especially when Wolf discovers Urquhart's gardener and another man digging around Redfern's grave one night, but the novel is concerned more with the essence of secrecy than with the mechanics of revealing secrets.

The residents of Dorsetshire, with their piquant personalities, rustic sincerity, and realistic complexity, are worthy of a Thomas Hardy novel; no set of characters can expect higher praise than that. They are there not just to drive the plot forward but to act and react against Wolf and each other to create a theater of emotions and passions in which life becomes a colorful, unpredictable masquerade. The principal players include Jason Otter, a morose, temperamental poet; Selena Gault, an ugly old spinster with whom Wolf's father had had an affair; Tilly-Valley, a foolish vicar; and Bob Weevil, a lascivious butcher whose sausages possibly connote something priapic about his role in the community.

Wolf's research brings him to two young ladies with whom he falls in love: Gerda Torp, the stonecutter's daughter, whose stunning beauty and nymphlike nature arouse his sexual desires; and Christie Malakite, the bookseller's daughter, a relatively plain but bright girl who is harboring a vile secret about her father and to whom Wolf relates on an intellectual level. As Wolf's romantic reveries careen between the two women representing two different erotic ideals, body and mind, we see an intense internal conflict building within him, one that threatens to, but somehow never does, unravel his inner peace.

And what is the source of this peace? Simply that Wolf has escaped the modernity and materialism of London to embrace the idyllic antiquity of rural England and to experience "certain sensations" -- not that he knows exactly what these are yet, but perhaps the fun is in not knowing, in exploration and self-discovery. This is also why he is annoyed by the encroachment of automobiles and airplanes into Dorsetshire towards the end of the novel -- twentieth-century technology has no place in the world whose nineteenth-century tranquility he wants dearly to preserve.