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Summary
‘What I’ve tried to do in this tale is to invent a group of really mad people who have the fantastic and grotesquely humorous extravagance that, afer all, is an element in life’.
So wrote John Cowper Powys himself in his prefatory note to this novel first published in 1952. In this ‘wild book’ Powys creates a ‘Philosophy of the Demented’ expressing fundamental truths about madness and sanity.
Most of the novel, though, like so much of his later fiction, it is more a fantasy, takes place in Glint Hall, a lunatic asylum. The two main characters are John Hush and Tenna Sheer. They fall in love. The rapidly developing, psychologically complex narrative centres on ‘Hush’s organizationof a conspiracy of revolt amongst the most fantastically crazy of the inmates’. It makes for a strange, disturbing, and yet, at times, funny read.
