Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Penguin Books Ltd (1976), Edition: New Impression, Paperback, 640 pages
Description
Often described as one of the great apocalyptic novels of our time, WOLF SOLENT is the story of a young man returning from London to work near to the school at which his father had been history master. Complex, romantic and humorous, it is a classicwork combining a close understanding of man's everyday experience with a delicate awareness of the spiritual.
Media reviews
The New York Review of Books
Trivialities loom as satisfyingly large as in a novel by Jane Austen or Barbara Pym. We share Wolf’s anguish when both his mother and his motherinlaw threaten to come to tea the same day. After a tiff with his wife he is comforted by looking into the “strangelycoloured eyes” of his friend
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Darnley, and has “that peculiar sensation of relief which men are wont to feel when they encounter each other after the confusion of sex-conflicts.”...
In their urban or rural setting Powys’s lovers are as timeless in their erotic fixations as Queen Phaedra or Helen of Troy. And his narative proffers all sorts of metaphysical suggestions only to circumvent them, as trees and plants grow around artificial obstructions; sudden vital “discoveries,” often emphasized by italics, are soon absorbed back into the leisurely ganglion. Even as it absorbs and compels us the novel seems to be inviting us not to take it seriously. Show Less
New Statesman
Sustained competence as a novelist escaped Powys in his vastly swollen works. One has the impression that some lettered prehistoric pachyderm was trying, with learned pathos, to get in touch with the village grocer and was distracted by village girls’ garters. A pretty folk world - inaptly
We exist, he seems to say, as metaphors. But whereas the portrait of Wolf Solent is an essay, the women are also carefully observed persons with an inner life. In all this, as a pagan poet-teacher midway in the revaluation of sex in this century, he had something bold to say. We may find him evasive, or dismiss him as self-loving, but evasiveness is one of the aspects of sexual emotion, which is subject, after all, to transfigurations and reserves that tend now to be forgotten in our stress on the vividly physical.
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compared with Hardy’s - has somehow to coalesce with educated pryings. His objective correlatives are grotesquely ill-assorted, even in Wolf Solent where the theme is restricted to Wolf’s sexual indecisions.,,We exist, he seems to say, as metaphors. But whereas the portrait of Wolf Solent is an essay, the women are also carefully observed persons with an inner life. In all this, as a pagan poet-teacher midway in the revaluation of sex in this century, he had something bold to say. We may find him evasive, or dismiss him as self-loving, but evasiveness is one of the aspects of sexual emotion, which is subject, after all, to transfigurations and reserves that tend now to be forgotten in our stress on the vividly physical.
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User reviews
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
Wolf Solent was published in 1929, when Powys was 57 and still making a part-time living from his mobile lecture show. An unsparingly analytical, intensely poetic character-study of the kind that became his specialty, it was his debut as a mature novelist. Here are all the elements of standard
"have to be joined together, have to be forced into one another, have to be proved dependent upon each other, while all solid entities have to dissolve, if they are to outlast their momentary appearance, into atmosphere."
The novel, on the surface, is a fairly straightforward story of a native son’s return, along the lines of Hardy’s Return of the Native. Wolf, the eponymous hero, an extremely sensitive soul, returns to his hometown on England’s South Coast after suffering a mental breakdown in London. But instead of recovering his innocence at home, he loses it completely. He is coming to a presumably serene writing assignment for the local squire, to escape the intensity of the city, to understand his past, and to somehow vindicate his tightly wound mother. Nothing goes to plan. He becomes entangled in various affairs, romantic and professional, and uncovers horrible truths about some old friends and neighbors. A battle between his father’s joie de vivre and his mother’s nervousness rages in his head. He becomes sympathetic to his father’s mistress, becomes attracted to his half-sister. The job he’s come for is not at all what he’s expected. In fact, nothing in this town provides relief from intensity.
In the end he returns, disillusioned, to the anonymity of London. You can’t go home again sums up the novel in a nutshell; but a nutshell is far too small for Powys. It is what throbs beneath the surface of this novel, from the hero who is alive to every blade of grass and housefly to the world around him. There are many contemplative walks through the English countryside where he plays out every reading of his life in order to make some sense of it. His reverence and concern for the natural world is laudable and, admittedly, hard-going in places. Powys hated most things modern – such as, say, technology and capitalism – so he lingers where others might move along. This is in the heart of the story and all of Powys’s novels.
The critic George Steiner once claimed that Powys was the only twentieth-century English writer on a par with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Margaret Drabble, the distinguished English novelist, believes, “we need to pay attention to this man.” The fantasy world of his novels, she says, is “densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien’s, but it is as compelling, and it has more air.”
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Powysian psychodrama: a conflict between brothers; the hypnotic eroticism of girls; depraved elders; and the remains of innocence. Wolf Solent is no nostalgic pastoral. Powys, who eulogized the beauties of Nature, never balked at revealing its horrors. His work is full of implications of violence. To him it was a mistake not to see what he, in a somewhat Zen manner, called “the necessity of opposition”: Good and Evil; Male and Female; Life and Death; Appearance and Reality. All these, he says,"have to be joined together, have to be forced into one another, have to be proved dependent upon each other, while all solid entities have to dissolve, if they are to outlast their momentary appearance, into atmosphere."
The novel, on the surface, is a fairly straightforward story of a native son’s return, along the lines of Hardy’s Return of the Native. Wolf, the eponymous hero, an extremely sensitive soul, returns to his hometown on England’s South Coast after suffering a mental breakdown in London. But instead of recovering his innocence at home, he loses it completely. He is coming to a presumably serene writing assignment for the local squire, to escape the intensity of the city, to understand his past, and to somehow vindicate his tightly wound mother. Nothing goes to plan. He becomes entangled in various affairs, romantic and professional, and uncovers horrible truths about some old friends and neighbors. A battle between his father’s joie de vivre and his mother’s nervousness rages in his head. He becomes sympathetic to his father’s mistress, becomes attracted to his half-sister. The job he’s come for is not at all what he’s expected. In fact, nothing in this town provides relief from intensity.
In the end he returns, disillusioned, to the anonymity of London. You can’t go home again sums up the novel in a nutshell; but a nutshell is far too small for Powys. It is what throbs beneath the surface of this novel, from the hero who is alive to every blade of grass and housefly to the world around him. There are many contemplative walks through the English countryside where he plays out every reading of his life in order to make some sense of it. His reverence and concern for the natural world is laudable and, admittedly, hard-going in places. Powys hated most things modern – such as, say, technology and capitalism – so he lingers where others might move along. This is in the heart of the story and all of Powys’s novels.
The critic George Steiner once claimed that Powys was the only twentieth-century English writer on a par with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Margaret Drabble, the distinguished English novelist, believes, “we need to pay attention to this man.” The fantasy world of his novels, she says, is “densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien’s, but it is as compelling, and it has more air.”
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LibraryThing member kettle666
I bought the book because I liked the cover painting. I read it and then devoured most of this great man's work. Fortunately there is a lot of it, and - even more fortunately - most of it is fine and sensitive stuff. Powys was a pantheistic eco warrior before there were such things, and
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consequently his work is prescient and even more timely for a modern audience. Show Less
LibraryThing member kristykay22
Whoa. How had I never heard of this book before? This was an epic, claustrophobic, beautiful, meaty, exhausting and wonderful novel.
Wolf Solent is a 35 year old school teacher who lives with his sarcastic and dominating mother in London where he has recently been fired for an uncontrolled outburst
Wolf quickly falls under the spell of Gerda Torp, the beautiful daughter of the local headstone carver (and sister of the amazingly named Lob Torp -- actually everyone has amazing names in this book....), and the strange attraction of the plain and intellectual Christie Malakite, the daughter of a local bookseller who knew his father. The reader is quickly drawn into Wolf's visceral experience of nature, light, and color, as well as his hard-to-pin-down "mythology" or "life-illusion" that touches all of his experiences, until it leaves him forever. It is impossible for me to cram the intensity of the plot and characters into this review, but much revolves around Wolf's lust for Gerda and philosophical connection with Christie, the push and pull of small town secrets, and (most of all) his sensual and ecstatic experience of nature.
Powys published this book in 1929, when he was in his early 50s, and it was his first successful publication although he had seen professional success as a charismatic lecturer in America, where he lived from 1905-1930. Philosophical, but earthy, with some of the most rich and loaded sentences I've ever read (and they just keep coming!). There are scenes and characters in this book that will stay with me forever. The book leans on Thomas Hardy's pastoral settings but has the sensuality and romantic overload of D.H. Lawrence. Really, though, this novel is one of a kind. It is an undertaking at 600+ pages, but my goodness it is worth it.
Wolf Solent is a 35 year old school teacher who lives with his sarcastic and dominating mother in London where he has recently been fired for an uncontrolled outburst
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("dancing his 'malice dance'") in front of his class. The novel starts as Wolf rides the train to a small town in Dorset, in the southwest of England, to take a job as a secretary/ghostwriter for Squire Urquhart who is compiling a history of all the scandals and perversions in the county going back to the beginning of its written history. Twenty-five years ago, Wolf and his mother left this same small town for London after Wolf's father had multiple affairs. His father continued his depravations and ended up dying in the workhouse and being buried in a pauper's grave. Wolf quickly falls under the spell of Gerda Torp, the beautiful daughter of the local headstone carver (and sister of the amazingly named Lob Torp -- actually everyone has amazing names in this book....), and the strange attraction of the plain and intellectual Christie Malakite, the daughter of a local bookseller who knew his father. The reader is quickly drawn into Wolf's visceral experience of nature, light, and color, as well as his hard-to-pin-down "mythology" or "life-illusion" that touches all of his experiences, until it leaves him forever. It is impossible for me to cram the intensity of the plot and characters into this review, but much revolves around Wolf's lust for Gerda and philosophical connection with Christie, the push and pull of small town secrets, and (most of all) his sensual and ecstatic experience of nature.
Powys published this book in 1929, when he was in his early 50s, and it was his first successful publication although he had seen professional success as a charismatic lecturer in America, where he lived from 1905-1930. Philosophical, but earthy, with some of the most rich and loaded sentences I've ever read (and they just keep coming!). There are scenes and characters in this book that will stay with me forever. The book leans on Thomas Hardy's pastoral settings but has the sensuality and romantic overload of D.H. Lawrence. Really, though, this novel is one of a kind. It is an undertaking at 600+ pages, but my goodness it is worth it.
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LibraryThing member ivanfranko
A grand story. Others below review it better than I could. Wolf finds his "mythology" of life destroyed when he returns to his Dorset home. His sobering experience with the two women he loves and the secretive, half-magical lives of the towns folk, leaves him thinking, "If I can't enjoy life,..with
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absolute childish absorption in its simplest elements, I might as well never have been born!' He decides that each of us must feel according to the fates of one's nature. One must endure or escape. Show Less
LibraryThing member yarb
What a slog. Interesting at first to read something so clearly influential to writers I hate, like Lawrence, and love, like Murdoch. The weird self-obsession of Wolf, and the intensity with which Powys delves into it, starts out fun but by half way, all the fun is gone (to quote Curious George). It
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turns into a Lawrencian mope-a-long in the company of a total drip. On the other hand you have a cast of real eccentrics, the satanic Squire Urquhart and the self-doubting vicar Tilly-Valley being typically Murdochian types. In the end though, I was completely unable to stomach another cup of tea, pointless self-reflective walk in the country, or obscure reference to someone’s “life illusion” or “mythology”. Show Less
Language
Original publication date
1929
Physical description
640 p.
ISBN
0140021825 / 9780140021820