Weymouth Sands Book

Weymouth Sands is the sea.

That's the best way I can encapsulate the essence of this book. Like waves, storylines surge, gain momentum and peter out without consequence as others suddenly come crashing into the scene with unexpected force, picking up the remains of the former and whirling them into new directions. All this movement is everything and, as such, leads nowhere. The myriad stories contained in this grandiose soap opera, like water, swirl and recirculate, take on new form, at times frightening and at times serene.

Cowper Powys might beg to differ, but I felt that reading this book is like taking a peek into the mind of Spinoza's God, where everything that happens anywhere in existence is part of an endlessly complex and ultimately inconsequential chain of cause and effect, wherein the agency of a human mind is as critical a determinant of the course of history as the direction of the wind.

JCP's ecstatic and masturbatory writing is, as usual, seething with colourful details so numerous they can only be admired as a whole, like a cloud of plankton. Only in this book it did get a tad too much at times; insofar as there is one, the plot takes place over the course of a week and is stretched so thin as to basically be irrelevant. The way to get through it is to let the tug and pull of the psyches of its many characters carry you either for as long as you can take it or until they spit you, with the turn of the last page, back onto dry land.

So yeah, unlike A Glastonbury Romance , which was a lot more epic in scope and mystical in content, this is the Cowper Powys equivalent of a comedy of manners, a small intimate book about people. The mind of each character is a turbulent sea of its own, and what strangely wonderful characters they are: Gypsy May, the sardonic clown Jerry Cobbold, the jobber Adam Skald, the woeful and wistful Perdita Wane (what a great name!), the chilly and withdrawn agent of evil Dr Brush… and possibly the most disturbing author insert of all time, Sylvanus Cobbold.

This book delves a lot into what I can only describe as... family-friendly paedophilia? Cowper Powys was a self-declared paedophile who derived sexual pleasure from sitting young girls on his lap, a fact that tormented his consciousness but that he was also proud to be able to control through masturbation (I'm paraphrasing, don't shoot the messenger). So not a child molester, so to speak (that we know of, anyway). Sylvanus Cobbold has this same fetish, and throughout the book there is this highly dubious conflict between him and the authorities, who don't like his befriending the town's young girls who he then sleeps with - and the author goes to greath lengths to emphasise that literally all they do is just sleep. It's a strange sort of self-exploration/self-justification that depending on your mood can either be disturbingly wonderful or wonderfully disturbing.

An epilogue of sorts

When we finally reach the chapter told from Cobbold's POV and we discover he has befriended the shimmering reflection of a ray of sunlight projected onto a wall from a bucketful of water, a dancing sprite he calls Trivia, I was at once sure of two things: that that was one of the most beautiful things I had ever read and that I was seriously ready for a break from Cowper Powys. Seriously, I have read two and a half of this guy's books in a row. This is some heavy shit. I need to step out of his brain for a minute lest I forget myself and start conversing with the specks of humidity growing on the corners of my office wall. He is the most brilliant author I have discovered in a long time, but I need to breathe. Will return to him in due time.