Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

Published in 1954, John Cowper Powys called this novel, a 'long romance about Odysseus in his extreme old age, hoisting sail once more from Ithaca'. As usual there is a large cast of human characters but Powys also gives life and speech to inanimates such as a stone pillar, a wooden club,and an olive shoot. The descent to the drowned world of Atlantis towards the end of the novel is memorably described, indeed, Powys himself called it 'the best part of the book'.Many of Powys's themes, such as the benefits of matriarchy, the wickedness of priests and the evils of modern science which condones vivisection are given full rein in this odd but compelling work.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Fantasy, Novels

518 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 5, 1954

About the author

Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar. His mother was descended from the poet William Cowper, hence his middle name. His two younger brothers, Llewelyn Powys and Theodore Francis Powys, also became well-known writers. Other brothers and sisters also became prominent in the arts.

John studied at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and became a teacher and lecturer; as lecturer, he worked first in England, then in continental Europe and finally in the USA, where he lived in the years 1904-1934. While in the United States, his work was championed by author Theodore Dreiser. He engaged in public debate with Bertrand Russell and the philosopher and historian Will Durant: he was called for the defence in the first obscenity trial for the James Joyce novel, Ulysses, and was mentioned with approval in the autobiography of US feminist and anarchist, Emma Goldman.

He made his name as a poet and essayist, moving on to produce a series of acclaimed novels distinguished by their uniquely detailed and intensely sensual recreation of time, place and character. They also describe heightened states of awareness resulting from mystic revelation, or from the experience of extreme pleasure or pain. The best known of these distinctive novels are A Glastonbury Romance and Wolf Solent. He also wrote some works of philosophy and literary criticism, including a pioneering tribute to Dorothy Richardson.

Having returned to the UK, he lived in England for a brief time, then moved to Corwen in Wales, where he wrote historical romances (including two set in Wales) and magical fantasies. He later moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he remained until his death in 1963.

Reviews

[Paul Sánchez Keighley · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF'ed at circa 30%.

I don't really have time for the endless circumlotions of an old man free from editorial supervision. Shame. Powys' earlier works were so good, but this passion project (born under the financial mantle of a patron who promised to publish anything the then 80-year-old JCP put to paper) magnifies all of the worst aspects of his writing to the point where they smother the ones that shine.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a hard book to read and a hard book to write about, but I'll give it my best shot. In his Atlantis, John Cowper Powys not only has human characters, gods, and semi-divine characters; but the characters also include a moth, a fly, the wooden club with which Hercules slew the Nemean lion, and the sixth pillar in Odysseus's palace on Ithaca. When anything could be sentient, that can cause traffic problems in a novel.

In addition, the author is very well-versed in Greek mythology and epic; so it is very easy to feel ever so ignorant in dealing with the backgrounds of various mythological figures as the Fates, Naiads, Dryads, Pan, Pegasus, and the Erinnyes, or Furies.

Somehow, Powys manages to carry it off. But I think the sheer erudition and complexity make Atlantis more of a tour de force than a masterpiece. I managed my way through the book, but remain uncertain about some characters, such as Zeuks (not Zeus!), Enorches, Eione, Pontopereia, Okyrhöe, and about a dozen others.

The basic story line is that the aging Odysseus wants to make one more voyage, to Atlantis. The first three-quarters of the novel see his lining up the human, divine, and material resources he needs to make the trip; while the last quarter tells about the voyage out and what Odysseus found there.

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tennyson’s poem Ulysses was suggested to Powys as a subject. He’s finished his 'chief work' Porius and he’s getting on for eighty; he’s said to have cheerily 'thrown control to the winds' in his novels thereafter, and you get the sense he’s out to enjoy himself. I swear he’s pulling his own leg half the time. Atlantis isn’t in Tennyson’s heroic temper. It’s a… metaphysical comedy? A comedy of ideas? (people liken him to Dostoyevsky, who wrote tragedies of ideas). It’s a candidate for strangest work by a major novelist, is what.

While old Odysseus endeavours to set sail from Ithaca - he meets a lot of halts and interruptions – there is news of an upheaval in the world: rumours of revolution, on a cosmic scale. As you imagine is the case with revolutions, no-one’s sure what’s going on, but every creature has his or her pet interpretation. Every creature, because in this novel things are given voice. The action is commented upon by a fly and a moth, who are engaged in an inter-species love affair, and travel about with Odysseus in a crack of his club – the club that once, in Herakles’ hands, slew the Nemean lion, and that also has a consciousness (unutterably proud of its history). Everything has a stake in events, if there’s a cosmic revolution.

It’s important for Odysseus to sail. Half the island is out to hinder him, the other half to help. The Olympian gods have sunk Atlantis, from whence came the first salvo in the revolt against them, this revolt of the older gods against the newer gods, of the great old giant-gods, animal-gods, dragon-gods, serpent-gods, women-gods. Odysseus feels a need to cross the sea-site of the drowned city. "It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles" (Tennyson). His crew aren’t his old comrades, but include Nausikaa, arrived in Ithaca to start up an old romance; Arsinoe, a Trojan captive and nostalgic daughter of Hector; Zeuks, fathered by Pan, named in blasphemous satire on Zeus.

Powys writes of lives with an intimacy and a pathos, if I can say that, no matter who or what they are. As an example, can I introduce you to the old Dryad who lives in a tree outside Odysseus’ window and keeps her 'garden' - one of those divine sanctuaries where the smallest insects and the weakest worms could be safe at last from all those abominable injustices and cruel outrages, and all those stupid brutalities and careless mutilations that lack even the excuse of lust. /But it was not only of things like these that the aged Dryad Kleta constructed what she called her garden… Anyone, whether human or more than human, who turns nature into a garden is liable to find an unbelievable number of very small things that have once been part of other things but are now entities on their own, such as bits of wood, bits of stalk, bits of fungus, bits of small snail-shells, bits of empty birds’ eggs, bits of animals’ hair, bits of birds’ feathers, bits of broken sheaths of long-perished buds and shattered insect-shards, strewn remnants of withered lichen-clusters, and scattered fragments of acorns and berries and oak-apples that have survived in these lonely trails and tracks to be scurf upon the skin of one world and the chaos-stuff for the creation of another world. This gentle eccentric has early-morning confabulations with Odysseus, until the beleaguered Zeus, who has got one thunder-bolt left, a very little one, but large enough to dispose of my oak and me, blasts her.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a lovely book! A fun and fascinating read, Odysseus himself is a pretty amazing guy, even as an old guy (I'm not sure how old is "old," he seems very spry, yet clearly, other characters express ageist opinions about him) anyway, he still goes out and kicks ass, and he's determined to go on a final journey to the sunken Atlantis.

I had to read this one directly after reading Porius because he briefly mentioned survivors of Atlantis arriving on the shores of Wales and England, mixing with the varied population of inhabitants and conquerors. Although Atlantis only lightly brushes on what happened to the survivors, it does make you wonder what happened to the population of this lost continent. It would only make sense that anyone with access to a ship would've gotten out of town when everything hit the fan...

Powys always writes such an interesting cast of characters, they are varied and always well-formed, humans from all stations of life - old and young, then there are the gods, goddesses, titans, dryads, nymphs, the Club of Herakles, a pillar, a shoot from an olive tree stump, a moth, and a fly- can you imagine? A fly whose language is heavily laced with adverbs.

Part of the experience of reading this book is the tome itself, a first edition 1954, with handwritten notes by a previous owner, quite an illegible signature, and an inscription from Tennyson's Ulysses on the dedication page. There's a sticker inside the cover for Morgan's Book Shop, 8 Castlereagh St., Sydney...so it seems this book has seen the world before coming to me. (I think my Fred found it on eBay.) It has lots of foxing, and I had to clean up some dead mold here and there (thankfully, it doesn't stink!) Aside from its exposure to a damp environment, there's no sign of water damage. Its paper feels soft and aged, the bound signatures are still tight, and the cloth cover hangs in there fine, with some fraying on the edges. I love old books, even if they have blemishes - it adds to my experience of reading.

There's still so much more to say, I'm just scratching the surface, but I will stop here today.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

super late period jcp, where he seems to have mostly stopped caring about the reader or the need for a coherent plot and is just writing whatever appeals to him. a lot of this seems to be an extension from some of the cosmological stuff in porius - there's a cosmic revolt, never explained completely, against the olympian gods and zeus in particular, which may be a revolt of the titans and primordial monsters, of women against men, or of all beings in the universe against zeus' power depending on who in the book refers to it. we spend much of the book on ithaca, witnessing various characters(some of which include a fly, a moth, and a wooden club) think about things and hearing about the cosmic upheaval which we never really end up seeing. the last voyage of odysseus promised in the blurb barely gets going until more than halfway through, and happens virtually out of nowhere. characters simply appear whenever jcp needs them to do something, and quite often they do things that weren't foreshadowed at all! i guess when you're pushing 90 you can just do that in your books. sunken atlantis itself turns out to be home to some sort of undead embodiment of science that seems to be a bit of a callback to the polemic against vivisection from morwyn. this is really only a book for the jcp completionists but i think i preferred it to the brazen head because it never verges into self parody like that one does.

[Ben Ramsdonck · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wanted to like this more than i did.