Books by T. F. Powys

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."e;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."e; John Gray, New Statesman

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; 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.

The White Weathercock; The Devil; The White Paternoster; The Left Leg; The Lonely Lady; The Rival Pastors; The Golden Gates; The Dog and the Lantern; The Corpse and the Flea.Charles Prentice, who had been T.

'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 "e;The Silent Woman"e; 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

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.

'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.