Customer Reviews

A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

_A Dance to the Music of Time_ is an extremely absorbing and well-crafted novel (composed of 12 smaller novels). Its subject is the decline of the English upper classes from the First World War to about 1970, a decline seen is inevitable and probably necessary, but somehow also regrettable.

Such a description might make the novel seem stuffy, but it is not. _A Dance to the Music of Time_ is at times very funny indeed, and always interesting. always involving. It features an enormous cast of characters, and Powell has the remarkable ability to make his characters memorable with the briefest of descriptions. In addition, Powell's prose is addictive: very characteristic, idiosyncratic, and elegant.

The long novel follows the life of the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, from his time at Eton just after World War I to retirement in the English countryside in the late '60s. But Jenkins, though the narrator, is in many ways not the most important character. The comic villain Widmerpool, a creature of pure will, and awkward malevolence, is the other fulcrum around which the novel pivots.

This final volume of the University of Chicago's beautiful Trade Paperback edition includes the last three books. _Books Do Furnish a Room_ is set shortly after World War II, when Nick Jenkins is moving in London literary circles, dealing with such characters as the doomed, eccentric, novelist X. Trapnel, his mistress Pamela Flitton Widmerpool, and of course Kenneth Widmerpool himself, clumsily but successfully trying to maximize his political influence with the help of a literary magazine. _Temporary Kings_ features Jenkins at a conference in Venice, then back in London, and introduces a couple of curious Americans, Louis Glober and Russell Gwinnett. It also features the final destructive acts of the terrible Pamela Flitton's life. _Hearing Secret Harmonies_ concludes the sequence, as Jenkins rather bitterly views the radicalism of the '60s, and especially Widmerpool's usual attempts at ingratiating himself with the latest fads in power. The novel closes with a remarkable vision of Widmerpool's end, oddly, bitterly echoing his first appearance.

A great, great, series of novels. Incomparable.

C. S. Lewis once wrote that one of the greatest services that literature offers is the opportunity to experience worlds and lives not our own. This is rarely more true than with Powell's magnificent series. I had come to feel that Nicholas Jenkins's friends were my friends, and by the end I felt almost as if I had experienced another life.

If one is willing to make the commitment of time, I wholeheartedly recommend this superb series. In a hundred years time, it might be the single work that I would recommend to anyone wanting to know what life in the 20th century was like.

The last three novels of this twelve-volume series take place in post-World War II England. The cast of characters has been substantially trimmed, as many of the narrator's closest friends have died, but new and unforgettable individuals emerge in the feverish literary world of London and the international conference circuit. We wait, and root for, the horrible Widmerpool to get his comeuppance, and watch as the other characters grow older, some gracefully, some less so, but always moving to the stately rhythms of time's music. Those who have read the first three-quarters of the series should definitely go on to the end--many treats are in store for you!

To arrive at the 4th movement of 20th Century British author Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time," is, of course, to arrive at the season of winter, as we can see from the front of the soft-cover volume, a reprint of the painting by the 16th century French artist Nicolas Poussin, from which title Powell's masterwork, initially a 12-book series, takes its own. The series'1st movement, chronicling the schooldays of Powell's narrator, Nick Jenkins, was spring; the second movement, chronicling the palmy young adulthood in London of the narrator, his friends and acquaintances, was summer. World War II was fall. We now arrive at winter, melancholy; discontented, to quote Shakespeare's Richard III; and shot through with death. Powell's language is frequently more Latinate and pompous than in his earlier books; his plots and characters are less dense, and less funny. Our narrator, Jenkins, becomes less an actor in the tale than a bystander; the books read almost as a prolonged afterword as loose ends are tied up.

"Books Do Furnish a Room," first in the final trilogy, is set in the immediate post-war years of the late 1940's. Mention is made of the many people Jenkins knew who were lost in the war: his closest friends from schooldays, Peter Templer and Charles Stringham; his friend from young London salad days, Barnby. Several of his wife Isobel's many siblings have also been lost: as well as her aunt Molly Jeavons. Our narrator Jenkins is working on a study of Robert Burton, sixteenth-century author of The Essential Anatomy of Melancholy (Dover Books on Literature & Drama), and the mood is melancholy indeed. Mention is made of the difficulty and expense of getting clothing ration coupons, flowers, alcoholic beverages, gas. "Books Do Furnish a Room" is the nickname of a literary compere of Jenkins'; but he does not dominate this volume. Instead, we see quite a lot of Kenneth Widmerpool, the boys'bete noir from schooldays, and the woman he's married, Charles Stringham's universally-acknowledged to be difficult niece, Pamela Flitton. However, the book largely centers on X.Trapnel, mysterious author, whom I've always thought was based on the mysterious real-life 20th century German-American writer B. Traven, author of the 1927 novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, among other works - it was made into a famous movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston, directed by Huston's famous son John: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Two-Disc Special Edition). And then, of course, there's Trevanian, pen named author of The Eiger Sanction: A Novel; also made into a well-known movie, starring Clint Eastwood:The Eiger Sanction.

The second book, "Temporary Kings," centers on an international literary convention in Venice. We meet some new characters, principally American academic Russell Gwinnett. But the action really centers on Lord Widmerpool, as he has been named a life peer, and his wife, Lady Pamela. More of Jenkins' friends and relations are lost.

In "Hearing Secret Harmonies," the last book, set in the 1960's, we meet and will see a lot of one Scorpio Murtlock, youthful guru extraordinaire and leader of his own cult. But once again, Widmerpool, now Lord Widmerpool, chancellor of a red-brick university, will dominate, as he is first caught up in the student unrest that characterized that long-gone era; and then delivers himself and his goods to Murtlock. And yet more of Jenkins' friends, relations, and acquaintances are lost.

It's rather a glum volume, all told, and not nearly as entertaining as its brilliant predecessors. But if, you've read your way through this lengthy series, and,like some of us, you want to know what happened then --- well, you might as well read it.

The first two novels in this, the last movement of "Dance," are wonderful, just as those in the three preceding movements are wonderful. I'm going to limit my review to the last volume, and that's because I hated it so much. Complaining about an appalling desert to a sumptuous meal is, of course, ungrateful, but such is human nature. (Amazon demands that we rate books, and my 4-star rating applies to "Books do Furnish a Room" and "Temporary Kings.")

What ails "Hearing Secret Harmonies" is simple: Powell, after having spent nearly 25 years on his ambitious series, no longer knows what to do with his characters. This is especially true of Widmerpool, Powell's power-mad, creepy and ultimately intriguing antihero. Here, in "Hearing Secret Harmonies" we reencounter said Widmerpool as an aspiring leader of a crackpot cult, an amusing but trite end for a pompous Eton pupil, a wunderkind London businessman, a ruthless military officer, a journalist and a Communist spy. Are we really to believe this of one who, for most of his power-hungry life, posed as "another Lord Chesterfield" (Stringham's apt description)?

Jenkins, too, is also a bit of a disappointment. The astute observer loses much of his muscle here, and what we end up with is a rather charming Tory who heaps scorn on the generation of the 1960s as embodied in the person of Scorp Murtlock and in those of his minions. Disappointing stuff from the penetrating Jenkins, a verdict that will, I think, make sense to you after you've completed such delights as "The Acceptance World," "The Kindly Ones" and "The Valley of Bones." With Jenkins, too, Powell has run out of ideas.

That said, read the series!

After a hundreds of pages dealing just with World War II, Anthony Powell brings us through the postwar decades with the last three novels of "A Dance to the Music of Time", which tracks Nicholas Jenkins and his social circle across an enormous breadth of 20th-century Britain.

BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM, the tenth novel, opens in the winter of 1945/46 as Britain settles back into peacetime, though not without annoying rationing and shortages. Jenkins has come to his old university for research towards a biography on Robert Burton, but soon first himself involved in the launch of a new literary magazine with distinct leftist tones. Indeed, we return to a world of shady politics left behind in the early 1930s in THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD, the third novel of the sequence, and many of the characters from those days return. Widmerpool, his political career now taking off, also comes into the picture, and his continual defence of the Soviet Union makes him a more repulsive antagonist than ever.

But beyond revisiting old friends, BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM introduces two new characters with very distinctive personalities. One is the novelist X. Trapnel, whose bohemianism mystifies his fellow characters and ultimately leads to his grisly ruin. The other character is Pamela Widmerpool. Though she appeared first in the previous novel, she was mostly a force of nature destroying the lives of numerous male characters offscreen. Here Jenkins talks with her on several occasions, revealing something of her as a person. As this volume was written at the end of the 1960s in a more frank era, Powell felt that his language could be a bit more coarse, and it is Pamela who utters all the profanity. The relationship between Widmerpool and his wife sometimes descends into mere soap opera, and the literary allusions, especially to Burton, get rather tiresome. Still, this is a pretty OK entry in the series.

The last two volumes are unfortunately very weak. TEMPORARY KINGS brings us over a gap of more than a decade to Venice 1958, where Jenkins is attending a literary conference. We're introduced to some American characters, but only so that Pamela Widmerpool can destroy them. This novel is tedious, the coincidences too hard to swallow, and there's a real lack of the comedy that sustained the series. HEARING SECRET HARMONIES takes place another decade on, in the late '60s, and here Powell had gotten bored with the usual trend of the "Dance" to be centred around dinner parties and inspired by real life events, so he creates an outlandish plot with a cult leader, magical powers and ritual sex.

In these last volumes, Powell tries to pare the basic plot down to Jenkins versus Widmerpool, and indeed Widmerpool's demise is what brings these multi-volume reminisces to a close. But in TEMPORARY KINGS and HEARING SECRET HARMONIES, Widmerpool is a completely different character, doing things not at all in keeping with the fellow we've long followed. Also, in the last two novels the sex really gets out of hand. In early volumes in the "Dance", the presence of a few homosexual characters added realism to the work, but Powell now reveals nearly every male character (and not a few female characters) to be homosexual and bases the plot on this, which rather reminds me of mid-century British humour's excessive reliance on cross-dressing.

I am happy that I read the Dance and I'd probably even recommend it. The bulk of the series is very entertaining, and pushing through to the end didn't require so much extra effort. Still, it's a pity that Powell couldn't keep it together in the end.

As in previous volumes, things in this volume "just happen." Perhaps Powell's frequent allusions to myth and legend, both in literature and in art, are intended to elevate his work to the status of contemporary myth. But the mode is realism. Time and again, even more so than in previous volumes, events stain credibility, as the narrative, such as it is, limps along. Powell has absolutely no sense of pace either between or within scenes. Dramatic situations are set up but are allowed to fizzle, often because the narrator interrupts reporting in order to ruminate or to make arcane allusions. There is altogether too much shop talk about literature and art, so much, in fact, as to invite the charge of pedantry.
Having read the first three volumes, I felt obliged to see how everything turned out. Virtually without exception, the deaths or fates of characters are presented in the form of a brusque checklist. "So much for so-and-so." The exception is the demise of Widmerpool, Main Gargoyle amongst many ( the work might have been called "A Convention of Gargoyles" ), which is risible for all the wrong reasons. It is tortured, literally, and torturous. One is led to wonder who this monster was based upon, as is likely the case, since this "chronicle" is transparently autobiographical, save that we learn next to nothing about the protagonist himself, apart from his cerebral excursions, and only that his wife, in brief verbal entrees, is sardonic.
The style in this volume has deteriorated into something like a parody of ornate prose. But there are good moments and an occasional snappy epigram. Thus the volume escapes even a lower score.

During the two years that I have been reading A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell(1905-2000) has become one of my three favorite authors. In his novel, divided into four "movements" with three volumes each, Powell followed his narrator, Nick Jenkins, from boyhood to semi-retirement in Great Britain during most of the 1900s. Along the way I became acquainted with a variety of interesting characters living upper middle class lives in London and the countryside. Jenkins is a writer of fiction and non-fiction who is a keen observer of behaviors of his family, friends, and fellow writers and artists. Nick's observational skills are not hampered by over- reaction, and the narrator may appear uninterested in other people's feelings. The depth of his character is revealed in the compassionate and humorous interaction, observation, and description of others.

The twelve volumes of Powell's work make it one of the longest novels in the English language. It is similar to Proust's In Search of Lost Time in length. The two novels also share many topics if not style, and are on a similar intellectual level. A way to help the reader decide to read A Dance to the Music of Time is to say that it is a "thinking person's" Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. In fact, as I mentioned in reviews of the first three movements, Galsworthy is represented in the novel by a successful but egocentric and foolish literary character, St John Clarke.

The fourth movement that I am reviewing here is composed of the volumes: Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), Temporary Kings (1973), and Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975). In this movement, the theme that has been recurring throughout the saga continues; people one meets early in life tend to come around again in middle life and yet again in later life. Each time these social seasons come around, the view of the people changes with an increase in observer wisdom. Certainly Nick Jenkins gains wisdom during his many decades as a family member, student, soldier, lover, husband, and writer. At the end of the story, Nick and the reader of the many volumes are able to hear the secret harmonies of the span of life described so beautifully and with good humor by Powell. See my other reviews of this novel written Powell wrote from 1951 to 1975.

This volume contains the final three novels of Anthony Powell's masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time. Readers coming to this series for the first time should start with the first volume. Powell's work is social comedy in the tradition of Jane Austen and George Meredith. Contemporary writers with whom he is often compared include Marcel Proust and Evelyn Waugh. The 12 short novels of A Dance to the Music of Time give a panoramic picture of English upper-class social life from 1921 to 1971 that is both intensely realistic and amazingly funny. Readers either love Powell's work or can't understand what others see in it. My own opinion is that Dance is the best novel written in the twentieth century. Others share this view: A Dance to the Music of Time is #43 on the recently constructed Random House/Modern Library 100 Best Poll (of twentieth century fiction) and was made into a 4-part miniseries on British television just about a year ago.

About this fourth movement, two salient features strike me: 1) If you are not deeply steeped in literature or, perhaps, to put a finer point on it, the history of literature, if you don't understand this remark, made by Nick in The Temporary Kings, the second of these three final efforts, that, "It is often pointed out that one form of Romanticism is to be self-consciously Classical.", you are going to miss out on much of the work's depth. Indeed, if you have not read one particular book, Burton's delightful, age-old, rambling The Anatomy of Melancholy, you will miss out on much. So much is seen through a literary lens. 2.) This movement is indeed a departure from the other three, in that, were I asked to sum up its theme in one word, that word would be: Necrophilia

I'm not going to delve into the psychology of Pamela Widmerpool nee Flitton or into that of Russell Gwinnett here. But let's just say that, primarily through these two characters, this movement plumbs the depths of sadism and masochism (particularly the latter) so subtly and deftly, and yet so uncompromisingly that it makes just about anything else written on these themes seem exhibitionist and superficial by comparison.

Also, a word on the opus as a whole, now that I've read all four movements: It does not measure up to the standard of Proust, as is often claimed. Really, it's an entirely different sort of work than Proust's. Proust is solipsistic (in a profound sense) and poetic. Powell is gregarious and deeply prosaic. His style of writing reminds me of the Latin I had to construe as a youth.

Near the end of the third movement, our narrator Jenkins confesses to a weakness for Poe. Here, that "weakness" blossoms improbably like a rose in a charnel house. After completing this fourth movement and meditating on the entire "Dance" for some time, I discovered that the overall affect on me was that it was extremely weird, weird in a way that I find impossible to put into exact wording, weird, no doubt, in the way that critic Harold Bloom uses the word when he avers that all great literature strikes the reader in this way, as weird.

As odd as this recommendation may sound, one could do worse, far worse, than to return to Poe's poem Annabel Lee after completing this massive opus in order to gain a sort of perspective, whether one likes the poem or not, perhaps particularly if one does not.