Many motives, presumably, may underlie the writing of a historical novel. There may be a desire to escape from one's own time to an era where, at least in retrospect, the brave were braver and the fair more fair and all more picturesquely dressed. There may be a desire, as in Elizabeth Page's "The Tree of Liberty," to see the longer perspective of distant-period forces which illuminate our own; or as in L. H. Myers's remarkable trilogy, "The Root and the Flower," the author may choose a remote time and place in order to free his readers from their own immediate preoccupations and associations so that they will be the more able to examine some particular problem around which the story is woven. More simply, the desire may have been an extension of the curiosity which underlies most fiction, a desire to clothe in living flesh and so to see and feel the events which formal history has recorded in a succession of names and dates.

This last, I should guess, was the compelling motive for the writing of Mr. Powys's vast novel of Wales at the beginning of the fifteenth century. In contrast to many of his other books, he makes relatively little use of subjective symbolism and mysticism. It is rather as though, steeped in the songs, legends and chronicles of his native land, he has set himself the task of making a living whole out of the fragments preserved by the antiquarians. More than half the persons of the story bear names known to history, while the central figure, Owen Glendower, is the national hero who in 1400 led his countrymen in their last and most formidable uprising.

In an "Argument" prefaced to the story Mr. Powys points out that the beginning of the fifteenth century found Europe in the seething unrest of transition. In an era of "degenerate faith and degenerate chivalry." John Wycliffe, whose sermons had set people to questioning the social and moral, as well as the theological, conventions of the time, had died in 1384. The turn of the century found "an age of unscrupulous individualism but also an age when national self-consciousness under independent rulers superseded the old feudal ideal of a united Christendom under Emperor and Pope." The years of the story—1400 to 1416—saw "the beginning of one of the most momentous and startling epochs of transition that the world has known: the transition from the more or less federated Christendom of the Middle Ages to the turbulent evolution of our modern sovereign states."

Owen Glendower was a man in his middle years when first he led his people in revolt, a scholar as well as a soldier with, in Mr. Powys's interpretation, strains of the mystic, the charlatan and the demagogue. The immediate cause of his taking up arms was a personal quarrel with his English neighbors, the Greys of Ruthin, but once the turmoil was started, his followers rode with the cause of Welsh independence to victories through most of a decade. Owen made an official treaty with the French, openly styled himself Prince of Wales and called a parliament. The Battle of Harlech, in which his wife, daughter and grandchildren were taken captive, saw the end of the power of a man whose remarkable personality, exploits and cultivation are attested by history as well as by legend.

The figure of Owen dominates Mr. Powys's story, and is the center about which the scores of lesser characters and the hurly-burly of episodes revolve. Secondary only to Owen is his young kinsman and secretary, Rhisiart ab Owen, whose love for Owen's daughter Catharine and for Tegolin, the fictional maid who rode with Owen's men into battle, occasions the continuing thread of action in the book. Rhisiart, a young law scholar just up from Oxford, is more nearly attuned to the oncoming changes than his chieftain, who could lead his people up to, but not into, the newer ways; in Rhisiart, moreover, Norman blood helped temper Welsh ardors. But just as these times had meant the dissolution of the unity of old faiths and old loyalties, so for Rhisiart, even when he had become Judge Rhisiart, there was success neither in love nor in politics.

As its great length might suggest, Owen Glendower is written with Mr. Powys's characteristic exuberance, which gives vigor to its portraits of both historical and fictional characters. This exuberance, however, and the very breadth and intensity of Mr. Powys's concern for his subject tend to diffuse interest to an extent that is often confusing, the more so in a realm of strange names, customs and legends. The wealth of material that has gone into this novel makes it at points more dazzling than clear, a fault that becomes serious as one progresses through nearly a thousand closely printed pages, at least to a reader who has no background of national loyalties into which to fit Mr. Powys's synthesis and extension of old stories.

Owen Glendower is like a tapestry, many parts of which delight, though others will startle, any who love romance. From the standpoint he expresses in the prefatory "Argument," however, the author might have attained his objectives more nearly had he given less. In mood Owen Glendower is less exalted—if you will, hysterical—than some of Mr. Powys's earlier books, notably than his other very long novel, Wolf Solent. Possibly because of this greater objectivity, it lacks, on the whole, the sustained emotion and intensity of his work at its best. For the same reason, it probably will be more generally liked, especially by readers who bring to it a prior concern that all these things have "happened in their beauty and in their pain."