From The New Yorker

This immense, robustly imagined novel was whittled down by more than five hundred pages when it was first published, in 1951. Powys’s original conception is here restored, a dense, complex merging of modern psychology and ancient mythology. In Wales in the year 499, the ruling Celts learn that the Saxons and the forest people are advancing against them; Porius, the son of the Celt prince, awaits the coming battle while ruminating on the eternal conflicts between male and female, nature and humankind, pagan and Christian. No mere philosopher, he also wields a corpse as a weapon and sleeps with a giantess. The line between reality and reverie is not always clearly demarcated, and the epic number of characters is often bewildering, but the astutely envisaged world and the operatic romantic couplings quickly draw in the reader.
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Review

"Porius is a complex epic in which passages of galloping action contend with long metaphysical digressions; the novel is electrifying... The pages of Porius are geysers of words, sometimes poetic and profound... Porius is a great, exhilarating work." -- Wall Street Journal

"A gigantic novel (which includes giants in its cast) set in Wales in 499 ad... One can only hope that this mythic masterpiece will now find the readers that it deserves, for it is, as critics have argued, fit to be compared both for ambition and achievement with Ulysses, while the biography, Descents of Memory, deserves to stand with Richard Ellmann's James Joyce as a major work about a major artist." -- Margaret Drabble, The Times Literary Supplement

"If [a] casual reader loves to inhabit a fully realized landscape and to be drawn deep into the mind and heart of a unique and fascinating character, Porius might just be worth the many hours said reader must invest... I would suggest that in this massive tome, Powys may have more of significance to offer us than Tolkien or Lewis or White." -- Globe & Mail (Toronto)

"Readers of J.R.R. Tolkien, Mervyn Peake and J.K. Rowling might find something to their taste in Porius... Epic and elemental." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

"[An] immense, robustly imagined novel... A dense, complex merging of modern psychology and ancient mythology. ... The astutely envisaged world and the operatic romantic couplings quickly draw in the reader." -- The New Yorker

About the Author

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) lived in the United States as well as his native England. The author of ten novels, including A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, and Maiden Castle, as well as many works of criticism and philosophy, he was the son of a vicar and a descendant of the poets Donne and Cowper.