Weymouth Sands

Weymouth Sands is the third in the great quartet of Powys's Dorset novels, the others being Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance and Maiden Castle. In drawing on his vivid childhood memories of the seaside town of Weymouth Powys created a wealth of characters and showed his deep sympathy for the variety, the eccentricity, the essential loneliness of human beings. Magnus Muir the Latin teacher, Sylvanus Cobbald the nature mystic, Adam Skald the Jobber, Dog Cattistock the brewer: these are especially memorable characters.

But this is not all; the town of Weymouth, the sea, the sands, the stones of Chesil Beach are as much characters as the human beings. As Angus Wilson writes in his introduction, "The setting, though recognizably Weymouth and Portland, is much more than that, it is a claim for a pantheistic (yet never declaredly transcendental) universe in which men, their acts and the memories of those acts survive only through the timeless, so-called inanimate world they live in."