posted on 09 Feb 2023

Mr Weston’s Good Wine by T.F. Powys

Religious allegories come in all shapes and forms but T.F. Powys’ Mr Weston’s Good Wine must be one of the most whimsical and weird examples. I had previous read and reviewed (here) Powys’ Unclay – his final novel – which I found oddly charming and eccentric and I was hoping that this one, published in 1927, also his most famous, would be equally intriguing. However, I have to say upfront that eccentric and quirky alone was ultimately not enough to hold my interest and keep this one afloat.

It's evening time on a November day in 1923 when Mr Weston and his younger companion, Michael, arrive in their van to a low hill overlooking the small English village of Folly Down. The van advertises Mr Weston’s Good Wine and he’s arrived to discover which of the village’s inhabitants will need or want a taste of the wine he’s peddling.

Mr Weston is, of course, a manifestation of God and Michael is his archangel – but, this being Powys, he’s a pretty unconventional God figure who is prepared to interpret and stretch his interpretations of good, bad, moral and immoral. And, although Mr Weston stays long enough to pay a visit to several of the key characters in the village, it’s the flawed and frequently transgressive mortals that are the focus of most attention.

And what a collection they are! As is often the case with religious allegories, sex or sexual peccadillos feature prominently. The nubile young girls of the village find themselves the target of the dreadful Mrs Vosper who, for her own perverse gratification, systematically organises and ensures they fall victim to the sexual abuse of local farmhands. There’s Mr Grunter, who may well have some kind of learning disability, who gets blamed for each unwanted pregnancy and seems to be accepted by everyone as the culprit without attracting any real adverse condemnation. Nicholas Grobe is the local vicar who has lost his faith following the death of his wife and his daughter, Tamar, is waiting for an encounter with an angel. Thomas Bunce, the local pub landlord, blames God for all the world’s ills and has a daughter, Jenny, who works at the Rectory as a maid and is the current target of Mrs Vosper’s attentions.

Over the course of that evening (in which time seems to be suspended for the village’s population), Mr Weston will pay a visit to all these characters and they will all be offered slightly different manifestations of Mr Weston’s good wine – it’s a visitation that will bring all of them face-to-face with the enormities of their behaviour and beliefs. Not all of them will survive and none will survive unchanged.

Sadly, I found that the longer the book went on, the more prosaic and preachy it became. By the end of the book I was left with the feeling that if Folly Down is an extended metaphor for Britain as a whole, then Powys must have held a pretty low opinion of his fellow citizens. When a book stops exploring ideas and turns to sermonising, you know its time to close the page on it. Mr Weston’s Good Wine has probably lost its wider audience over the years because of this – ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ books have often been lost for forgotten for a reason and Powys’ allegory of redemption tastes more like Sanatogen than Beaujolais.

There is a Vintage Classics paperback of this book currently in print that can be purchased for well under £10.

 

Terry Potter

February 2023