SOURCE: "John Cowper Powys' A Glastonbury Romance; A Modern Mystery Play," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. XIII, No. 3, Summer, 1972, pp. 341-60.

In the following essay, Cook explores the themes and characters of A Glastonbury Romance, and compares its style to the novels of Dostoevsky.

The psychic history of a place like Glastonbury is not an easy thing to write down in set terms, for not only does chance play an enormous part in it, but there are many forces at work for which human language has at present no fit terms.

John Cowper Powys' first important work, Wolf Solent (1929), is a novel which follows a fairly simple course of narrative development through the experience of a single center of consciousness to a predictable conclusion. It is like a swollen brook running through the plains of Dorsetshire without variation or divergence to the sea. A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Powys' second major...