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 Essential!
Anthony Powell's masterpiece "A Dance to the Music of Time" is essential reading for any lover of literature.
 Having Fun Fun Fun in the Frantic Gaiety of Pre-War London
"A Dance to the Music of Time" is one of the great glories of twentieth century English literature, a sharply observed, highly literate, disturbingly entertaining series, originally published in twelve volumes, by British author Anthony Powell. It has since been collected into four mega-volumes, called movements, by its publisher. The second movement consists of three of the original novels: "At Lady Molly's," "Casanova's Chinese Restaurant," and "The Kindly Ones."
"At Lady Molly's" is set in the ferment that was pre World War II London. The war was noticeably casting its shadow forward: people were concerned about happenings in Germany and Spain, and were highly-politicized - never before or since has London seen so many self-proclaimed Communists. But Nick Jenkins, our narrator, is young and handsome, working as a screen writer in the nascent British film industry, and having a good time, as are most of his friends. Their lives are highly sexualized: in the frantic gaiety of the time, they're busy running off with other people's husbands, wives, and sheep, for all I know. Nick will meet the girl of his dreams at Lady Molly's. Widmerpool is continuing his irresistible climb to fame and power. It's one of the funniest of the books, and has some of its author's best-known witticisms, as when one character says to another, "Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody."
"Casanova's Chinese Restaurant," finds Jenkins mingling with London's artistic and musical crowds, enjoying the life of a young married. People are off to fight in Spain and see firsthand what the Japanese are up to in China. And Widmerpool: well, in "Lady Molly's," Jenkins muses, "I had always felt an interest in what might be called the theoretical side of Widmerpool's life: the reaction of his own emotions to the severe rule of ambition that he had from the beginning imposed upon himself: the determination that existence must be governed by the will." He rises, still.
In "The Kindly Ones," the war has begun, but is yet still phony, as they called it: people have hung blackout curtains, but are still arguing about the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. One character muses, "The Kaiser went to war for shame of his withered arm. Hitler will go to war because at official receptions the tails of his evening coat sweep the floor like a clown's." The book opens on a flashback to Jenkins' pre World War I army childhood, and a glance at the extraordinary number of British lives claimed by that particularly bloodthirsty war. It also gives us an often-quoted discussion of "the kindly ones:" "....the Greeks, because they so greatly feared the Furies, had named them the Eumenides - the Kindly Ones - flattery intended to appease their terrible wrath." The attentive reader must assume we will see the Furies - the Eumenides, if you prefer --at work in the third movement of the series, devoted to life during the very real war to come.
Enter The Furies
I shall begin this review with employing the caveat with which I embarked upon my review of the First Movement: This is only a review of this movement, not the entire opus. That's the way they were printed, and that's the way I shall review it.....Amen....Ahem, more to the point, I haven't read the other two yet.
Thank whatever powers that be for the third book in this movement, The Kindly Ones---a translation of the Greek Eumenides, a euphemism, as related to us by Nicholas Jenkins in his recollections of Stonehurst, the home where he lived as a boy until the advent of WWI, used by the Greeks for The Furies, so terrified were they of naming them properly aloud. The significance of this particular book is not, to my mind, that the outer world starts to obtrude into the "hermetically sealed" life of the characters, as one reviewer has put it. It's rather that Nicholas Jenkins, our narrator, finally starts to display feelings of his own. He is no longer the detached cypher of the first movement.
In retrospect, one can see that this "coming out" as it were of Jenkins has been slowly developing through all three books of this movement. But it is only in The Kindly Ones that he emerges from his chrysalis.
Deeper themes abound, of course. Upon taking leave of General Conyers during a private tête-à-tête in which the General provides a quite rum venture into the psychoanalysis of Widmerpool, Jenkins describes it thus:
"The change in his voice announced that our fantasy life together was over. We had returned to the world of everyday things. Perhaps it would be truer to say that our real life together was over, and we returned to the world of fantasy. Who can say?"
Who indeed?
I shall ponder such things as I begin to turn the pages of the third movement and The Furies descend across Europe.
Reserve-the Pole Position
Quite a nice series. If one desires to understand the English qualities of reserve, humor, and understatement this the book to read. They are embedded in the story and most importantly in the author's approach.
It would be a bit Widmerpool of me to say much more. Please give it a try.
 Hazardous reading
There are two hazards in reading Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (12 books in 4 volumes or "Movements). First, you may be too bored to continue (so buy only the first volume to start). "Nothing" happens in the first two volumes I've read. Fans of action, suspense, romance, light, or even historical novels may be most unhappy with this series. For the many characters living through the 1920's and '30's described in the first two movements, life is an endless round of parties and conversations over food, through which the characters, in ever mutating combinations, drift while insightfully discussing each other. In a sense this is high-brow and high-toned soap opera. Only in Book 6, as World War II impinges on the characters, does an outside structure of events impose itself on the actions and reactions of the characters. Previously they have seemed largely to float in an hermetically sealed world of university-educated gentlemen and their women (mothers, wives, and ex-wives). In this upper class void no chronological dates are supplied, although if you are an octogenerian the names dropped may supply a framework to the intricate sets of flashbacks and occasional anticipations Powell employs. We learn much about the main characters, but rarely see them at work or play, and never domestically or with children. The second hazard is that you may be forever spoiled for reading anything less well crafted. The next author you read after Powell may seem shallow, simplistic, juvenile, obvious, crude, banal, overheated, or even vulgar. Powell's writing is objective, distanced, understated, intricate, subtle, acute, and highly precise; the apotheosis of ordinary detail. Powell's strength lies in closely observed and particularized character development, our understanding of each person altering slightly from one vignette, glimpse, or reference to the next. Allegedly a masterpiece of comedic writing, "Dance" is not, however, funny, farcical, or obviously, satirical. I really think it takes an English person to see and enjoy fully the comedy of manners I sense behind the prose. I felt I was always on the outside, vaguely aware that people might be not quite right, or "dotty," except for one passage in Book 5 where I laughed out loud. I probably need an "Annotated Powell." You can see I'm deeply conflicted about this series: it is marvelously well-written yet I am not well entertained. An honest reviewer admitted that Powell "evokes a wry poetry from drabness and boredom." It took me 5 years to finish the first Movement, and dogged determination to read the next, and still I want to read one more! Just not immediately.
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