Reviews for Weymouth Sands

The average rating for Weymouth Sands based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-12-23 00:00:00 Michael Walls Some rather rambling thoughts... Here are the first couple of paragraphs which, more than anything I could say here, set out both the strengths and the problems with JCP's style. In particular, at least for me, the first sentence is a wonderfully complex and concise observation of nature, the second moves rapidly towards JCP's own unique, eccentric, concept of the Universe (and his granting of a certain kind of consciousness to things that do not warrant it), which I personally find instantly irritating: "The Sea lost nothing of the swallowing identity of its great outer mass of waters in the emphatic, individual character of each particular wave. Each wave, as it rolled in upon the high-pebbled beach, was an epitome of the whole body of the sea, and carried with it all the vast mysterious quality of the earth's ancient antagonist. Such at any rate was the impression that Magnus Muir ' tutor in Latin to backward boys ' received from the waves on Weymouth Beach as in the early twilight of a dark January afternoon, having dismissed his last pupil for the day and hurriedly crossed the road and the esplanade, he stood on the wet pebbles and surveyed the turbulent expanse of water. Lean, bony and rugged, with hollow cheeks and high cheekbones, the consciousness that looked out from his grey eyes assumed an expression that would have been very difficult for the cleverest onlooker to analyze or define. It was certainly to no easy, relaxed enjoyment of those darkening waves that Magnus was now yielding himself in his release from his day's labour. His face was wrought up rather than relaxed, strained rather than casual, grim rather than complacent; and if he had been a priest, occupied with the rendering of some complicated fragment of ancient liturgy, he could not have appeared more gravely concentrated." His skill with character description, which I love, is nicely on display here. In particular the rhythm of the final sentence is just fantastic. One can also certainly hear echoes of both Hardy and James in the sentence structure. While his essentialism (i.e. "Woman" does/is X) grates, he can certainly not be accused of misogyny - "…as if by the mere hugging of her knees between her arms she could return to that unconscious state in which twenty-six years ago she lay, an embryo-mite, before she was born into a world like this; a world in which for a woman not to be beautiful, not to be seductive and appealing, means after all a series of futile desperations, of shifts and make-shifts, of pitiful and sorrowful turnings to the wall." for example. His focus is on a certain kind of solitude, which is not the same as being deliberately isolated or selfish, that allows one to reveal the connection, the continuity, between that which is self and that which is non-self - a kind of ecstatic transcendence - is appealing, to a certain extent, but the use of terms like "soul" and "consciousness" with a rather wild abandon, often leads to confusion and pseudo -mysticism. Here are a couple of quotes to give you an idea of those parts of his writing most likely to put you off - of course it is entirely unfair to put them here out of context, but hopefully their length will do much to mitigate that: "And the obliviousness of Rodney and Daisy to that crying of the gulls above Spy Croft added a new burden, a new weight, a new quota of insensibility to the age-old indifference of so many human souls of the two Boroughs to the objects and to the sounds that had become the tutelary background of the place. To a mind not grown quite callous to what Mr. Gaul would have called the "representative potentiality of inanimate identities" it might be easily conceived that between St. Alban's Head, the White Nose, the Nothe, Chesil Beach, the Breakwater, the Town Bridge, the White Horse, Hardy's Monument, King George's Statue, St. John's Spire, the Jubilee Clock, and this perpetual crying of sea-gulls and advancing and retreating of sea-tides, there might have arisen, in their long confederacy, a brooding patience, resembling that of an organic Being; a patience that approached, if it never could quite attain, the faint, dim embryonic half-consciousness that brooded in the sea-weeds, the sea-shells, the sea-anemones, the star-fish and jelly-fish, that lay submerged along those beaches and among those rock-pools." *********** "He doesn't play like a musician," she thought. "I know he is making mistakes." But she had hardly thought, "He is making mistakes. He is playing badly" than she felt compelled to shut her eyes. An immense flood of happiness lifted her up and carried her away. Her irritation with this man of many masks dropped from her and sank as if into deep water. Her revulsion against Lucinda fell away, too, sinking down like a pebble-stone. Her loneliness, her anxiety, her pessimism, all were submerged. She was herself, and yet not herself! She became a disembodied spirit that floated in, and over, this quivering flood. Across these waves she skimmed, light as a seamew; and, as the man went on playing, it was as if every moment in her past life, when she had been happy, darted up from its hiding-place, an arrowy jet of gleaming luminosity, and diffused itself through the whole air on which she floated; till she felt as if she were drifting through the liquid ether of a substance that resembled mother-of-pearl. But when all that had ever thrilled her, whether of taste, or touch, or sight, or smell, was transformed into a super-ether, this ether itself melted into that sound-sea, that rolled and rippled and towered and toppled and carried her along. Everything became sound. Thought had no reality. Things had no substance. Memory had no meaning, hope no shape. Sound was life. Sound was death. Sound was fate. Sound was the pouring forth, out of the abyss, of something beyond all reason and all knowledge! She herself, the Perdita she lived with, became a sound among other sounds, a sound that was nothing but the rising and falling of darkness and light. Past and future were lost in each other. Nor did any present that could be called a present take their place. This conscious sound, that had been Perdita's soul, was a thing that had neither inward nor outward, neither subject nor object. It was an Absolute, self-existent, self-generated, self-complete. Only it kept breaking up into innumerable waves of darkness and light, that fell and rose, rose and fell, till they were an eternal oneness in their manifold, and an eternal manifold in their oneness . . ." There is enough hesitancy in these passages (note the "might" in the first passage for example) for me to be more forgiving, though I would expect others may not agree. It is not that I think he is wrong in, for example, his description of Perdita's experience (and what would it mean to say someone was "wrong" when describing such a thing?) and I accept that he is attempting to render a certain phenomenon in prose that it may not be possible to render in language, but there is something about those exclamation marks in particular that annoys me. However, JCP is also the only writer I know who could write something like this: "Jerry had indeed something in him that went beyond Rabelaisianism, in that he not only could get an ecstasy of curious satisfaction from the most drab, ordinary, homely, realistic aspects of what might be called the excremental under-tides of existence but he could slough off his loathing for humanity in this contemplation and grow gay, child-like, guileless. " Which I would be hard-pressed to find fault with. I don't know. He is certainly on of the great writers, not least for his uniqueness and his willingness to commit completely to an expression of his world-view, reader-be-damned. I certainly intend to read all his books. But I also don't think he is for everyone, nor is he someone I would be quick to recommend. However, one thing I would say is that it is important to allow him a certain amount of time, say 100 pages or so, to get under your skin before you dismiss him. I find that it always takes me a while to submit and cease my resistance, and I am glad when I do. Regardless, we you to be interested in reading him, I would not suggest starting here. Judging by the reviews it seems Wolf Solent is a good starting place.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-10-02 00:00:00 Tom Hofer 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.