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Rhisiart's Romance
John Cowper Powys's two late and long medieval novels may be seen as the crowning points of his oeuvre. Meditative and serially ambitious, they summon the depths of this great writer's creative consciousness. And they will truly please no one. They are too philosophical for the aficionado of the historical novel; they are too historical for the reader interested in the permutations and reversals of ideas. They are about Celtic subjects, but will not please Celtic nationalists or essentialists who may be interested in the Middle Ages, though often only as a convenient 'other' of the modern.
Looking over the past two millennia in Western history, there are two truly transformational centuries: the fifth and the fifteenth. In the fifth, the classical world absorbed a whole host of transformations, from the rise of Christianity to barbarian invasions; in the fifteenth, the voyages of Columbus and the printing press. Porius offers a deep archaism, an 'other world' of dark energy and religious, fictive and sexual pluralism, while Owen Glendower looks forward to the modernizing process of the Renaissance and has as one of its chief dilemmas whether Owen himself stands aside from, or athwart them. Porius is set nine hundred years earlier - making us realize how truly long the long medieval period was - and is set in the haziest and most myth-strewn of historical times, in a Britain poised between the withdrawal of Rome and the full manifestation of the Anglo- Saxons, a past too other to conveniently resonate. Whereas some modern historical novelists have used the medieval period to either critique the modern or make the modern feel good about itself, Powys's radical medievalism sees the past as other, but also as an inventory of the present. And for Powys the past is present: not only was he living in Wales when he wrote these books, but the world of the 1940s was in a cataclysm of turmoil that makes these earlier 'dark' ages look luminous by comparison. Powys takes the traditional role of the medieval in historical fiction from Walter Scott onward, to provide an authorizing lineage in the past, and both accelerates and annihilates it.
Although Rhisiart is in a sense a Scott-like, or even a Conradlike, bystander providing...