Customer Reviews

Hearing Secret Harmonies (Dance to the Music of Time 12)

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Project Powell ends off with a whimper. It took me awhile to get through this last volume in the "Dance to the Music of Time" series. Now that I've read all twelve, I think I can make some sweeping generalizations about the series.

Although the first book implies that the series is about four people, basically it is just about two: Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, who is a rough stand in for the author himself; and Kenneth Widmerpool, the man who rises above his station and falls off the ladder. I like Jenkins. His demeanor and outlook on life is wry, sophisticated, and inimitable. Just how an author would like to be seen. However, I did not like Widmerpool, and I felt mad with myself for falling into Powell's trap. I get the feeling that you aren't supposed to like Widmerpool for a single reason: he does things the wrong way. He's pushy, self-centered, and vain, or at least that's the words we use for people who are failures. If Widmerpool had been successful (that is, if we were to speak of him before his fall), we would have said that he was aggressive, driven, and eccentric.

In this last book, Powell tries to pull in the loose ends, updating us on a little bit of all the characters we have met in the past, while trying to put the finishing touches on his comments on this generation. I found it anti-climatic. The climax came in the last book with Pamela Widmerpool dropping the horrible revelation about Kenneth's sexual habits. The wind out of his sails, he floats about afterwards, his previous accomplishments now meaning- less. It's a sad story, alright.

I'm not inclined to read more by Powell. While I found the series interesting, and do not regret having taken the time to work my way through it, his style was a little too "laid back" for me to enjoy.

I read the first eleven of Anthony Powell's twelve-volume sequence of novels 'A Dance to the Music of Time', and was engrossed. Deeply, hugely impressed and engrossed. And then found I'd lost my copy of the twelfth one, 'Hearing Secret Harmonies'. I ordered a copy on Amazon, from the UK to South Africa, and it duly arrived some three weeks later. Good clean second-hand copy (looks like new).

'Hearing Secret Harmonies' is a wonderful conclusion to this English mixture of Balzac and Proust. With a thematic focus on Jacobean drama and occultism, ageing, friendships and betrayals, death, the youth and sexual liberation, the early 1970s (the series begins in circa 1920). I felt after finishing it that I was forlorn, lost, bewildered, forced reluctantly to return to my diurnal world.

I have now ordered Hilary Spurling's companion to Powell's sequence.

As a new novelist myself ('Zebra Crossings, tales from the Shaman's Record' and 'The Zombie and the Moon, more tales from the Shaman's Record' - Jacana Media, Johannesburg and Cape Town, 2008, 2011) I felt that reading Powell taught me a lot about the reflective aspects of writing. Measured prose, slow incremental accumulation of an entire world, informed but unpretentious drawing on a whole wide range of allusions to music, fine art, and literature - and a haunting sense of time passing, memory, change, through two world wars and after. Powell's use A Question of Upbringing: Book 1 of A Dance to the Music of Timeof an anecdotal first-person narrator's voice is marvellously done.

What ails this last volume 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!

With HEARING SECRET HARMONIES we reach the end of Anthony Powell's 12-novel series "A Dance to the Music of Time", which has followed narrator Nicholas Jenkins and his social circle for over five decades. As the novel opens, we are in 1968 after a gap of several years since the previous book. Jenkins and his wife host a caravan of hippies on their rural property. Widmerpool, whom Jenkins hasn't seen for a long while, returns and is caught up in the counterculture. Ultimately this leads to Widmerpool's downfall and the close of Jenkins' reminisces.

Unfortunately, this novel continues the downward spiral of TEMPORARY KINGS. It is as if Powell had gotten bored with the usual trend of the "Dance" to be centred around dinner parties and inspired by real life events, and so he creates an outlandish plot with a cult leader, magical powers and ritual sex. The sex really gets out of hand, and the hints at necrophilia of TEMPORARY KINGS are nothing compared to what you get here. Also, 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 to be homosexual and bases the plot on this, which rather reminds me of mid-century British humour's excessive reliance on cross-dressing.

The book isn't entirely without merit. Powell wraps up the series by making references all the way back to the first volume, A QUESTION OF UPBRINGING. This has a considerable emotional impact even if the story is really not very good, like the series finales of "Lost" or "Star Trek: The Next Generation". Also, it's interesting to see what Powell felt about the 1960s counterculture. I've enjoyed reading memoirs by major activists of the era like Richard Neville, but now I see an old Tory's perspective.

I am happy that I read the Dance. 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.

The final book in the final volume of Powell's monumental series (Book 3 of Winter). Wow, it has been a long time getting through this epic collection. The characters are older, not necessarily wiser, by this time. Clear separation in attitudes between Jenkins and the younger set as represented primarily by Murtlock and Fiona. At the core of this is the utter self-destruction by Widermpool. Cults and weddings as the backdrop, this is perhaps more varied than the earlier books, but without as much humanity. To me, this failed in truly explaining why Widmerpool took such drastic measures, and also in why Jenkin's interest in Widermerpool had changed to almost indifference. The persistent observer throughout this series, suddenly Jenkins was inclined to walk away from disturbances.

I think the core story could have been done justice in 3 or 4 books rather than 12. I have no regrets over spending time on this, but doubt I would ever venture a second pass at it.