A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement [Paperback]

Anthony Powell (Author)

Book Description

Series: Dance to the Music of Time | Publication Date: June 15, 1995

Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.

In the background of this second volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, the rumble of distant events in Germany and Spain presages the storm of World War II. In England, even as the whirl of marriages and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures gathers speed, men and women find themselves on the brink of fateful choices.

Includes these novels:
At Lady Molly's
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
The Kindly Ones

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Powell's epic of 20th-century England is actually composed of 12 novels divided into four "movements," although they can be read individually as separate works. The novels were originally published from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Anthony Powell's work includes Miscellaneous Verdicts and Under Review, both available from the University of Chicago Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 746 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (June 15, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226677168
• ISBN-13: 978-0226677163
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #478,466 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best novels written in English, October 30, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement (Paperback)

This volume contains the second 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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More of the greatest 20th Century English novel, July 14, 2000

By 

Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement (Paperback)

_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 second volume of the University of Chicago's beautiful trade paperback editions features books 4, 5 and 6 of the novel series. _At Lady Molly's_ is centered around the eccentric title character and her parties, as well as such other characters as her eccentric husband, Ted Jeavons, and even Nick Jenkins' wife-to-be, Isobel. _Casanova's Chinese Restaurant_ opens with a bravura prose set-piece of flashback within flashback, and deals with Jenkins' great friend the composer Hugh Moreland, and with the tragically unhappily married critic Maclintick. The subject of the novel is marriage. The last novel in this book is _The Kindly Ones_, which deals with the coming of World War II. It begins with a flashback to 1914, as the First World War breaks out and impinges on Jenkins' childhood, then continues in the late '30s as Europe heads again into war.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Having Fun Fun Fun in the Frantic Gaiety of Pre-War London, March 29, 2008

By 

Stephanie DePue (Carolina Beach, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement (Paperback)

"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.