Wolf Solent — an excruciating read

With the best will in the world — from my first reading I remembered only a rural girl who could whistle like a blackbird — I re-read Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys and found it excruciating — overwrought — I liked the searching, exhaustive and ecstatic in 1966 — all names and intrigue and yearning — Squire Urquhart compiling a sordid history of Dorset, Wolf Solent assisting, ghosting, eagerly enacting a modern counterpart — sordid if you like, or confused — with rural girls and other men and women— without let or scruple — essence of girl and the other, kindred spirit.

I read rapidly through the six hundred plus pages, wanting to rest with some character or other, only at the very end realising that the character I wanted to rest with was me, the reader who lapped this up once.