Why do I love Margaret Drabble? Let me count the ways, but first let's start with this, from The Guardian, August 11 2006: "The realm of John Cowper Powys is dangerous. The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end. There is always another book to discover, another work to reread. Like Tolkien, Powys has invented another country, densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien's, but it is as compelling, and it has more air."
MAIDEN CASTLE
"At the centre of the novel is the aptly named Dud No-man, a historical novelist widowed after a yearlong unconsummated marriage to a woman who continues to haunt him. Inspired by pity and his own deep loneliness, Dud takes Wizzie Ravelston, an itinerant circus performer, into his home and heart. ...As the characters in Maiden Castle struggle with the perplexities of love, desire and faith - readjusting their sights and affections - it is the looming fortress of Maiden Castle that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives." (text courtesy of the Powys Society official website)
From p. 75 of the text, Colgate University Press edition, 1994:
He knew well how frightened he was, for his fear totally transformed, as they stood there at the bottom of those steps, the normal processes of time and space. His fear had the effect of making each single second, each tick of the eternal watch in the pocket of the Creator, transmute itself, like a vision in a magician's mirror, into a shifting impression that was composed of space as well as of time. The "space" of this transmuted experience, this vision over which a psychological magnifiing-glass was being projected back and forth with every breath he took, was the trodden grass and clinging mud of the fair-field; but the time-element in these magnified fear-seconds extended itself so far beyond the present as to throw a magical desirableness over both a past and a future that were free from the engrossing panic of the moment. He was even able, while his feet were still on the steps of the caravan, as much did the nervous fear he suffered extend the content of the passsing seconds, to tell himself a story about living in unruffled peace forever, with the "eidolon" of his wife visiting him daily while both Wizzie and Thuella melted into thin air.
[Photos: Maiden Castle is the largest Iron Age hill fort in Europe and covers an area of 47 acres, a large area, equivalent to 50 football pitches. 'Maiden' derives from the Celtic 'Mai Dun' which means 'great hill'. It is situated just 2 miles south of Dorchester in Dorset. The earthworks are immense, some ramparts rising to a height of 6 metres (20 feet) today, they have previously been even higher. Sometimes called The 'War' Cemetery--bodies of 38 Iron Age warriors were uncovered during an excavation in the 20th century. This is evidence of a Roman attack on the fort. One of the burials had a Roman spearhead embedded in the spine. (Text courtesy of www.photographers-resource.co.uk, photos courtesy of BBC.)]
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| "...with the 'eidolon' of his wife visiting..." (an eidolon is an image, idol, double, apparition, phantom, ghost of a person, living or dead) Photo courtesy of Dave McAleavy, Glasgow, Scotland. www.mcaleavy.org |
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