PORIUS Praised in Canada's GLOBE AND MAIL

The new Overlook edition of Porius, the monunmental novel by John Cowper Powys, is reviewed by Maggie de Vries, in The Globe and Mail:

"Powys achieves a striking balance of character, action and reflection. . . Equal to the exploration of religion and philosophy, Powys is concerned with all things male and female. Men and women connect in many configurations and with many different motives. Powys may not be a writer of the 21st century, but his men and women are not creatures of the 21st century, either. Just as Powys's characters' ruminations on the nature of good and evil allow for life's full complexity and variety, their struggles with power and sex and love do justice to life's infinite permutations.

It is interesting to consider Porius and its author in the context of several other writers who produced key works in those critical postwar years. While Powys was deep in writing Porius in his native northern Wales, to which he had returned after decades in the United States, T. H. White (1906-984) was writing the latter portions of The Once and Future King and J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) and C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) were holed up in Oxford, hard at work on their own tales of the battle between good and evil. . . I would suggest that in this massive tome, Powys may have more of significance to offer us than Tolkien or Lewis or White. And perhaps that is why, after all these years, his book is being offered to us in its entirety."