Customer Reviews

Kindly Ones (Dance to the Music of Time)

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The initial part of this, the sixth volume is told in retrospect by the narrator. It concerns his childhood prior to the Great War.

For the first time in the novel we meet his parents. There is sadness and humour in this section, as there has been throughout.

When the scene returns to a contemporary setting the world has now realized that war is again inevitable and it is only when this will occur.

More early characters die off with new and interesting ones being introduced. The core still remain however and we are treated to the arch bore, Widmerpool, dressed up in a farcical looking uniform.

There is a touch of the mystical about this volume with several discussions on the spirit world, after life.

This volume is comparable to volume three as the two best in my view thus far.

The book ends with the world at war.

When we last left Anthony Powell's 12-volume work "A Dance to the Music of Time", we were in the late 1930s and steadily approaching the outbreak of the Second World War. THE KINDLY ONES, the sixth novel in the sequence, unexpectedly opens with a flashback to the start of the First. In 1914, Nicholas Jenkins is an eight or nine year-old, living in a rented manor in the countryside where his father is stationed. For some fifty pages, we follow some disputes and love affairs among the family's servants, until an offhand mention that Archduke Ferdinand has just been assassinated casts a shadow over Jenkins' youth.

THE KINDLY ONES then returns to where the Dance had left off. In late 1938 Jenkins visits Stourwater again and several old acquaintances reappear. An elderly character dies and Jenkins must sort out his belongings. A drunken Bob Duport makes some uncomfortable revelations after Jean Templer's life during her affair with Nick almost a decade earlier. Finally, the start of World War II pushes every adult member of society into some new job. The pervading sentiment of THE KINDLY ONES is melancholy and wistfulness. Jenkins' perusal of the documents of a deceased relative offer a sad meditation on the mounting failures of one's life. The Seven Deadly Sins tableaux introduced here reduces the characters to grotesque caricatures and plays a role in a later volume of the Dance, where it is shown as a symbol of a bygone era.

Although the flashback fills in some of Nicholas Jenkins' past, he remains an enigmatic narrator, reporting the events around him in great detail but never betraying much of his own feelings. As the novel comes to an end, he is desperate to find some way into the army, but why he wants to join is a mystery (adventure? serving his country? not looking like an intellectual layabout?). There is twice mention that wife Isobel is expecting a child, but I don't expect to hear much about the raising of a family in the next volume. But the novel does encompass much more than the aristocratic rounds of the previous volumes, and we do enter among some of the lower classes.

When I started THE KINDLY ONES, I found the 1914 flashback to be slow-going, and I thought this was going to be one of the lesser volumes in the Dance. By the end of the novel, I was convinced that the flashback has its place in the novel's overall feeling of melancholy. Powell's particular generation had a rough time of it, living through two outbreaks of total war that decimated their families and acquaintances. It's not all poignant reflections, though. There continue to be moments of great humour here, such as a charismatic cult leader who speaks in pretentious riddles, or Widmerpool's buffoonish transition to full-time soldier.

With every volume read, I look ever more forward to moving onto the rest of the sequence. This is a moving chronicle of an entire generation.

When we last left Anthony Powell's 12-volume work "A Dance to the Music of Time", we were in the late 1930s and steadily approaching the outbreak of the Second World War. THE KINDLY ONES, the sixth novel in the sequence, unexpectedly opens with a flashback to the start of the First. In 1914, Nicholas Jenkins is an eight or nine year-old, living in a rented manor in the countryside where his father is stationed. For some fifty pages, we follow some disputes and love affairs among the family's servants, until an offhand mention that Archduke Ferdinand has just been assassinated casts a shadow over Jenkins' youth.

THE KINDLY ONES then returns to where the Dance had left off. In late 1938 Jenkins visits Stourwater again and several old acquaintances reappear. An elderly character dies and Jenkins must sort out his belongings. A drunken Bob Duport makes some uncomfortable revelations after Jean Templer's life during her affair with Nick almost a decade earlier. Finally, the start of World War II pushes every adult member of society into some new job. The pervading sentiment of THE KINDLY ONES is melancholy and wistfulness. Jenkins' perusal of the documents of a deceased relative offer a sad meditation on the mounting failures of one's life. The Seven Deadly Sins tableaux introduced here reduces the characters to grotesque caricatures and plays a role in a later volume of the Dance, where it is shown as a symbol of a bygone era.

Although the flashback fills in some of Nicholas Jenkins' past, he remains an enigmatic narrator, reporting the events around him in great detail but never betraying much of his own feelings. As the novel comes to an end, he is desperate to find some way into the army, but why he wants to join is a mystery (adventure? serving his country? not looking like an intellectual layabout?). There is twice mention that wife Isobel is expecting a child, but I don't expect to hear much about the raising of a family in the next volume. But the novel does encompass much more than the aristocratic rounds of the previous volumes, and we do enter among some of the lower classes.

When I started THE KINDLY ONES, I found the 1914 flashback to be slow-going, and I thought this was going to be one of the lesser volumes in the Dance. By the end of the novel, I was convinced that the flashback has its place in the novel's overall feeling of melancholy. Powell's particular generation had a rough time of it, living through two outbreaks of total war that decimated their families and acquaintances. It's not all poignant reflections, though. There continue to be moments of great humour here, such as a charismatic cult leader who speaks in pretentious riddles, or Widmerpool's buffoonish transition to full-time soldier.

With every volume read, I look ever more forward to moving onto the rest of the sequence. This is a moving chronicle of an entire generation.

The third book in the second volume of Powell's monumental series (Book 3 of Summer).

We finally get real details, specific stories, of the narrator.

I wonder if the first books would have been more enjoyable if we had more of a sense of his past, rather than just an observer who happened to know everyone by direct or indirect connection.