4.0 out of 5 stars
The latter half of World War II, where victory brings unexpected reunions and new scandals, February 22, 2011
THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS is the ninth novel in Anthony Powell's long sequence "A Dance to the Music of Time" and the last to cover World War II. It opens early 1942 with Nicholas Jenkins working in Whitehall, having left his provincial regiment in Northern Ireland behind and now acting as liaison with other Allied forces. The social comedy and grotesque personalities that Powell excels at now take place among a motley assortment of Polish, Belgian and Czech officers, as well as some British high-ups. Perhaps the most shocking of these new characters is the sex-crazed Pamela Flitton, more force of nature than human woman, who brings disaster on half of the men in the novel.
THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS is somewhat weaker than the best novels of the series in that Powell is too obviously writing from his own wartime experience, but just changing the names, instead of making the necessary abstraction that Art requires. Also, the amount of literary references here is gratuitous. Powell quotes over a full page of Proust, fills up one scene with hymn texts, and has Jenkins make obscure jokes to characters we shouldn't expect to understand them.
But even with its weaknesses, the novel turns very memorable in the latter half, once the end of war is on the horizon. There is a poignant reunion with figures we haven't seen since the 1930s, and Jenkins' own emotions make a rare appearance from behind his stoic narrator's mask. Some characters don't survive World War II, but of those who make it through the war, we feel something of a gigantic summing up before the last three books of the series.
After the disappointing THE SOLDIER'S ART, things are looking very up with the Dance and I look forward to moving on to the last movement.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Inner Disciplines, February 21, 2009
This review is from: The Military Philosophers (Dance to the Music of Time 09) (Paperback)
As the story opens, the reader learns narrator Nicholas Jenkins is an assistant to the Polish Liaison Office. Later Nick works with the Belgians and the Czechs. Kenneth Widmerpool, despised school friend, is now Colonel Widmerpool. Widmerpool's capacity for work is enormous.
Sunny Farebrother, his opposite number, is famous for his charm. Peter Templer and Sir Magnus Donners appear on the scene to talk on economic warfare. They have remained civilians. Nick feels that Templer has acquired a new look, a hardness. After an hour long discussion on Polish generals, Nick and Peter Templer leave a meeting so that the other participants can proceed in a greater amount of secrecy. Widmerpool's dismissal of them is brusque.
Hugh Moreland is on a government-sponsored musical tour of the provinces. Nick begins as a captain in this volume of the series. Farebrother and Finn are both colonels, Widmerpool's rank. Pamela Flitton, Charles Stringham's niece, is a driver. (Stringham has gone missing in Singapore.)
Nick and Isobel are invited to attend a performance of THE BARTERED BRIDE. Wartime social functions are scheduled to raise morale. The bodies of Polish officers are found in the forest at Katyn. The Poles want the Red Cross to investigate. On the English side there is a hesitancy to rile the Russians. Farebrother must call upon all of his inner disciplines to deal with saluting Widmerpool.
At his one room flat in Chelsea, Nick is reading REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST. Eventually Nick Jenkins receives a promotion to major. He accompanies the Allied military attaches to France following the Normandy Invasion. When Nick learns of the proposed marriage of two of his associates or friends, he considers the couple's plan a colossal folly.
The book is colorful, portraying a series of characters in extremity as they assume roles foisted on them by the exigencies of war. This novel of social manners touches on tragedy where the fates of some actors turn on the particular forces driving a nation at war.
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