Fables

by T.F. Powys

Inanimate objects take life and animals speak in T. F. Powys's collection of fables, which was first published in 1929: a dish-cloth and an old pan, lying on a rubbish heap, discuss the emotional intricacies of the household that has discarded them; the efforts of a determined spinster to marry off all her furniture end in tragedy; a rabbit takes advice from a viper to avenge the death of her son. Set in the Dorset countryside that also inspired Powys's novels, these are tales of morality, original and surprising, as all good fables should be.

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

Theodore Francis Powys, published as T. F. Powys, was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, the son of the Reverend Charles Francis Powys (1843–1923), vicar of Montacute, Somerset, for 32 years, and Mary Cowper Johnson, grand-daughter of Dr John Johnson, cousin and close friend of the poet William Cowper. He was one of eleven talented siblings, including the novelist John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) and the novelist and essayist Llewelyn Powys (1884–1939).
A sensitive child, Powys was not happy in school and left when he was 15 to become an apprentice on a farm in Suffolk. Later he had his own farm in Suffolk, but he was not successful and returned to Dorset in 1901 with plans to be a writer. Then, in 1905, he married Violet Dodd. They had two sons and later adopted a daughter. From 1904 until 1940 Theodore Powys lived in East Chaldon but then moved to Mappowder because of the war.
During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Powys was one of several UK writers who campaigned for aid to be sent to the Republican side.
Powys was deeply, if unconventionally, religious; the Bible was a major influence, and he had a special affinity with writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, including John Bunyan, Miguel de Cervantes, Jeremy Taylor, Jonathan Swift, and Henry Fielding. Among more recent writers, he admired Thomas Hardy, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
He died on 27 November 1953 in Mappowder, Dorset, where he was buried. [from wikipedia, adapted]

Reviews

[Zachary Mays · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another exceptional book by T. F. Powys. Outside of Mr. Weston's Good Wine, this may be the best thing I have read by him. His style and imagination are well suited to the fable and the short story. These are strange, macabre, humorous, melancholy, and at times puzzling tales. They zig when you expect them to zag, they often have sudden and surprising endings, and they will be well served by multiple readings. Some of my favorites off hand include "Mr Pim and the Holy Crumb," The Seaweed and the Cuckoo-Clock," "John Pardy and the Waves," "The Dog and the Lantern," "Darkness and Nathaniel" (maybe my favorite), and "The Corpse and the Flea." Still, all of them were fairly memorable. The themes are various, but seem to me to center around God (who can become anything, and appears as everything: a holy crumb, a mouse, a mysterious personage, or a raging fire) and death (many of the stories involve sudden violence, rotting corpses, suicide, and the graveyard). And yet, from those seemingly simple themes, Powys has weaved wonderfully complex and opaque tales, that don't always have any simple or didactic meaning. A truly haunting collection of fables, proving once again that Powys is the true master of Christian allegory.

[Shawn]

"The Corpse And The Flea" - A man dies and as his body lays, waiting for burial, he converses with a number of insects, reckoning with his existence. An abstract meditation on mortality, beautiful in its way, very much in the area of fantasy/fable.

[Wess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written and overwhelmingly bleak.