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A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement

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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.

_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.

"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.

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.

The notion that "nothing happens" in A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement, is preposterous. True, there are no car chases, murders or coup d'etat. If that is what you insist upon from fiction, these books are definitely not for you. But plenty else is happening. People you met in the first three novels are growing up. Some are finding spouses, some divorcing them. A few are succeeding terrifically. A number are floundering or worse. The "Slump" (aka The Great Depression) continues unabated and continues to take its toll upon the upper-middle and upper classes. And Poussin's classical painting of the eponymous title and its depiction of unchanging grace and beauty seems increasingly ironic.

Again, a triptych of novels (At Lady Molly's, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant and The Kindly Ones) depicts Powell's late 1930s. Nick Jenkins, hero and narrator, has moved on to screenwriting and from debutante balls to the more mature haunts of the drawing room. He continues (at first to my dismay--now I am simply resigned to the device) to continually and "coincidentally" bump into old acquaintances. ALM literally is a laundry list of these run-ins, and told with perfect comic pitch. Widermerpool resurfaces and is as great a buffoon as ever. The buffoon of youth, who seemed so hopeless before is still appallingly clumsy socially-- but successful otherwise. Love affairs that seemed so passionate and exciting have dissipated, and from the outset we are aware that Nick will get himself a wife before long. Why? Because that's what people do.

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant is less comic. More a meditation on art, relationships and trying to find happiness. In my opinion it is the best in the series thus far realistically and plaintively depicting that ache of first love and the subsequent disenchantment that inevitably follows. The composer Moreland is depicted from the first stages of infatuation to the brink of an affair that could reck his marriage. What he decides and why is beautifully wrought. Jenkins's in-laws provide the comic relief in this volume, but here Powell is happier to stay focused on the more serious. The aside of Erridge going off to the Spanish Civil War anchors us in time, provides some amusing remarks about Lefties but doesn't really create concern for his fate. The focus stays on the Moreland marriage throughout with an ending that is and is not surprising. Very well done, indeed.

The Kindly Ones abandons the melancholic for Powell's more jocular tone. Indeed the first chapter is one of the best send-ups of English Uppper Class life I have ever read. Quite hilarious and btw the only glimpse in six novels of Nick Jenkins's parents or his childhood. The comic tone is a bit "now or never" as we are teetering upon the onset of WWII. There won't be much to laugh at for years to come. The Kindly Ones though is no misnomer-- it's the name the ancient Greeks gave to the Furies, the bringers of disease, war and strife. And TKO does the same. It brings us to the beginning of the end--when empire and centuries' old ways are all threatened. We know it will all be swept away--the only question of course is how it affects the dozens of people we have met thus far in these splendid novels.

"A Dance to the Music of Time" is Anthony Powell's sequences of twelve novels which follow the narrator Nicholas Jenkins and his social circle from youth in the period following World War I to old age and death in the 1970s. Jenkins' reminisces are inspired by Poussin's classic painting where the four Seasons dance with arms linked, and this second trio of novels do represent the summer of life. AT LADY MOLLY'S, CASANOVA'S CHINESE RESTAURANT and THE KINDLY ONES cover the period From 1934 to 1939. We see Jenkins settling into marriage, other characters divorcing and embarking on fiery second marriages, and yet more characters unable either from failure or unrelenting ambition to establish their comfortable niche in life.

We continue to mainly inhabit upper-class drawing rooms and dinner parties. The tumultuous political events of 1930s Europe are only alluded to, and the characters who are caught up in the Spanish Civil War or appeasing Hitler do it offstage. Still, the plot continued to hold my interest, for Powell has a gift for depicting various personalities. Jenkins' schoolmates Templer, Stringham and Widmerpool return, and though Widmerpool comes more and more to seem the perverse antagonist of the series, Stringham and Templer fade in and out of Jenkins' life. A great many new characters are introduced, with Jenkins' wife's family, the Tollands, providing much of the drama.

I've reviewed the individual novels in the Dance here on Amazon, and if you want more information about each volume, look at those listings. But I will say here that in general I am happy that I pressed ahead with the Dance after the first "movement". The latter two novels in this part of the sequence are especially finely crafted, and the outbreak of World War II in THE KINDLY ONES put me in such suspense that I felt driven on to the third movement.

The "Second Movement" of Anthony Powell's novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, contains three volumes that continue the story of Nicholas Jenkins and his acquaintances and family. The period is between the two World Wars and the setting is London and some parts of the English countryside. At Lady Molly's (1957) focuses on Jenkins' memories of his early childhood and his present experiences with the Tollands, a wide-ranging family with some royal distinction. Like Proust's study of the Guermantes family in In Search of Lost Time, detailed destriptions of Tolland family events with their overt and covert rules of thought and behavior are given by Nick as a mostly passive observer.

The second volume, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960), focuses on relationships pre and post marriage and Jenkins' consideration of the nature of love. He begins to see love and marriage as unpredictable aspects of the dance of time. The one consistent factor in relationships is the cycling of interaction with intimates even if years go by between meetings. As time continues after separation, only residual aspects of love remain when people meet again. The memories, though, are still charged with strong time bound emotions.

The Kindly Ones (1962) is the final volume of the second movement. It concerns Nick's observations of the frequency of divorce among his friends and family members and how the formerly married individuals get out of step with him and other people. Unlike the feelings associated with relationships that do not lead to marriage, divorce seems to cause the characters to permanently spin out of their former social circles. They can return to the dance to the music of time, but only temporarily and with limited commitment.

Powell's epic work continues in the second movement with the same unhurried narrative, with his observer Nick becoming more reliable as he matures. As I indicated in my review of the three novels in the first movement, this is an excellent continuing series and I look forward (with regret for what I will lose) to reading the second half of the saga.

The reader who picks up the Second Movement of A Dance to the Music of Time might be initially overwhelmed with the fourth novel of the series (At Lady Molly's). Whereas the three novels of the First Movement progressed in a fairly sequential manner and focused on four major characters, At Lady Molly's, the fourth novel of the series, introduces literally dozens of new characters and alludes to old ones probably forgotten by the reader. To complicate matters, the novel begins with a flashback involving characters never encountered before; in the hands of most novelists, this would create a barrier that could never be overcome and ultimately result in a failed work. But Anthony Powell is no average writer and the meticulous care he expended in creating his characters in the First Movement served him well, so that with only the barest character descriptions these shadowy figures slowly re-emerge in the reader's consciousness.

And whereas Powell did a masterful job in the First Movement of bringing to life the supporting characters (particularly Kenneth Widmerpool) who interacted with the narrator, Nick Jenkins; he paid only passing attention to Jenkins as a character, using him primarily as a somewhat impartial observer. Recognizing this defect, the author now focuses on Jenkins, providing the reader with background information on his life and family and allowing the reader finally to get to know this character. In the three novels that make up the Second Movement - At Lady Molly's, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, and The Kindly Ones - it is Jenkins around whom the action spins. We are introduced to his in-laws, the prodigious Tolland family, as well as to the composer, Hugh Moreland, and the music critic, McClintick, as well as witnessing his marriage (although taking place "off stage" between the fourth and fifth novels) and the birth of a child.

As with the First Movement, Powell is more interested in personal interrelations than he is with political matters. The war in Spain and the ominous maneuverings in Germany are mentioned, but only act as background to the spate of failed marriages and relationships, sexual indiscretions, and economic intrigues that make up the majority of the story line. Powell does a fine job of describing the malaise that affected British society prior to the outbreak of war, and gives flesh to some of the absurdity that predominated British pre-war planning in the person of Widmerpool, who now appears in the role of a Territorial officer who is more interested in the practical effects of a military uniform and his own self-aggrandizement, than he is motivated by any powerful patriotic drive.

Some readers will be put off by Powell's overly contrived meetings between his characters. It seems that Nick Jenkins cannot go anywhere unless he happens to run into an acquaintance or two with whom he carries on lenghty conversations. The best example of this is the meeting between Jenkins, Widmerpool and Hugh Moreland at the maternity hospital in which Jenkins' wife is recovering from a miscarriage, a meeting void of genuineness and contrived solely for the author's convenience. However, Powell can be forgiven these indiscretions as it is through these conversations that the reader becomes intimately acquainted with each of the characters; so acquainted, in fact, that by the end of Powell's sixth novel, one is unsure whether or not these characters actually existed.

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 tęte-à-tęte 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.

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.