Unclay

by T. F. Powys

Overview

T. F. Powys is a forgotten genius like no other—and Unclay is his masterpiece

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811228190
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/27/2018
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	558,977
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

T. F. Powys (1875-1953), a novelist and short-story writer, belonged to one of the most remarkable literary families (his brothers include John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys). He was a man who rarely left home or traveled by car, who claimed to love monotony, and who “never gave so much as a sunflower-seed for the busy, practical life.”

Editorial Reviews

08/20/2018
In this intriguing, slightly musty novel originally published in 1931, Powys (Mr. Weston’s Good Wine) fleshes out Death as a character, from grim reaper to a dandified hero, an instrument of consolation and consummation rather than destruction. Having lost a parchment on which the names of his next two victims are written, a mortified Death must linger in the rural British town of Dodder, picking up odd jobs (mower, sexton) while trying to recover his document. He is as skilled at seduction as he is with a scythe, though one local beauty, Susie Dawe, kindles in the proud figure novel feelings: jealousy, sorrow, and love, whose “trade is to hurt and destroy.” Powys’s quaint village brims with eccentrics and sinners, and gentle humor exists alongside a brutal frankness about power and sex. Susie’s father invites suitors to spy on her through a peephole in her bedroom and arranges her marriage to a loathsome sadist, while the local nobleman, Lord Bullman, contemplates reinstating the feudal right of prima nocta. Powys has a tic-like reliance on apercus, which can be intriguing or almost comically banal (“To drink one opens one’s mouth”), but the overall effect is numbing. Nonetheless, it is hard not to succumb to the strange, animating energy in Powys’s allegorical tale about Death’s redeeming qualities. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Unclay is such an odd and unlikely book that it seems scarcely more real than the fictional books Borges delighted in. Behold visions that owe a debt to Blake and the novel’s theological concerns and earthy humor harken back to Swift, but Powys’s ambivalence seems hyper-contemporary: I loved this book."

Tor.com - Matthew Keeley

"Mr. Powys is not a writer for everybody, but I am sure that he is a writer for posterity: indeed, of living authors I consider him the most notable, both as a thinker and a stylist."

Sylvia Townsend Werner

"An esoteric genius: his books are puzzling, engaging, and illuminating, glowing with a gentle, a half eerie light, humane, ironic and wise. Powys gives pleasure and delight, unique and surprising music."

The New York Times

"Grimly brilliant."

The Sunday Times - John Carey

"His masterpiece."

Washington Post

"Heretical, scandalous, and mocking, but essentially parables."

Jorge Luis Borges

"Very few 20th-century authors have the knack of writing convincingly of first and last things. T.F. Powys is one of them. "

New Statesman - John Gray

"One of the most original of all English storytellers. T.F. Powys’s novels and the powerful Unclay ‘stand up like oaks.’"

TLS

★ 2018-09-02

A reissue of an amusing 1931 work by this British author that describes the strange doings among rural villagers and how they're affected by the arrival of an outsider.

"Country people do like oddities," Powys writes in this wry allegory. "There would be no pleasure for them if all their neighbors were ordinary." One day in the English village of Dodder, Death misplaces the parchment with his latest orders to "unclay" two people. Joe Bridle finds it and sees his name and that of his true love, Susie Dawe. Joe's Aunt Sarah thinks she is a camel, which suits Mr. Balliboy, a man who decides he would like to marry a beast of burden. Nine-year-old Winnie, who has an answer for everything, sets her cap for Mr. Solly, who believes women are turnips and other vegetables. The Rev. Hayhoe believes anything by Jane Austen "to be almost as necessary to salvation" as the Bible. But why is the mysterious Tinker Jar weeping? And what message does Winnie receive from the Angel Gabriel? Powys (1875-1953), brother of the novelist John Cowper Powys, gained some fame for the 1927 novel Mr. Weston's Good Wine (a phrase from Austen's Emma), in which the title character, who is apparently God, visits a rural village. This novel follows a similar parablelike pattern, with Death in the supernatural role. The plot loosely follows three men's pursuits of Susie while the author observes the oddities of innocents, eccentrics, and grotesques. The villagers often dwell on amorous activity that ranges from arcadian to earthy to droit de seigneur and one suitor's sadistic bent. The voice is satirical but generally gentle, even bumpkin-esque, and sometimes precious, calling to mind Swift, Twain, Austen, and Jerome K. Jerome. It manages masterfully to cover the spectrum of human failings, from petty to vile, with insight and humor.

A delightful entertainment with a wit too rarely seen now in fiction.

Kirkus Reviews