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 Essential!
Anthony Powell's masterpiece "A Dance to the Music of Time" is essential reading for any lover of literature.
If you like Dickens, Hardy, Waugh and Snow ...
"A Dance to the Music of Time" is to Modern British Literature what Ben & Jerry's is to ice cream -- fabulous fare to be savored, appreciated and remembered. If you enjoy Charles Dickens (especially "David Copperfield" and "Great Expectations"), Thomas Hardy ("Return of the Native," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"), Evelyn Waugh ("Decline and Fall," "A Handful of Dust"),and C.P. Snow ("The Light and The Dark", "The Masters"), you will love Powell's amazing tour de force. And if you enjoy Powell, you will probably also enjoy the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian! Great writing, memorable characters, convoluted plots -- what more can a reader ask?
If You Always Wanted to Climb into a Debutante Dance
"A Dance to the Music of Time," an engrossing, highly-literate, highly comic 12-book series by British author Anthony Powell, had to have been one of the highlights of latter 20th century writing to those who appreciate a good, funny book. And it had to have been of riveting interest to some, those who can never get enough of Public Broadcasting Systems' "Masterpiece Theatre/Upstairs Downstairs" entertainments. In fact, it was of riveting interest to me: I remember, in real time, eagerly awaiting the appearance of each next book. I felt more or less like those 19th Century Dickens fans, so eager to learn what had become of Little Nell that they climbed the cliffs of Montauk, New York, to be the first to shout their inquiries to incoming British sailors. So, now that the series is complete, it has been collected into four movements, each including three of the original novels. The first starts with "A Question of Upbringing," "A Buyer's Market," and "The Acceptance World."
If you are reading this review, "A Question of Upbringing" may be as close as you'll ever get to Eton, the legendary English public school - for which, to us, read private school - experience. It is set shortly after World War I. We meet our narrator, Nick Jenkins, and his two closest friends. Peter Templer, already a ladies' man, whose unfortunate incident will hint at much to come. Charles Stringham, already rich and reckless. Then there is the headmaster, LeBas, a great comic creation. Also Kenneth Widmerpool, an even greater, more resonant comic creation, known at school for the wrong sort of overcoat, and his overwhelming desire to succeed. We will continue to meet him in future. We meet Templer's famously rich and beautiful mother, Mrs. Foxe, her latest husband, Buster, a navy man, and see Jenkins' first crush on Jean, Peter's sister. Then we go briefly to France, where Widmerpool pops up again, and onto Oxford and the great world of London.
At Oxford we meet another great comic creation, one of the dons, Sillery, known as Sillers, who's busy giving Sunday afternoon teas, enabling him to keep a finger in every possible pie. We also meet Mark Members and J.G.Quiggin; who, according to Sillers, live quite near each other at home, and are possibly related, and who, like Jenkins our narrator, have literary ambitions.
"A Buyer's Market" takes our characters to London, where those wishing to begin to establish literary careers. We see quite a lot of Deacon, an elderly, homosexual, not so talented artist, and of his tenant, Barnby, a more talented, third generation artist, with an eye for the ladies. And we meet quite a few ladies, several of them beautiful: Gypsy Jones, Baby Wentworth, Bijou Ardglass. Widmerpool pops up again. And, we see more of those famous debutante dances, and the dinners thrown before them, than you're likely to find anywhere else. Finally, we are introduced to one of the abiding passions of the thirties: Communism, in its Stalinist and Trotskyite embodiments.
"The Acceptance World," set as the world approaches the Great Depression, gives us an even larger gallery of entertaining, larger than life characters. Templer and Stringham have married, unsuccessfully, as has Jean Templer: Jenkins will find himself falling in love with her again, as a grown-up this time. We meet Dicky Umfraville, an older man who will take away Stringham's former sister-in-law, Ann Stepney, from Barnby, and marry her himself. Further, Peter Templer's wife Mona, whom we initially met as an artist's model, will suddenly find the literary/political worlds more interesting than that of the just plain rich.
Mind you, Powell is no mere stenographer; he creates the rhythmic beat of "A Dance to the Music of Time," with thought, care, philosophy, perception, irony and wit. If you always wished you could climb into "Masterpiece Theatre" and live there, this series is for you.
Great start
I usually dislike coming-of-age novels, but based on other reviews I decided to try this. It is not your normal angst ridden type of such. This is humorous. That raises it several notches in my estimation.
If you appreciate British society, you will like this. If not, you probably won't. This isn't an everyman that could be set elsewhere (USA for instance). The very Britishness is what makes it work.
Amazon's description is sufficient to explain where Powell is going with this series. I am looking forward to reading the 2nd Movement.
Quiet Forms of Life
First off the mark, this is a review only of the "First Movement", the first three novels, the title of this volume (q.v. the top of the page). I don't know why reviewers who have read the entire opus have decided to post their reviews here when there is a complete set available on Amazon under which they can post such reviews. It rather spoils it for the rest of us who have only read this volume. In any event, this is my review of that volume; you can find my reviews of the other three volumes under their respective titles after I read them. ----Do I sound a bit too Widmerpool here?
The comparisons with Proust: Proust is much better, more poetic and profound, than Powell. The narrator, Marcel, pulls you in to an almost solipsistic universe in which he, while outwardly passive, remains the main character throughout in his work, exposing the readers to the deep vicissitudes in his intense inner life. Our narrator here, Nick Jenkins, seems an almost completely empty vessel save for his detached reflections. That's how it seems to me....so far.
It also seems to me that to really catch the wry humour here you have to have lived in England or among English people for a considerable amount of time. If one reads the exchanges herein in American accent, the delicious nuances fall flat. Such as in an exchange as this one where Eleanor and Sir Gavin are debating whether to attend the luncheon at the Donners castle:
"I don't know what you call neighbours," said Eleanor. "Stourwater is twenty-five miles at least."
"Nonsense," said Sir Gavin. "I doubt if it is twenty-three."
That cadence that leads up to the stress on the final syllable, "three", is what makes the exchange so gorgeously droll. Yes, it is still somewhat funny in American English. But, well, you see what I mean.
Despite these reservations, I find myself in profound disagreement with the reviewer who says that this volume is "literally about nothing." The judgment holds water only if you believe that life is about nothing. As Nick reflects at one point, "Even in the quietest forms of life the untoward is rarely far from the surface."
And how this volume bears this out!
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