Customer Reviews

Temporary Kings (Dance to the Music of Time 11)

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This is probably not the best part of The Dance to start with. It is, after all, the penultimate volume of a twelve-part series. Still, it is possibly the one novel of the series with the greatest notoriety, and also some great acclaim.

In this volume, it is about 1958, and narrator Nick Jenkins is a full-on academic, attending a conference in Venice, reflecting on travelling professors' statuses as "Temporary Kings." It isn't long before Pamela Widmerpool arrives in the story and sucks all the air out of the other characters. They all meet while gazing at a painting featuring another King, a scene that Lady Widmerpool finds entirely too relevant.

For good measure, there's a couple of Americans tossed in. There's a movie director/race-car driver, and then the introverted would-be biographer of Pamela's late lover. Between the art and the horde of characters that show up in the seemingly casually strung together episodes, Powell continues to bring humanity to his characters, all the while killing them off more quickly and methodically than Jason dispatches errant campers in a Friday the 13th movie.

Still, the messy humanity of these characters is the driver for the story. In this way, the characters in this step of The Dance are much like the Osbournes on TV. Despite all the fabulousness granted to these literary, political, academic, or artistic elites, they're still naked under all their clothing. And their getting older, while realizing that they've reached the primes of their adult lives, and their friends are beginning to die of natural causes, and none of it is that unexpected at all.

TEMPORARY KINGS is the eleventh and penultimate volume in Anthony Powell's sequence "A Dance to the Music of Time", which follows narrator Nicholas Jenkins and his social circle through several decades of 20th-century Britain. With this novel, we make a great leap in time, for over ten years have elapsed since BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM. Events in that novel are so far in the past as to be but vague memories.

In the late 1950s Nicholas Jenkins attends a writers' conference in Venice, where among the whole left-wing literary crowd of earlier entries in the series, we are introduced to two new, American characters. Gwinnett is an academic preparing a biography of X. Trapnel. Glober, on the other hand, is a millionaire movie producer whom, we are informed in flashback, Jenkins had already briefly met in the 1920s. Naturally both encounter Pamela Widmerpool, who continues to destroy the lives of every male character in her path. Though later scenes in the novel return us to Britain, the Venice episode takes up over half of the novel. It's awfully tedious, and the comedy that marked earlier volumes is generally missing. And though I've accepted the random encounters of characters before (the "dance", after all, of the series' title), it's hard to believe that so many people, some with no connection to the conference, just happen to be in Venice at the same time.

This volume also reveals Powell to be running out of ideas, especially when it comes to documenting characters' sexual lives, which is the bulk of the plot here. Yet another female character is outed as a lesbian with the same generic description as earlier volumes -- except for Pamela Widmerpool, the female characters in the Dance have never been but two-dimensional. Then, at the climax of TEMPORARY KINGS, a scandalous revelation is made about Widmerpool's tastes, but his particular fetish belonged already to another character and we've heard enough about it that it's hard to be really scandalized that Widmerpool shares it.

TEMPORARY KINGS isn't completely worthless. The last few pages of the novel, where some horrible events are described only indirectly, is skilfully done. I'll continue with the Dance, but now I'm grateful there's only a single volume left.

The second book in the final volume of Powell's monumental series (Book 2 of Winter). The femme fatale Pamela Flitton-Widmerpool continues to leave ruined men in her wake. Kenneth Widmerpool seems certain to fall in this book but continues his resiliency, surviving scandals of both marital and political nature. The typical party setting, this time at a conference, with lots of conversation and reminiscing of past affairs, fails to add much to the epic series. I don't believe I enjoyed it as much as the previous book.

The penultimate book in the "Dance to the Music of Time" series. With each book, I find myself reading these faster and faster. Some of this is due to the familiarity with the characters and settings, people and places that I have encountered before and thus do not need to labor at identifying. But it is also due to the 'dating' of the books. Early in the series, beginning as it does shortly after the first World War, I had little in common with the characters and their world. As Powell has progressed through the years, I find myself being able to visualize the people much, much easier.

As in the previous book, Books Do Furnish a Room, Widmerpool continues to embody the Peter Principle in his endless fall upwards, no matter the cruelty that his wife (or Anthony Powell) can bring to bear on him. While I do not find Widmerpool a character with which I can emphathize, I do find myself wincing at his discomfort in much the same way that I can hardly stand to watch sitcoms like "Seinfeld" where people are shown in embarrassing or humiliating situations.

I'm anxious to finish off the series, and made a summary statement about it, even though the first book is lost in the hazy memory of a year ago.