Mr. Tasker's gods (edition 1929)

The TF Powys’ novels that I have read have always seemed to come from an earlier era than the one they were written in. Where Mansfield and Forster seem a part almost of the current era in their style and in the characterisation, Powys’ villages and their inhabitants seem primal. His way of making the good very good and innocent while the bad are as exploitative as they can be might seem to weaken his writing but the simple prose has a way of holding the reader’s attention. In ‘Mr Tasker’s Gods’ we quickly seem Powys targeting his favourite victims – the hypocritical clergy and the materialistic farmers, Mr Tasker being one of the latter and the ‘Gods’ being his much loved pigs. Although he frequently jumps from one scene to another by just starting a new paragraph where today there would probably be a line left as well, the story moves along quickly, the reader regularly confronted by surprises such as when the identity of a miscreant is revealed to be an already established character. ( )