Kirjahaku

Mr Tasker's Gods was T. F. Powys's first novel. Written during the First World War it wasn't published until 1925. It is an unsettling work constantly showing the brutal reality behind the facades. Mr Tasker himself, on the surface, a respectable farmer and God abiding churchwarden is, in fact, 'a brute beast of the most foul nature' Many of the initial reviews were hostile, but that was largely because of the author's treatment of the church. It is under constant attack with the services being described as 'a sort of roll-call to enable authority to retain a proper hold upon the people'. Faber Finds are reissuing six works by T. F. Powys: Mr Tasker's Gods, Mark Only, Mockery Gap, Innocent Birds, Fables and God's Eyes A-Twinkle.

God's Eyes A-Twinkle offers a conspectus of thirty eight short stories by T. F. Powys drawn from the following collections: Bottle's Path; No Painted Plumage; Captain Patch; The House with the Echo; The White Paternoster; The Left Leg. The stories included are: A Loud Lie; Darkness and Nathaniel; Only the Devil; The Seaweed and the Cuckoo-Clock; Jesus' Walk; The Key of the Field; I Came as a Bride; The Gong; The White Weathercock; When Thou wast Naked; Charlotte Bennett; John Pardy and the Waves; Mr Pim and the Holy Crumb; King Duck; The Bucket and the Rope; The Devil; The Only Penitent; The White Paternoster; The Stone and Mr Thomas; My Money; Christ in the Cupboard; Archdeacon Truggin; The Left Leg; A Christmas Gift; The Candle and the Slow-Worm; The Lonely Lady; The Rival Pastors; The Golden Gates; The Dog and the Lantern; Captain Patch; No Room; The Dewpond; Bottle's Path; Gold; In Dull Devonshire; Lie The Down, Oddity!; John Told and the Worm; The Corpse and the Flea.Charles Prentice, who had been T. F. Powys' editor, concludes his preface in a way that would be difficult to better, 'They (the stories) should all be read slowly. Powys is not a literalist; his words convey more than their face value. These stories treat of the general and unalterable, with subtlety of thought and feeling, and with simplicity of presentation. Wisdom and humour are embedded in them. They reveal the infinite mystery, the fluid inconsistencies of life. They are delicate, wiry and human. 'God's eyes' are 'a-twinkle'. But the main business is the incalculable doings of that oddity Man.' In addition to God's Eyes A-Twinkle, Faber Finds are reissuing the following T. F. Powys books: Mr Tasker's Gods; Mark Only; Fables; Mockery Gap; Innocent Birds.

'Heavy clouds darkened the Dodderdown Church one Sunday in December. There was a baptism in progress that afternoon.' A little later on, 'What name?' he asked crossly. 'Mark' replied Mr Andrews, and then added a little louder, 'Mark only.' . . . . 'Mark Only, I baptize thee in the name of the Holy Ghost.' A mistake, of course, but this accident of nomenclature sets the principal character on a life of misfortune. Faber Finds are reissuing six works by T. F. Powys: Mr Tasker's Gods, Mark Only, Mockery Gap, Innocent Birds, Fables and God's Eyes A-Twinkle.

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.

'A village is like a stage that retains the same scenery throughout all the acts of the play. The actors come and go, and walk to and fro, with gestures that their passions fair or foul use them to... A country village has a way now and again of clearing out all its inhabitants in one rush, as though it were grown tired of that particular combination of human destinies, and shakes itself free of them as a tree might do of unwelcome leaves..'The action of T.F. Powys' blackly absorbing, deeply characteristic Innocent Birds unfolds in the English croft of Madder, an ostensibly sleepy and settled milieu where the local people, nonetheless, are prone to acting on impulses and urges that have the power to bring themselves (and others) to ruin. 'There is Mr. Bugby, who buys "The Silent Woman" because of the sinister coincidence that successive keepers of that tavern were speedily widowed. There is Maud Chick, an imbecile girl longing to have a baby, whom Mr. Bugby avoids after one experience; and Polly Wimple, prim Miss Pettifer's maid whom he does not avoid, to her great cost. A cormorant, far from the sea, that flaps and roosts arbitrarily at dusk whenever anything especially morbid or malicious is about to take place, is an apt metaphor for a shadowy flight of the author's imagination...'Time, June 1926

Mockery Gap is the story of a tiny village on the coast of England, and a series of events arising out of the complex currents set flowing in this simple community by the chance remarks of a chance visitor. This is Mr James Tarr, a gentleman of ethnological pursuits with a desire to impress himself firmly upon people. He exercises this passion on the inhabitants of Mockery Gap, and the effect of carefully-weighted suggestion upon minds given to credulity and superstition makes for far-reaching and devastating consequences."By all conventional standards, T F Powys is the least modern of writers. His novels and short stories are set in a landscape as far removed as possible from anything smart or urban - a fantastical version of English village life, in which human emotions work themselves out against a backdrop of brooding countryside... Writing as an allegorist or fabulist rather than any sort of conventional realist, Theodore Powys looks not to the present or the future, but to the past. He sets his tales in a grotesquely exaggerated rural landscape, not because he has any nostalgia for the way of life it may once have contained, but because, by doing so, he is free to strip human beings down to their barest elements - their lust, greed, cruelty and stupidity, and the mixture of dread and yearning with which they respond to the prospect of death." John Gray, New Statesman

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.