In 2001 HarperCollins published Lindsay Clarke’s fifth book, Parzival and the Stone from Heaven, which also appeared in the USA in 2002.

The book is a re-telling for our own time of one of the most highly developed medieval versions of the myth of the Holy Grail. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival was originally written in German verse, but even in translation its dense and gnomic style render it almost inaccessible to a wide audience. By adapting powerful poem into a prose romance Lindsay Clarke reveals it as one of the great adventures of the European imagination, an illuminating story that can be enjoyed by readers of all ages.

In the Preface to his version, Lindsay Clarke says: ‘What follows is not a novel, with all that that implies of social, psychological and even ‘magic’ realism, but the telling of a tale – something closer in spirit to the Grimm Brothers than to Sir Walter Scott. I gave myself considerable license to improvize, however, and as always been the case with re-workers of the grail material, I have come up with inflections and variations that suit my own temperament and purposes. Those purposes include the desire to speak through the imagination to some of the dilemmas and possibilities of our own transitional time, as Wolfram himself was certainly doing for his.’

In an extended essay on that follows his telling of the story, Clarke considers the importance of its motifs to issues of both individual and social importance for the evolution of consciousness in our time. The continuing relevance of Wolfram’s myth has been brought fiercely home by recent events, for in this extraordinary story the Grail is a stone brought down from Heaven by the Neutral Angels (who refused to take sides when there was a war in Heaven), and the Christian Parzival can only attain it when he is reconciled to his Muslim half-brother. Wolfram’s poem was written at the time of the Crusades. This new version was published 800 years later, just before the atrocious events of 11th September 2001 and the ensuing war in Afghanistan.

As Clarke says in his Afterword: ‘Perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of Wolfram’s poem is the powerful act of the imagination by which it enfolds the story of an individual human soul within a larger, cosmic myth that offers metaphorical insights into the evolution of consciousness itself. Parzival is a story about renewal, the kind of renewal that comes when, and only when, apparently irreconcilable powers are brought to reconciliation – when contradictions have received their full expression, fought each other to a standstill, then reperceived one another, no longer as hostile opposites but as polar complements. This is how something new gets made for life.’

In response to Lindsay Clarke’s Parzival and the Stone from Heaven, the Film Director John Boorman wrote: ‘It is as though you have had access to inspired revelation. You have uncovered what was hidden. You have given us a template of human behaviour, a map to chart a passage through the wasteland we have made of our planet. This is the most important contribution to the Grail myth since Jesse Weston. Many congratulations on a magnificent and magical achievement.’

Reviews:

‘As soon as I began to read I was entranced and enthralled, words which in this context bear special meanings. The intricate romance has become a lean novel, alert to the original story’s concern for states of mind, attentiveness, reverie, dream. Clarke’s restrained telling expresses both the douceurs and the terrible sublimity of the Grail story, its eroticism and dismaying dream-logic, in a style that varies from lyricism to delicate comedy, from ritual combat to the uncanny… In Clarke’s Parzival action is compulsively cryptic and elliptical, as if the tale told itself.’ (Stevie Smith : The Independent On Sunday)

‘The medieval poem carries within its dense structure meanings that transcend history as well as fashion, if only they can be made accessible. This Lindsay Clarke has done, not just by retelling the story in a streamlined, vivid style which will grip readers of all ages, but also by adding an excellent and helpful Afterword which is as perceptive as it is challenging. In it he relates the story of Parzival to vital issues of selfhood, gender, creative energy and so on – and he is convincing in his assertion that "Wolfram’s story offers a map to the landscape of the human soul"’ (Bel Mooney in The Times)

‘An appealing retelling of one of the West’s primary myths’ (TLS)

‘In adapting this story for a modern-day audience, Clarke has unearthed a gem.’ (The Saturday Times Magazine)

‘A masterly, accessible and inspirational retelling of the legend’ (Publishing News)

‘An engrossing historical romance’ (San Francisco Chronicle)
n 1997 Thorsons published Essential Celtic Mythology , a re-telling by Lindsay Clarke of several important Irish and Welsh myths, along with an introductory essay on ancient Celtic culture and the relevance of its stories for our own time. This book (originally commissioned as part of series on world mythology by various authors called ‘Stories That Change The World’) was republished as Lindsay Clarke’s Traditional Celtic Stories in 1999.

In her review for Resurgence, Jules Cashford (co-author of The Myth of the Goddess) wrote: ‘Lindsay Clarke’s book is an inspiration because of the way it is written: the characters sparkle: their remarkable adventures are instantly inevitable. No word juts out of place: each sentence is irreducibly particular, finished and refined to a poetic precision, the language transparent to its source in the Imagination…the result is a book in which reconciliation and renewal become possible through the stories themselves… His fourteen page introduction is worth having on its own, so vividly does he explain and evoke the culture of the Celts, and so eloquently does he call for stories "that seek out values larger than merely tribal loyalties"’