At the striking of noon on a certain March 5 there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptyness, between the uttermost stellar systems, one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause, which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the 12:19 train from London and the divine-diabolic First Cause of all life.

Thus, in its first paragraph, Mr. Powys sets the key for A Glastonbury Romance. Through nearly 1,200 large and closely printed pages its tentacles reach out in a determined effort to connect the infinitesimal and the infinite.

Its visible scene is the town of Glastonbury in modern times. Its visible people include a Mayor, a manufacturer, a doctor, a landed proprietor, a philosophical anarchist, a would-be writer, an elderly aristocrat, a vicar and his son, laborers, farmers and so on, with their wives, sweethearts, children, friends and the like; a prefixed list of "principal characters" enumerates forty-six persons. Its action, as the dust cover declares, "embraces no less than six major love affairs, one murder, three births and two deaths." Its thinking includes the establishment of a commune in a modern English town of ancient lineage, all of which the author declares in a foreword to be "pure invention." In fact, he insists categorically that "not a single scene, or situation, or character, or episode in this book has been drawn in any respect, or in any sense whatsoever, from real life." On closing what undoubtedly is one of the longest novels of all times, one feels that unfortunately this is true in a sense which the statement did not intend to imply.

Behind the kaleidoscope implied in this summary of the volume's vital statistics there lies layer upon layer of allegory, as below the Glastonbury land on which Philip Crow set his modern dye works there lay buried remains that traced back through the British kings to Arthur and beyond to the ancient peoples of the lake village, lost in the mists of antiquity. Only mysticism can bridge the span that Mr. Powys has set himself between the railway clock (assuming that I am correct in my reading of "causal" in that first sentence) with the creative silence of the First Causes. A vision hovers over this modern Glastonbury in the unpardonable sin of a Welsh antiquary, the religious fervor of the former secretary-valet of a late canon, who at the time of the story has become the rich Mayor; in the perversity of John Crow, the cancer of Tittie Petherton, the madness of Bet, the naturalism of Mother Legge, a procuress; in the simplicity of the country people. In it, as in a mirage, one sees the gleams and stains of the Arthurian legend, even to the Grail which appears to the Vicar's son in a coal barge. Behind this shadow play lurk still deeper reaches of ancient myth, to which Christian symbolism is only a recent sheath. At the kernel apparently (it is far from clear to me) lies that First Cause. Mr. Powys's preoccupation with mysteries seems to have permeated even the blurb writer of the jacket, who asserts cryptically that "his creation is more than a book."

The author's preceding novel, Wolf Solent, seemed to me a moving and vivid portrayal of the strange, often incomprehensible, currents that govern the life of one man. In the present story, however, it is not a person but a cosmology that is the hero. Varieties of human experience seem less important for what they are in themselves than for their bearing on the unrolling of some universal plan. Patiently, laboriously, sometimes brilliantly, the author puts his finger on some quality in the relationship of two persons, and then tries to trace it out in universal terms, back again to the First Cause. Or starting from a conflict of ambivalence, he works forward. "The mind of the First Cause was twofold—self-contradictory, divided against itself. The multifarious minds that stir up the chemistry of matter today are all descended from the First Cause and share its dualistic nature, its mingling of abominable cruelty with magnanimous consideration." This purpose involves pondering the contradictions of thought and feeling, and especially in this book the varieties of experience that spring from some manifestation or aberration of sex.

The symbol of t'ai chi, the interlocked yang and yin which from remote times have represented the antithesis of day and night, heat and cold, male and female, might well stand as the goal of A Glastonbury Romance. But in the tone of the story one feels not the sense of balance, of complement, which the symbol implies, but a conflict, a striving for unity (despite the author's repeated avowal that none exists), from which has ensued this enormous and to me inchoate volume. This conflict—this thirst for an explanation, a cosmology, if you will—is in direct antithesis to that creative realization of a moment in the flow of time out of which is born what we call consciousness and in another form art. As a by-product of his central purpose, Mr. Powys has given this book beautiful sentences, occasional gleams of imaginative realization that are wholly satisfying. But the struggle in which it is rooted seems to me to bring confusion and an alien purpose.