Customer Reviews

THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD.

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I loved Acceptance World, which has Powell's writing on the London art scene (hilarious) and his more meditative style at its most enthralling. This book occassionally puts Powell in Proust's class, in my opinion, and I wouldn't say that about most of the other novels in the series, as much as I have enjoyed them.

This is number three of twelve in the 12-part "A Dance to the Music of Time" series. I found the first two volumes a little dull and slow, but I am continuing to read this series mainly due to Richard Horton's exhortations. With this book, I finally got a sense of why Richard keeps urging me along; something finally clicked. As characters reappeared, I welcomed them back as old friends, and didn't need to flip back to find where they had entered the story before. Jenkins, the narrator, started doing something, rather than just commenting on the actions of Stringham, Templar, and Widmerpool. Marriages were consummated and broken. Literary and political differences moved into the foreground of the novel. For once, I even thought I saw a plot.

I guess what really happened is that I warmed to both Powell's prose and subjects. In the first two books, I thought there were occasions upon which Powell waxed poetical--loving bits of description that put both character-building and story into suspension until the subject at hand was drained of detail. I am the first to admit that I am not one fond of overt description, but one can sit still for only so long before something falls asleep.

Jenkins and his contemporaries are in their late 20s in this book, which takes place in the golden years between the two World Wars. Trouble is brewing in the world, seen here in some characters who are pronounced revolutionaries, followers of Marx and Trotsky.

A quote from page 63 sums up the idea of this series in my mind:

Afterwards, that dinner in the Grill seemed to partake of the nature of a ritual feast, a rite from which the four of us emerged to take up new positions in the formal dance with which human life is concerned. At the time, its charm seemed to reside in a difference from the usual run of things.... But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned--or everything is--because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.

And, while I am in a quoting mood, here is a line that seemed apt: "There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you." Lines like that have me anxious to continue the series.

Volume three has our narrator out into the real world where he and his circle have to confront all of life's realities even with their wealth and social advantages.

This volume is very funny with much of the story centered on the London art world.

We see a more casual side to the socialising in this volume. That is to be expected I suppose as we are now into the late 1920's early 1930's with the " slump" underway. Characters political beliefs are coming to the fore with the upper class love affair with Marxism becoming apparent with several of them.

The annual 'Le Bas' dinner is hilarious, not just the writing but the images invoked because of the manners of the time.

And Nick starts to get some sex, which has been a while coming - he hasn't made the most of his opportunities up until now.

Roll on volume four.

THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD is the third book in Anthony Powell's 12-novel sequence "A Dance to the Music of Time", which tracks the narrator and his social circle from youth in the 1920s to old age and death half a century later. In comparison, the first two novels seem a weighy introduction, presenting us with Jenkins' school friends and then their wider social circle. With THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD, the scene is set and the plot can now move at a more sprightly pace.

Set from around 1930-1932, this third instalment skewers the literary world's flirtation with Communism on one hand (represented by Quiggin) and the greed and ambition of industrial magnates on the other (as Widmerpool reveals his intentions in a climactic speech). There are some very amusing portrayals of people caught up in recent fads, and while Powell's humour is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD is nonetheless a lot of fun. The reappearance of Jenkins' school friends Templer and Stringham adds however a note of tragedy.

Jenkins' relationship with Jean Templer, alluded to in the last volume, blooms in the course of these pages. Consequently, Jenkins is no longer the passive observer of events around him as in the earlier volumes, but an engaged narrator who reflects at great length of lessons learned in love. There's even some overt sexuality -- overt once you've become accustomed to Powell's world of allusion.

"A Dance to the Music of Time" has been republished in four volumes by University of Chicago Press, each containing three novels in the sequence. THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD wraps up the first "movement" of the work quite well, reintroducing us to some characters met at the very start of A QUESTION OF UPBRINGING, and leaving us in suspense for what will happen next during the turbulent 1930s.