Analysis
In a 2002 review of the book, Margaret Drabble commented that Powys's portrayal of Glendower is "more Welsh, more authentic, more tragic and more mythical than Shakespeare's". She describes Powys's narrative style as "extremely peculiar and often unsettling", drawing attention to his imagination, his use of vocabulary and his obsessions with details such as the scatological. Promoting Duckworth's 2006 edition, P. J. Kavanagh described the novel as "psychologically complex, sensuous in its language, vivid in its evocation of a period shrouded by myth", while Jan Morris called it "one of the most fascinating of all historical novels about one of the most tantalizing of historical figures".
Harald William Fawkner, in The Ecstatic World of John Cowper Powys (Associated University Presses, 1986), comments on the contrast between Rhisiart's lack of introspection and Glendower's constant self-examination, for which he is gently rebuked by his friend Broch o' Meifod, and suggests that the novelist identified with Glendower. He cites Powys's Autobiography of 1934, in which the author deplores the view that "introspection" is a bad thing. Like Powys himself and his other fictional heroes, Glendower is "caught in a tremendous struggle between Ego and Self".
Read more about this topic: Owen Glendower (novel)
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