We all know Glendower through Shakespeare, who presents the Welsh hero as a strutting and irascible star-gazer: Owen was politically in the wrong camp and, besides, Shakespeare liked to kid the Welsh. John Cowper Powys' two-volume novel gives us a different Owen—mystic, with a power of letting his spirit float away from his body, but in the main a practical and brilliant leader of an oppressed minority. Owen could whip the armies of Henry IV so long as the Welsh kept fighting a nuisance war, but he could never establish a peaceful, independent Welsh nation. At the end, Mr. Powys gives him a dramatic and impressive death scene in the traditionally magic Welsh mountains.

The story of Owen's revolt is presented through a thick broth of Cowper-Powysian prose. The central consciousness is sometimes Owen's, but oftener it is that of his kinsman on the illegitimate side, Rhisiart ab Owen. At the end of the book Rhisiart is a famous English lawyer, far removed from the youth of Welsh and Norman blood who had left Oxford for Welsh to become Owen's secretary. Rhisiart is easily the most oversexed character in all the hectic literature of today: "He had the feeling that his fate was advancing upon him in the form of a vast pair of dusky feminine breasts, each with a crater where the nipple should have been out of which proceeded fire and smoke!" Rhisiart's entire approach to the sexual is like this; he sets a new record even for a Powys hero by having erotic inclinations toward almost every character in the book. Rhisiart is irrevocably bound to two girls, but his sexual impulses run on beyond them to every girl in the story, and even to old women, pages and dwarfs. Owen, historically a noted libertine, is shown as a renouncer of temptation, at least in one big self-denial scene. As in the previous novels by this author, the motives of behavior are not easy to understand: here the obscurity is more in keeping with the background, and helps to suggest the world of Celtic fable and of dark old chronicles. The book is frequently effective on the atmospheric side: the guerilla Owen, moving from place to place in wild Wales, keeps a stately court in ruined castles, where his retinue are to be seen mostly by torch-light—savage hillmen, a mad friar screaming that King Richard still lives, the old seneschal who cherishes a famous ancient sword, the bards, bowmen, sorceresses, the flamboyant Hotspur and all the rest, in vivid costumes amid the shattered mystic castles—all these have the medieval flavor.

Yet there is another aspect of the book to be considered before the reader hazards the 963 pages. It is bad in so many ways that one wonders how it ever got published in its present state. The story is disproportionate, wind-baggy, and loaded with references to legends that only a Cymric specialist would know; it is lumpishly written, and full of stylistic ineptitudes. But if the book is read it will be for the unquestionable power of its dramatic moments, and for its evocation of the past. At least one can say for it that it is a most unusual combination of the impressive and the goofy.