Mr Tasker’s Gods by T.F. Powys – #1925Club

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… Image 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…