Unclay

by T.F. Powys

New Directions is proud to present one of the most spellbinding novels you will read this year, and certainly the weirdest.


First published in 1931, Unclay glows with an unworldly light—Death has come to the small village of Dodder to deliver a parchment with the names of two local mortals and the fatal word unclay upon it. When he loses the precious sheet, he is at a loss, and also free of his errand. Hungry to taste the sweet fruits of human life, Mr. John Death, as he is now known, takes a holiday in Dorsetshire and rests from his reaping. The village teems with the old virtues (love, kindness, patience) and the old sins (lust, avarice, greed). What unfolds is a witty, earthy, metaphysical, and delicious novel of enormous moral force and astonishing beauty.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Fantasy, Literature, Novels, British Literature

319 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1931

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

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Death arrives at the rural village of Dodder with orders to unclay (it’s what death does for a living) two of its inhabitants. He manages to lose the bit of paper with the names on. So he decides to take a bit of R and R and stay in the village for a while. There is a strong allegorical element in this novel and Powys as always is not afraid to deal with difficult issues. There is a good deal of humour in the book, but it is also very bleak. On the surface it is a simple story but the ideas are very complex. The cast of characters are interesting to say the least: a woman who thinks she is a camel, a man so afraid of love that he plants nut trees around his house to keep love out, the publican who thinks the local squire is the best thing ever, the local farmer who is thoroughly evil and enjoys nothing more than the infliction of pain, a local miser who plans to sell his young daughter in wedlock to the farmer so he has a young innocent creature to torture, the Parson who prefers to read Jane Austen to his parishioners rather than the Bible and a whole collections of locals who each have their own idiosyncrasies, some of which are very strange.
There is a good deal of carnality in this novel, a little akin to Hardy. However there is a difference, in Hardy there is usually a price to pay; remember Tess or Fanny Robin (Far from the Madding Crowd). For Powys this just seems to be the way people behave; it is morally neutral and anyway there is a great deal of other strangeness going on. However the sex and death link which Freud posited and Powys was clearly influenced by is not just looked at by Powys; it’s taken several times round the dance floor and is very much in plain sight. Death has, it seems, discovered the joys of sex and has intimate relations with most of the female cast (including the vicar’s wife); John Death is seemingly irresistible.
The book has its origins in Christian tradition, but it is not orthodox by any means. There is a real gothic horror feel to some of it;
“As Joe Bridle bent over the pond, two dead corpses rose up but, when he thought he knew their sodden faces, the waters thickened and the faces vanished.”
It is also a meditation and exploration of belief and life and death, something Powys also battled with; as he wrote elsewhere:
“Though not of the Church, I am of the Church. Though not of the faith, I am of the faith. Though not of the fold, I am of the fold; a priest in the cloud of God, beside the Altar of Stone. Near beside me is a flock of real sheep; above me a cloud of misty white embraces the noonday light of the Altar. I am without a belief; — a belief is too easy a road to God.”
In fact as you can see here Powys is very sceptical at times, “ ..at the bottom of the well of being one may discover, instead of a mighty God, only the cap and bells of a mad fool.”
Whilst there is a clear and very English heritage here going back to Donne and Cowper, as John Gray points out, there is also a clear link to the Greek sceptics like Pyrrho.
The ending is no surprise as the reader knows whose names are on the lost paper, but there are several twists and turns and Powys certainly has a sense of the macabre.
There are lots of hidden surprises and Powys has a great sense of theatre. John Death is a strange and endearing character with real flaws and failings and even the bit part characters are very strong. Well worth looking out for.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

One thing I learned for certain from reading my last book - Coven Country - is never go fox hunting on a Sunday. Bad stuff will happen if you do. Well, this book opens with a fox hunt. On a Sunday. Well, this won't end well, I thought.

And it doesn't, of course, though I won't plot-spoil the particulars. Sunday is a day of surprises. Right away, since I had just read Coven Country, I anticipated the Devil. Break the Sabbath, get the Devil, no? But even though that feeling lingered, it wasn't the Devil who came to the village of Dodder. It was Death.

Death took on human form, so real that the townspeople started calling him John. John Death. And they did so without a clue.

Death had a mission, to unclay two residents. Unclay, meaning to make them die. That word and two names were on a parchment, which Death misplaced. So Death doesn't know whom to unclay. Joe Bridle* finds the parchment, and hides it, figuring roughly its meaning, even as he never realizes that Death is, well, Death.

The novel has an interesting style. The 54** chapters are relatively short and many of them begin with a kind of epigram:

- Even the most unfriendly people are fond of something.

- A change sometimes comes over a human creature that is noticed by others more than by itself. A man may be lifted, translated, changed, and yet will appear to himself as the same being.

- A human being can be mocked into madness, as well as into sense.

- To drink one opens one's mouth. When the drink is swallowed, the tongue is loosened.

- Some say a miser is an odd contortion--that his mind is twisted. That is not so. A miser is a mathematical figure, an exact computation. But he always counts in low numbers. He likes to begin to gain and never to finish. He will say to his money, "Lie down, oddity!"

- A man is often hated without knowing why. As one begets a child, so one begets an enemy--unknowingly. The more harmless and docile a nature may be, the more easy to dislike.

Unlike the stitched samplers of, say, Cormac McCarthy and Jim Harrison, these aphorisms withstood a second glance.*** And, instead of interrupting the tale, they served to place the plotline in a philosophical context. This was especially true when the author waxed about Death:

- It is all pretence, for when no one knows what truth is, what else is there but to pretend? All life is pretence, but never death.

What Powys does here, via story, is to make Life horrible. He paints it brutal. Rich against poor. Men against women. Even a dog is violently murdered. So an old woman might think herself a camel; a man might grow nut trees to keep out Love. Or the characters, numb to life, await Death, spooky, uncertain, but not unkind. Powys lets Death himself explain it:

"When God's finger first stirred the pudding . . . He let a tear fall in by mistake, and the tear became man's consciousness. Then, to preserve man from everlasting sorrow, He put Death in the pot."



_____ _____ _____ _____
*Joe, by the way, is in love with the lovely Susie Dawe, as is every other man in town. Even her father has a peephole into her room. I got it into my head that Joe and Susie were Jim Halpert and Pam from The Office, though. The images stayed with me.

**The chapters are in Roman numerals, so the last chapter is LIV. Golfers will understand the significance.

***Though there was this: Having often seen, in the way of his trade, how the best women even behave to their husbands, Mr. Balliboy could never understand why the lawgiver Moses made so strict a rule against a man mating with a beast. The gift of speech had certainly done women very little good, no animal had learned to speak so unkindly.

[Fionnuala]

This is a combined review of Mr Weston's Good Wine from 1927 and Unclay from 1931 because these two Powys novels share a few characters, locations and themes. I read them one after the other in the order they were written and that was the perfect way to savour both to the maximum.

These are books full of contrasts, some of them exceedingly stark as in the contrast between good and evil. But they are also very funny books which is not what you'd expect in novels that focus so closely on good and evil. However the dose of fun in each of them is balanced by a small dose of the tragic, just as the measure of evil is balanced by a generous measure of good so the overall impression is very pleasing.

The characters in these funny tragic books are often compared to animals, and sometimes we don't know which are the humans and which are the animals. To add to the heady mixture, inanimate objects become animate at times too. It might be an oak tree or it might be a mountain but they come alive and they play a role in reminding us of the age-old nature of the world.

Everything in these stories plays a role so that the finished product is a harmonious whole, for all the world like a good wine, a Medoc for example where up to five different grapes are combined in different amounts, each playing its part to add elegance, aroma, colour, longevity and structure. I wasn't surprised that there was a brief mention in each of these novels of the goddess Balbuc whom Rabelais immortalised in the form of a giant bottle of wine: La dive bouteille!

When I finished these two novels, I started a third Powys but soon realised it wasn't by T F Powys but by his brother J C Powys. Though a little disappointed, I've decided to stick with Wolf Solent. The style is very different but early on I came upon a reference to good and evil, and further on, a reference to the goddess Balbuc, and soon after a reference to Rabelais so I will continue. It's a very long book though, and I'm not yet sure if its particular combination of themes will suit me but I'm sipping away for the moment and will likely post some tasting notes in a week or two...

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've never read T.F. Powys, this novel (originally published in 1931) is a fine place to start. You'll either like his parables, as Borges did, or you won't, and you'll find out soon enough. Without spoiling anything, let me emphasize the UNBURIED aspect to reading any Powys male or female--reason enough, for some, to take up a text--and the appeal of this darkly amiable novel.

Death visits a village to unclay (that is, take the life of) two people but loses the parchment that bears their names and can't remember who is supposed to die. He enters village life, with its one aristocrat, its miser, its rich man, the men who drink at the tavern, the farmers, the children, and, yes, takes a holiday. But the imaginative phrasing, humour, and the vision of life make this book worth reading. Certain scenes won't leave your head when you're finished. If you read Aira, then you'll understand why TFP is now his stablemate at New Directions.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Death comes to a small village and loses a parchment with his mission he decides to stay on to find it. The village has the usual set of eccentrics such as a lady who thinks she's a camel and a man who views all women as vegetables (to avoid any chance of romantic involvement). It's a wry and witty tale (almost a parable) of the conflict between Love and Death.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 2 out of 5]

The central idea seemed promising, and this certainly has a quirky, old-fashioned English charm. But 150+ pages into the minutiae of village life, I can only conclude that I much prefer scything to a holiday in the country.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

My eye was drawn to this book because of my familiarity with the Powys name. John Cowper Powys was a modernist novelist who wrote some very long, very intriguing books about British history and myth. Since I'm a diehard fan of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays, and have always been fascinated and amused by his depiction of that famous Welsh sorcerer, Powys's Owen Glendower provoked my curiosity in my college days. But, like all of J. C. Powys's novels, it is very long, and I'm skittish around very long books.

Flash forward a few years, and I mistake Unclay for a J. C. Powys novel; an uncharacteristically short J. C. Powys novel, at that. Of course, it is no such thing. It's by John's younger brother, Theodore (who, I must say, looks quite a bit like the Irish character actor Patrick McGee, who probably would have appreciated Unclay's drippingly wry, dark humor). Having read Unclay, I have learned precious little about J. C. Powys. Instead, I've devoured an absolutely bewitching potion of country-gothic Britishism that did my soul much good.

This novel appears at first to be somewhat quaint, as the first important character we meet is the adorable Jane Austen-loving parson Mr. Hayhoe (ah, the names in this one!), and you can imagine my pleasure when Hayhoe is described as having not "the leisure to be sick in such a rustling time," exactly as the Earl of Northumberland was described in my beloved Henry IV. Quite early, the book reveals its gentle, winking humor, and slow, easy warmth, for when I'm faced with a passage such as "He liked a grassy place, but his wife had told him that a bank is not always safe-- ants or snakes might be hiding, to sting a good man," I can do nothing but smile. At this point the reader would be forgiven for assuming this book to be a good-natured takeoff of The Wind in the Willows or another such parcel of English nostalgia for country life. Not so. That sort of nostalgia is certainly an important ingredient, but soon after we take our leave from Hayhoe's lovely and simple affability, this utterly unique novel begins to unfold its many-colored wings.

What we soon learn is that this is a fantasy novel, and an old-fashioned one, the sort that J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis would've admired. It can be light and essentially allegorical, or deeply mythopoetic and imaginative. Its central conceit, that the Angel of Death has taken human form and has deigned to walk among us, learning our ways as a less-than-impartial observer on a sort of working vacation, is nothing new, and Terry Pratchett, for instance, has written lengthily on the very same idea. Up until a certain point, Unclay, in its mocking appreciation of human behavior via a whimsical impossibility, could vaguely be called a "comic fantasy," just as that same title has dogged Pratchett and his books for so many years. But Powys departs from Pratchett when he permits his humanist satire to take on some very heavy sobriety. An unforgettable passage on page 64 describes the horrors of hell and the ghastly visions of the dead that farmer Joe Bridle sees as he peers into his backyard lake, newly infected by the presence of his neighbor undertaker:

Soon he heard sounds like dying groans, and from the bottom of the pond there rose a mass of decayed carrion. The pond was changed. It was become a charnel-yard, full of cadavers, all visible. A hideous stench surrounded him. Fleshy corruption, in its most revolting and dreadful forms, clung to him. A snake, crawling out of the body of a child, raised its head and hissed at him; pond newts swarmed over the breasts of a woman who was newly drowned. Fingers, soiled with grave-mould, tried to pluck the paper away, but all in vain-- for Joe Bridle would not let it go.

In scenes like this, Unclay proves it cannot be confined by neat generic titles such as "satire," "comic," or "moral allegory." It's fuller and richer than that. It's a fantasy drawn from a pure and self-believing corner of the mind, like the fantasies Dante Alighieri and Gustave Doré once dreamed.

Yes, this is a book equally as deep and dark and troubled as it is light and affectionate and nostalgic. Its plot (if we can call it such, for it takes much wandering and tangential joy in frequently departing from it) is the story of three men fighting over the country lass Susie Dawe, and the quest for Susie's heart is a bloodthirsty hunt, with hearts broken, abuse delivered, and sheer inhumanity unveiled from man onto his fellow man. We are never sure who will win young Susie: the good man Joe Bridle, for whom Susie is "the darkness and light of his desire"; the vile Farmer Mere, who never met a sweet face he didn't intend to strike, aided in his quest by Susie's equally vile pedophile father, James Dawe; or John Death himself, the story's mythical focal point, who we see discovering the tender quiver of desire for the first time (a late chapter, called "The Large Quiet," is stunning in the way it describes a union between he and Susie in such evocatively ambiguous language that we cannot be sure if it describes sex or a reaping of the poor girl's soul. Perhaps it's all the same for John Death). The resolution, which we only come to on the last page, is stirring.

But this book is not primarily about its plot, and its plot was unraveled to me rather slowly, because on every page is an idea or phrase of such poignant poetic beauty that I felt compelled to share it with whomever was nearest to me.

~~~

On Joe's love for Susie: "Her laughter was everywhere, and at night her eyes shone in the sky. The air he breathed was Susie; whatever he touched was her too." (p. 58)

On the quality of James Dawe's character: "A miser's joys never fail him; he pretends he has little, then he counts his bags." (p. 80)”

On the pact he makes with Farmer Mere: "A good seller need be no poet, in order to dispose of what he has in stock. James Dawe was no polite talker; he did not trouble himself to say that 'beauty is a joy for ever,' nor did he say, 'there is a garden in her face, where roses and white lilies blow.' He said other things than that." (p. 103)

On hard-won contemptus mundi: "Beauty, he knew, fades in your arms, it vanishes like a coloured cloud; it leaves nothing behind, it goes down alive into the pit." (p. 122)

On the corruption of old men's souls: "He had been young in cruelty; he was now old in guile." (p. 124)

On passing away: "The last supper upon the earth is always a sad meal; the first breakfast in Heaven will be happier." (p. 135)

On getting into bed: "A bed has a friendly and benign look: it wishes to be kind." (p. 183)

~~~

Yet, if there is one moment that can possibly capture the spirit of this diverse and perfectly balanced book, it is this bravura monologue delivered by a bruised and ill-tempered Death:

“There is no corner of the world, no, nor of the firmament either, where I am not feared and honoured. The first principle in every religion is the fear of me. Kings, princes, and popes all bow before me. A mouse is afraid of me, and so is Lord Bullman. I possess a fine weapon with which, as every generation comes, I conquer the world.”

...that is immediately met with this rejoinder by his constant nemesis, the witty little girl Winnie Huddy:

"'Tis only a scythe you do boast of." (p. 258)

This is a book full of wisdom, to be savored and enjoyed; a friend to stay with you for a very long time.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

T.F. Powys's Unclay is a strange sort of parable about love and death in a rural Dorset village. To begin with, Death shows up in the village of Dodder, but he has lost has written orders to "unclay" (cause to die) two locals. And since he has no memory, Death cannot remember who he is supposed to cut down with his scythe.

And what a cast of characters! Death, for instance, has the hots for all the young women in the village, and several of them respond to his advances. There is a local prostitute, Daisy Huddy, and her 9-year-old sister Winnie who is in love with a grown man. There is the lovely Susie Dawe, with whom Joseph Biddle is in love. There are three unsavory rich characters: Lord Bullman, who wishes to re-institute the Droit de Seigneur with Susie; Susie's father, the miserly Dawe; and the wealthy and brutish farmer Mere.

Powys comes from a family of three writer brothers, himself and John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys -- all of whom are worth reading. This is a book I hated to come to the end of, which means I'll have to be on the lookout for his other books.

[Eleanor Toland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published three years before Death Takes a Holiday made its debut in cinemas, Unclay features the anthropomorphic personification of Death paying a visit to the sleepy Welsh village of Dodder. Death is there to claim the souls of two of Dodder's inhabitants, but upon finding he has lost the parchment where God has written the names of the two who will die, Death decides to wait in the village and enjoy a normal human life until the parchment shows up.

"During my stay in Dodder, I hope to enjoy myself without pain," said Death.
"That," replied Mr Hayhoe, "is quite impossible."

Lacking in subtlety, he names himself John Death and regularly sharpens his scythe in earshot of the village pub, but his behaviour hardly registers as unusual in Dodder, a village of eccentrics whose inhabitants include a woman convinced she is a camel, a vicar who reads Jane Austen to his parishioners, a miserly old man so ridiculously evil more than one character questions whether he's even human, and a lonely man convinced women are a type of vegetable.

Meanwhile Joseph Bridle, impoverished suitor to Susie Dawe, daughter of the aforementioned evil miser, finds a piece of parchment floating in a pond where several people have previously drowned themselves. In the creepiest, best-written sequence of the novel, Joseph pulls out the paper though it burns with supernatural flames, for being in love, "he had power. He was on fire, too. He burnt, and yet was not destroyed." Upon the parchment is written his own name, and the name of the woman he loves. So begins a struggle between the forces of Eros and Thanatos, with man as a cosmic plaything caught in the middle.

Unclay is something of a companion novel to Mr Weston's Good Wine. Weston and Folly Down are mentioned in passing. Unclay is, however, a much bleaker and more downbeat novel than Mr Weston, and much more pessimistic about the possibility of an all-powerful, all-benevolent God. "He deals out as He chooses. Man can do nothing. God is no tame beast." The latter parts of the book are bogged down by endless monologues about the futility of the human condition and less-than-subtle imagery about how life is horrible and then you die. The ending is gloriously bleak but very rushed.

The story is populated by some of the most loathsome villains a reader is ever likely to encounter, including a man who spies on his own daughter while she bathes and tries to arrange her marriage to a farmer he knows will probably murder her. Powys's Death as a fictional character is no benevolent Grim Reaper like the versions found in Pratchett or Gaiman: he's a boastful, cruel bully who seduces and abandons mortal women at will and even attempts to sexually assault a nine-year-old girl, possibly as an allegory about how God lets children suffer. It's all very dreary and depressing, and there's probably a reason that unlike most of T.F. Powys's novels, Unclay has never been reprinted. Edit: as pointed out below, actually Unclay has indeed been recently reprinted

Unclay is interesting theologically, as a novel about the possibility of maltheism, and interesting as an addition to the canon of "Death Takes a Holiday" stories. Ultimately, I found it a trial to read, being over-long, bogged down by too many bleak monologues and no less than two scenes of sexual violence against a child.

[The Sundial · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Chapter Four of UNCLAY:

The day brightened; the dark cloud that had lowered upon the earth moved softly away in a thin mist; the sun shone warmly, and the stranger turned and saw Mr Hayhoe.
The clergyman was the first to speak.
‘If you have lost anything, my friend,’ he said to the man, who was now come quite close to him, ‘perhaps you will allow me to help you to find it?’
The man looked down anxiously at the ground; he did not reply, but said hurriedly, as though speaking to himself, ‘Such an unlucky accident as this has never happened in the memory of man, no, not since that foolish girl ate of the apple. Never before have I lost an order. Every command that has been committed to me to do, that command have I done until now.’
‘Tell me your name,’ asked Mr Hayhoe, who began to think that the poor man must have escaped from a madhouse, ‘so that, if I have the good fortune to discover your property, I may be able to restore to you what you have lost.’
‘My name is Death,’ answered the man.
‘A Suffolk family?’ rejoined Mr Hayhoe, ‘for I know a village in that county where your name is common, and I have seen it too writ- ten upon a tombstone in this neighbourhood. But I trust you will not think me rude if I ask you to tell me your Christian name too?’
‘I have never had one,’ replied Death simply, ‘though in coming here this morning I met a little girl who made fun of my beard and called me “John”.’
‘Oh, that must have been Winnie Huddy,’ cried Mr Hayhoe, ‘who only likes to be happy.


From the Introduction by JOHN GRAY

UNCLAY, a companion novel to MR WESTON’S GOOD WINE, deserves to be placed among the author’s finest work.
The last full-length novel of T. F. Powys, UNCLAY is the summation of his life’s work. Though not without precedents, the manner and the substance of this strange, compelling, not always comfortable book are uniquely his own. Written in his inimitable style – poetic and aphoristic, pared down and at the same time highly allusive – UNCLAY was first published in 1931. It has remained one of the least read books of a great English writer, and one reason for this strange state of affairs may be the picture of human life it offers.

Presented with lapidary finality in UNCLAY, Powys’s vision is deeply at odds with contemporary sensibility. Theodore Powys is a religious writer without any seeming vestige of orthodox belief, a dark poet who celebrates passing beauty and a stark realist who is also a supreme fabulist. Unless one unlocks these paradoxes one cannot fully understand his work, or appreciate the rare delights it contains.

www.sundialpress.co.uk

[Mary Baker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very unsettling allegory. I read one reviewer's comment that it is "grimly brilliant," and I agree. It is very witty and very cleverly and even beautifully written, but it is also very depressingly true observation of human weaknesses like cruelty, greed, self-centeredness, unwholesomeness, etc. Sometimes it is very funny, but usually not in a way that provides a cheerful or good-natured smile. I found myself very puzzled and discomfited by this book.

[Chris Percival · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is it OK to say this weird, very English, Christian (in a sense) meditation on death, love and life is... funny?

[zac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely unbelievable. Powys paints death in the most brutal, uncompromising, impartial way possible, but--though it's sometimes nearly too painful and graphic to follow--puts a proper limit to its threatening and nearly all-encompassing power. No punches are pulled in describing the universality and despair of death, but no illusions are made about its finality, for death is not final. It is the same with how Powys writes about love--that condescended reality, a shadow of what God has prepared for his children.

That is why Death calls himself a gift and strips a hanged man of his clothes before he visits Dodder; He merely brings about a process of shedding an eventually limiting layer of life, and is only a conduit for ultimate, divine reality. And that is why the command is to "Unclay"; to return to Earth what is rightfully hers, and to give to God what is rightfully his.

There is a chance that other theologians (or perhaps writers) were as keenly aware of this reality as Powys, but there is no chance anyone has communicated these truths as effectively as he.

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5
Weird, dark, hilarious, engrossing.

[Markl Davidson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would rate this book as “okay.” I didn’t like how young Daisy, Susie, and especially Winnie were, if they were going to be betrothed or seen as “women.” Also, I don’t like that Death has a beard. I can’t get over the old men with children, but I suppose otherwise the story was decent. Still, it doesn’t make up for pedophilia.

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many books are described as “fairy tales for grownups” but this one actually has the dreamlike, semi-logical and morally literal quality of a good fairy tale. Powys waxes philosophical and liturgical at turns as he moves stock image characters (Death: the Maiden: the Miser: the rich farmer: the poor farmer) from one square of the chessboard to the next. For all the book’s comments on men, women, mortality, camels, the human heart and Austen, I found myself thinking most about summer nights and what June can do to people. If Thomas Hardy could have described himself as “spiritual but not religious,” he might have written something like this.

[R.C. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two stars because the writing itself is well paced, engaging, and I do love an idyllic countryside. But my god, what misogynistic drivel. I don't know what happened to Powys to make him hate women as he did, but whatever it was, there's no excuse for the disdain on full display here. And while it appears that he despises all of humanity, as well as God, he takes special care in ensuring that all the women in his story are sex-obsessed objects for male pleasure and violence, or, not any better, merely caretakers of men. Oh, and this is applied to minors, too. The whole thing is a prettily written disgrace and I truly can't fathom why it got a modern day revival.

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm leaning towards 4.5 on this one.
https://wordpress.com/post/expositrix...

[Shubhu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Death is there to claim the souls of two of Dodder's inhabitants, but upon finding he has lost the parchment where God has written the names of the two who will die, Death decides to wait in the village and enjoy a normal human life until the parchment shows up.

"During my stay in Dodder, I hope to enjoy myself without pain," said Death.
"That," replied Mr Hayhoe, "is quite impossible."

Lacking in subtlety, he names himself John Death and regularly sharpens his scythe in earshot of the village pub, but his behaviour hardly registers as unusual in Dodder, a village of eccentrics whose inhabitants include a woman convinced she is a camel, a vicar who reads Jane Austen to his parishioners, a miserly old man so ridiculously evil more than one character questions whether he's even human, and a lonely man convinced women are a type of vegetable.

Meanwhile Joseph Bridle, impoverished suitor to Susie Dawe, daughter of the aforementioned evil miser, finds a piece of parchment floating in a pond where several people have previously drowned themselves. In the creepiest, best-written sequence of the novel, Joseph pulls out the paper though it burns with supernatural flames, for being in love, "he had power. He was on fire, too. He burnt, and yet was not destroyed." Upon the parchment is written his own name, and the name of the woman he loves. So begins a struggle between the forces of Eros and Thanatos, with man as a cosmic plaything caught in the middle.

Unclay is something of a companion novel to Mr Weston's Good Wine. Weston and Folly Down are mentioned in passing. Unclay is, however, a much bleaker and more downbeat novel than Mr Weston, and much more pessimistic about the possibility of an all-powerful, all-benevolent God. "He deals out as He chooses. Man can do nothing. God is no tame beast." The latter parts of the book are bogged down by endless monologues about the futility of the human condition and less-than-subtle imagery about how life is horrible and then you die. The ending is gloriously bleak but very rushed.

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Death takes a holiday to live the life of a human in a small village after he loses the piece of paper that held the names of the people he was sent there to reap. A simple allegory with a nasty black streak of black humor at its core, it is one of the most offbeat things I've read this year.

From the jump off it is obvious this inspired both Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. It's wry, dry, observational: everything I've come to appreciate (luckily at a distance) about British humor (tm). But there is a gentle almost poetic sadness over the whole book as it deals with the intertwined nature of love and death.

And Death is quite the character here, bedding the local women, maybe grave robbing to pay his way, and the bane of his relaxation is a precocious nine-year-old girl. The other assorted characters are memorable as well. There is Solly, a man afraid of women so he pretends they are vegetables, Sally, who thinks she is a camel, the wickedly cruel Mr. Mere, and Daisy, the prostitute who is reformed after discovering the works of Jane Austen.

Powys' story is probably at his weakest when he sidelines the plot to go into his views on female psychology, but it's kind of harmless fun in a 1930s redpill way. Overall, I really enjoyed this, I got strong Watership Down vibes, but swap the allegorical rabbits out for allegorical people. I love that word 'allegorical'. Allegorical. Okay I'm done now.

[A2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like whoa, oddly brilliant and brilliantly odd, entirely mind-consuming and slightly ethereal. Including some of the most interesting characters I've come across: Mr. Solly, who has thick nut-bushes to keep Love out (women are vegetables to him), Mr. Hayhoe (the church guy, quite jolly and oblivious, lover of Jane Austen even more than the Bible), Winnie Huddy (a nine-year old with tricks up her sleeve), Susie Dawe (everyone wants her), Lord Bullman, Joe Bridle (doomed?), Mr. Mere (rich, quite the monster), and, of course, John Death (realist-allegorical with a scythe, a man of strange impulses). Obviously the puns on "Death" are everywhere but rather than being funny they add dimension to the prose (other abstract words like Love are always capitalized). And how about that title? The ingenious word "unclay" appears approximately three times in the book, hovering over the story like a storm cloud. Dodder is a gem of a village, remote enough to be self-contained. The language is circa 1931 with a philosophical-theological bent: boring when taken seriously, but unsurpassed as the fabric of this sui generis novel, sadly overlooked. Thank you, New Directions, for publishing such a beautiful volume!

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is a work of genius but, because it's so unlike anything that's NOT by TF Powys, it's hard to tell.

I read Mr Weston's Good Wine for A level a long time ago and it's one of the books that stayed with me. I thought I should give this a try.

How to describe it? It's sort of the missing link between Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, Viv Stanshall's Sir Henry at Rawlinson End and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, if you can imagine it.

The Angel of Death arrives in a small English village and promptly loses his instructions, so stays around on holiday, and has an affair with most of the women.

Love is crueller than Death.

He occasionally makes generalised comments about women that are so unlike any women I've ever known that I'm wondering: what? But if one interprets those comments as though women are genetic structure, it just about makes sense (that's where the Dawkins comes in). And also, the comments all make sense as a generalisation about women in TF Powys novels.

I think this novel bears no resemblance to any real reality, but it's kind of a reality that's different from our own.

Glorious (I think). You probably have to read it for yourself.

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Though good cannot come from evil, laughter can." An utterly charming (and, in the end, affecting) novel, the first I've read by Powys. Sort of like Evelyn Waugh meets Charles Williams. I was also put in mind of Hilary Mantel's _Fludd_, in which a mysterious stranger arrives in a small English village very much like Dodder. England seems to have a dispensation for more-or-less heterodox metaphysical writers of this sort: the aforementioned Williams and G.K. Chesterton, for example. It is utterly unsurprising to learn that Nietzsche was deeply admired by Powys. _Unclay_ is sprinkled with compact, shocking, aphoristic expressions--like the one above--that might have been mouthed by Zarathustra. It is equally unsurprisingly to learn that Powys held Henry Fielding in similar high regard. The satirical edge of _Unclay_, like that of _Tom Jones_, is more Horatian than Juvenalian (and perhaps at times more Menippean than Horatian...); its critique of provincial mores never seems to come at the expense of readability or of fun.

[joan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Either under-edited or heavily over-worked. At times very mannered, as if impersonating his earlier works. Cut 100 pages of confused and clashing passages and you’d have a powerful work.

Love and death, love conquers death, Christ conquered death, sin brought death into the world, death conquers all, God ordains and measures out all lives..

TF is reaching for a way to describe the ineffable, people’s final furthest motives and desires, and sometimes his grasp exceeds his reach so much that sentences fall apart into heap of broken up words – which then gives the impression that he no longer much cares whether he is succeeding or not. The extreme cruelty of many scenes doesn’t help dispel this impression. And then comic scenes are juxtaposed..

The inner lives of other people, or other tribes - like farmers or young women - are mysterious, and may strike one as frighteningly unknowable and different.. but to conclude, and to do so *in a novel* – the vessel in which such dangerous mysteries can be made safe – that only death is the unifier.. this is not good.

[Margot DV · Rating 3 out of 5]

What an interesting book - very much a mixed bag! I would say I enjoyed it overall - it generally had a cool premise, the idea is very original and it's a cool meditation on life/death/etc. And it had many lines that I really liked. I definitely think it was too long - there was about 100 pages in the middle that could have been drastically cut down or removed lol. But when the plot was actually moving it was engaging. Another thing I didn't like was the way women were represented (despite a condemnation of the violence against women depicted in the book, it still sometimes seemed like it was being affirmed) and

Also, I did quite like the end but it felt very rushed (this happened sometimes at other points - it would go slow for a while on the less interesting parts and then speed up something I was excited to read about in detail) - I wished more time had been spent wrapping up the plot and themes.

[Mart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine Dickens, Greene and Pratchett were to meet in a small country pub as they holidayed in the afterlife and then - while slowly emptying the unlucky landlord's winecellar of His good dark wines - they wrote about all the humans they'd left behind and the Gods and Angels they'd met since being Unclayed themselves. All the brutality, grace and mystery of humans and their Gods would be anthropomorphised only to be fondly dissected and described with the gentlest wit and greatest respect the great Authours could inspire within each other. This is what T. F. Powys achieves with his writing: he knows there is no line between God and Humanity, Death and Love, Endings and Beginnings. Utterly superb!

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm done here. I read about half of this book, put it down and just can't get started again. The first part is mildly amusing enough, and actually contains some plot; however as the "story" progresses it gets lost in the author's pseudophilosophical maunderings about whatever strikes his fancy--often marriage, sex, etc. "Susie pranced down the road" (four or five pages of diversion re: marriage, sex, descendants, whatever). "She met old Mrs Mopp" (several pages of digressions on the miseries of old age)...and by that time I've lost interest several times over.
This book is supposed to be lighthearted, and it was for just under half of it. After that, you're on your own. I don't care anymore.

[Hallie Kreppein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. I really like the concept of this book and how death is personified as Mr. John Death. Imagine losing your little paper of people to kill and while youre searching for it you acquire a newfound zest for life! I like the uniqueness of this story and how every character you meet has some sort of interesting quirk. One man is afraid of women and thinks they are vegetables and some lady is convinced that she is a camel. However, the weird quirks of this book all had a great intended meaning about death and love that I actually really liked. As death takes his vacation after losing his paper he really experiences what it is like to live, lust, love, etc. Says a lot about taking a nice vacation. Very lovely read

[Lauren Wickwire · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d give this book five stars for its exceptional writing. The parables are surprisingly deep, each one made me stop and think, and many moments are genuinely funny. I also loved the complex, mostly dark characters and the way they are described with such vivid detail, as well as the settings, which are written with so much personality that they feel alive on the page.

However, the book was written in the 1930s, and that definitely shows. There are instances of violence, blatant misogyny and even references to pedophilia that are uncomfortable to read today.

The ending also fell flat for me. After so many thoughtful parables, I expected the finale to be the most powerful moment, but instead it felt more like tying a neat bow on a strangely wrapped, chaotic package. It has its charm, but it doesn't quite come together.

[Zachary Mays · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and melancholy novel. Powys's characters and settings are simple and comforting, and in a way his philosophy is a simple one too. But he is never simplistic, and he manages to capture all the beautiful complications of life with characters and symbols that seem obvious and familiar, but in reality never are. Like Mr. Weston, this book is steeped in a Christian sensibility that is simultaneously "blasphemous" and pious. Powys's strange approach and idiosyncratic spirituality put him head and shoulders above other well-known Christian allegorists of the 20th Century.