Inspiring Older Readers
Unclay by T.F. Powys
Theodore Francis Powys (1875 – 1953) belonged to an eccentric and talented family – his father was a vicar, his brothers John Cowper and Llewelyn were also writers as was his sister Philippa and yet another sister, Gertrude was a painter. There were nine children in the family and all of them became eminent in their chosen field.
Theodore was a sensitive child who grew up to be a sensitive adult. He is often included in the group of writers that have become known as exponents of ‘Christian fantasy’ alongside C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. To be truthful, I haven't found much of T.F. Powys’ output very interesting but, havinfg said that, two novels which are usually thought of as companion pieces – Mr Weston’s Good Wine and Unclay – are truly remarkable.
It has to be said that there’s nothing very traditional about Powys’ Christianity – his theological position is often quite perplexing but he’s deeply influenced by the natural world; the Earth, it’s flora and fauna. His God is not an all-forgiving deity but a creator fully cognisant of humanity’s faults and failings and the potential perversion of nature that man is capable of. In many ways I was reminded of William Blake’s equally unconventional and iconoclastic mysticism and biographies of Powys always comment on the impact of Nietzsche and Freud on his ideas.
The eminent critic, John Gray puts it this way:
“Though Powys is a religious writer, for him religion was not about belief. As he put it in Soliloquies of a Hermit, an early volume first published in America in 1916 in which many of the themes of his mature fictions are prefigured, ‘I am without a belief; – a belief is too easy a road to God.’ Religion – ‘the only subject I know anything about’ – is not, for Powys, a set of propositions or a creed. It is a mood, or a shifting pattern of moods, whose intimations are fleeting. Spiritual truth was best approached by silence – or else by the indirect art that Powys employs in his wonderful Fables (1929), where pots and pans converse with fleas and corpses. If Powys had any religious beliefs they were, in the terms of conventional Christianity, highly heterodox, even heretical.”
Unclay was Powys’ last novel and it really is quite remarkable – although I’m prepared to acknowledge that it’s a book you’ll either be astonished by or it's one that you’ll give up on early on with a look of utter puzzlement. I, for one, fall into the former bracket. What Powys has written is like an adult fairy tale or morality play in which reality has little part to play in the motivations or actions of the characters who are all ‘types’ in the Medieval sense of that word. All these characters could have come straight from the pages of Chaucer and would be amazed to find themselves in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex.
So what’s the ‘plot’ of the book? Well, Death is sent to reap or ‘unclay’ two people in the small English village of Dodder but when he arrives he finds he’s lost the parchment that contains the names of his victims. He is forced to take on human form and as John Death he starts to interact with the people of the village as he continues his search for the lost document.
As John Gray notes, “throughout his stay he gives and receives joy, relishing sexual encounters with the village women and rejoicing in his mission of bringing release to suffering humanity.” Oddly enough the attractive charisma of Death contrasts remarkably with some of the specimens of humanity we encounter here who are arrogant, elitist, cruel, greedy, sadistic and socially retarded – unable to see real beauty as anything other than something to exploit.
Ultimately, Death finds his commission and the two souls are claimed - the most beautiful young woman in the village and the steadfast young man who loves her. But it’s not a tragic ending because their early death actually saves these two souls from having to live any longer amongst their corrupt fellows. Their ‘unclaying’ is not the start of their torment but their salvation from it.
The personification of death as John Death allows Powys to not only have plenty of fun with situations and characters but to also raise a whole range of philosophical points about the nature of existance and death. He doesn't labour these though; it's not a meditation on life and death. Why, he asks, might the idea of death be so attractive? Where does real peace lie; in life or death?
It’s not only the storyline of this book and its ideas that are so remarkable – the way Powys writes the fable is also a key part of the pleasure. He creates what is effectively an extended black comedy that combines the stereotypes of Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm and the grotesques of Royston Vesey’s League of Gentlemen to create something quite unique.
If I was to be hypercritical I would say that the book is maybe fifty pages too long and sags somewhat in the middle. But that would be to carp unnecessarily because I can’t imagine books like this come along very often. It's a daring novel of ideas, a genre which is difficult to pull-off with the brio Powys demonstrates here.
Copies are available online – you certainly won’t find it in Waterstones and I’d bet you’ll struggle to even track one down in a good second hand shop. The paperback comes in at just over £10 and you’ll need to go over £50 for the hardcover.
Terry Potter
August 2018