First published: 2008
Publisher: Barfield Press UK
Introduction by John D. Rateliff
While Owen Barfield did not publish a great deal of fiction during his lifetime, what he did publish is all of a special quality. Whether it is the early fairy-tale `The Silver Trumpet', the autobiographical `This Ever Diverse Pair' or the poetic drama `Orpheus', his creative endeavours, as much as his philosophical work, reveal Barfield as a profoundly original thinker - as well as a subtle and penetrating writer in the best British tradition. `Eager Spring', the most recent addition to his imaginative oeuvre, is no exception: it is a well-crafted and thought-provoking novel, that richly rewards reading and re-reading.
`Eager Spring' departs from Barfield's earlier work in several respects. It is the first of his works to feature a female protagonist, and, perhaps more importantly, it directly confronts one of the central problems of our age: our relationship to nature and to the environment. Through this choice of subject, the novel illuminates Barfield's work from an entirely new perspective, and it also allows Barfield to shed his own peculiar light on the impending environmental disaster.
As always, he is not content with merely tackling the surface problems. Instead, he delves beneath in search of their roots, and this search takes the novel's protagonist all the way back to the scientific revolution - and beyond. For it is in the novel approach to the material world initiated during the scientific revolution that Barfield locates the source of our present-day problems.
Yet he also takes the further step, and suggest a possible way out. The novel ends with a fairy-tale written by the protagonist, in which she wonderfully describes how Paolo, an Italian poet of the courtly love tradition, uses his enhanced powers of cognition and perception to locate and destroy the evil of the new industrialism. It is a beautiful and profound imaginative exploration of the environmental problems facing the world today, and a fitting end to a novel that already ranks high among Barfield's creative achievements.
`Eager Spring' departs from Barfield's earlier work in several respects. It is the first of his works to feature a female protagonist, and, perhaps more importantly, it directly confronts one of the central problems of our age: our relationship to nature and to the environment. Through this choice of subject, the novel illuminates Barfield's work from an entirely new perspective, and it also allows Barfield to shed his own peculiar light on the impending environmental disaster.
As always, he is not content with merely tackling the surface problems. Instead, he delves beneath in search of their roots, and this search takes the novel's protagonist all the way back to the scientific revolution - and beyond. For it is in the novel approach to the material world initiated during the scientific revolution that Barfield locates the source of our present-day problems.
Yet he also takes the further step, and suggest a possible way out. The novel ends with a fairy-tale written by the protagonist, in which she wonderfully describes how Paolo, an Italian poet of the courtly love tradition, uses his enhanced powers of cognition and perception to locate and destroy the evil of the new industrialism. It is a beautiful and profound imaginative exploration of the environmental problems facing the world today, and a fitting end to a novel that already ranks high among Barfield's creative achievements.
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