On Long Novels; John Cowper Powys; Maiden Castle; Dorchester.

Dorset County Museum display case

Originally published in an abridged version in 1936, I doubt that JCP's Maiden Castle has won many devoted fans.

It starts well, in this unabridged version (The Overlook Press, 2001). Here's the first page:

For me, it's largely downhill from then on in, apart from the descriptions of the ascent to Maiden Castle itself (Chapter 6) and of the mighty, cold, mysterious and wayward wind that arises to buffet the walkers around what the Powys Society describes as "the looming fortress of Maiden Castle" (the Overlook Press book cover blurb puts it like this" "It is the looming fortress of Maiden Castle that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives").

"The wind seemed to be dividing him in half just now like a sharp sword".

There are certainly passages of powerful nature-writing, in places, and some evocative descriptions of Dorchester, Maumbury Rings, and Maiden Castle itself. See, for instance, Chapter 8, Midsummer's Eve, page 378:

I have to confess that it is a novel that I shall never be able to get into or to read right through. I have tried several times, as with James Joyce's Ulysses. 

Perhaps that's why Maiden Castle was first published in an abridged form. Even then, it is for me a novel for occasional sampling, for random dipping into. Some more early extracts:

"He had decided to come to Dorchester for several reasons, but as he pondered over his motives now, he tried to idealise them into a longing to solve, if he only might, on the spot where his own dead lay, the ultimate meaning of death itself….‘ “Dorchester” means’, he thought, ‘the town of water”.’ And then he thought, ‘How queer that sorrow and sacrifice in men and women should draw water from behind the eye-sockets of their skulls!’

…And there came over him, as the sun of this pet day once more shone into his room, the old dark Homeric conception of death, with that terrifying multitude of the spirits of the dead surrounding us in their pitiful half-life and liable, on this day of their Cimmerian remembrance, when the minds of the living turn so desperately towards them, to rise thronging up, ‘ethnea myria nekrōn, the myriad tribes of the dead, with a terrible cry!

…The caretaker was one who understood the needs of the living as well as the needs of the dead. He suddenly stopped short. ‘Do ‘ee see thik ‘ooman, sir, down there?’ he said. ‘’Tis she’s young ‘un her have got down there, and a fine lad a’ were – I knowed ’un, to pass the time o’ day to, afore a’ fell sick. ’A used to come by here to school; and a’ used to ask I about they circuses – I do mind o’ he whenever I do hear ‘un.’"

I may try to read it once again - but generally, long and complex novels such as this hold little appeal for me. Life's too short - and one could be walking through the beautiful Dorset countryside, or up on Maiden Castle!

John Cowper Powys, Maiden Castle


Mapping the Wessex Novel, Landscape, History and the Parochial in British Literature, 1870-1940, Andrew Radford, Bloomsbury, 2010 (pages 105-115 can be read online).