Amusingly, when I was drafting my 1961 Club posts, I discovered a 1925 Club post buried in my drafts that I apparently forgot to publish last October. Oops! Anyway, here are my thoughts on Mr Tasker’s Gods by T.F. Powys, six months late…
T.F. Powys is probably best known for Mr Weston’s Good Wine, a very good novel about God visiting a rural community (with a title somewhat inexplicably drawn from Jane Austen’s Emma). I’ve tried a few of his other novels in the years since I read that one, and there’s a lot I like about him, but a lot I find less appealing – he has a wit that combines lightness and savagery, but almost no sense of momentum. How would Mr Tasker’s Gods fare?
Well, largely more of the same. His writing is unusual, sharp, and blackly comic – his characters are largely reprehensible – and his plots are hard to identify. To give you a sense of the writing, here is a section that is fairly incidental to whatever plot there is:
His daughters did not object to the source of the money, as long as they received it. Corpses cut down from bedposts, corpses fished up from backwaters, dead infants taken from sewers, shepherds from barns, girls from rivers, and old gentlemen from under trains, all generously helped to provide these young ladies with new hats. So, from their point of view, killing oneself or getting murdered became a deed of Christian charity. And an extra decayed corpse or two in the year gave them a chance to buy a king’s box of milk-chocolate or a motor veil.
Mr Tasker is in the title, but I’m not sure he’s the main character. He is a single-minded pig farmer, and the focus of that mind is, indeed, pigs: they are the ‘gods’ of the title. He treats them reverently and kindly, while abusing his daughter and ignoring everyone else. As the novel opens, his wastrel father is arriving in the village, cruel and stupid and bound to make life harder for everyone.
But perhaps the main characters are Reverend Turnbull and his three sons. One of is a worldly vicar, one is a penny-pinching doctor, and the third is put-upon innocent. Henry is a simpleton, in the parlance of the time, and has had an unpleasant time in Canada before returning to the family home to be treated as the lowliest family servant. He is horrified about a cow’s carcass being fed to the pigs, and his only friend is the vicar of a neighbouring parish (also called Henry, for reasons best known to Powys, but referred to by his surname, Neville). Neville is loathed by his parishioners, simply because the ball rolled in that direction, but the two Henrys are the only sympathetic characters in Mr Tasker’s Gods.
On the novel goes, with characters harming each other intentionally or (more rarely) unintentionally. A maid becomes a prostitute when she goes to town, and when one of the better known villagers dies during an ‘appointment’, things have to get covered up. Which sounds like a plot but, again, it really just adds to the atmosphere of the book, rather than to a storyline with any sense of beginning, middle, or end.
I’ve read a review referring to Mr Tasker’s Gods as a ‘horrible fable of darkness swamping the light’, and I can see how the reviewer came to that conclusion. For me, it has the tone of a fable – but not the message. It is worth reading for how distinct it is – Powys really does have a sensibility all of his own – but not if you want any conclusions. You enter a horrible world, you are alternatively amused and reviled by what goes on in it, and you leave. Neither you nor any of the characters have learned anything. I recommend Mr Tasker’s Gods as an experience, and as a writer doing exactly what he purposed to do, and doing it rather well. But why he chose to do it, I couldn’t say.
One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes is one of the worst-kept secrets of the mid-20th century, isn’t it? She isn’t a household name, and you might not even find that book in the average bookshop, but it’s well-known that One Fine Day is an absolutely extraordinary novel of life immediately after World War Two. Some of her stories are in print with Persephone, and her novel My Husband Simon was one of the first titles in the British Library Women Writers series – but, for such a well-regarded author, some of her books still remain a mystery.
