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A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement Paperback – May 31, 1995

by Anthony Powell (Author)

20 customer reviews

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Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.

In this climactic volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nick Jenkins describes a world of ambition, intrigue, and dissolution. England has won the war, but now the losses, physical and moral, must be counted. Pamela Widmerpool sets a snare for the young writer Trapnel, while her husband suffers private agony and public humiliation. Set against a background of politics, business, high society, and the counterculture in England and Europe, this magnificent work of art sounds an unforgettable requiem for an age.

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Books Do Furnish a Room

A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement

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Product Details

Series: Dance to the Music of Time
Paperback: 804 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (May 31, 1995)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0226677184
ISBN-13: 978-0226677187
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.8 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #357,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #11624 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary
- #20111 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

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4.1 out of 5 stars

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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful

Last segments of the finest English novel of the 20th C.

By Richard R. Horton on July 14, 2000

Format: Paperback

_A Dance to the Music of Time_ is an extremely absorbing and well-crafted novel (composed of 12 smaller novels). Its subject is the decline of the English upper classes from the First World War to about 1970, a decline seen is inevitable and probably necessary, but somehow also regrettable.
Such a description might make the novel seem stuffy, but it is not. _A Dance to the Music of Time_ is at times very funny indeed, and always interesting. always involving. It features an enormous cast of characters, and Powell has the remarkable ability to make his characters memorable with the briefest of descriptions. In addition, Powell's prose is addictive: very characteristic, idiosyncratic, and elegant.
The long novel follows the life of the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, from his time at Eton just after World War I to retirement in the English countryside in the late '60s. But Jenkins, though the narrator, is in many ways not the most important character. The comic villain Widmerpool, a creature of pure will, and awkward malevolence, is the other fulcrum around which the novel pivots.
This final volume of the University of Chicago's beautiful Trade Paperback edition includes the last three books. _Books Do Furnish a Room_ is set shortly after World War II, when Nick Jenkins is moving in London literary circles, dealing with such characters as the doomed, eccentric, novelist X. Trapnel, his mistress Pamela Flitton Widmerpool, and of course Kenneth Widmerpool himself, clumsily but successfully trying to maximize his political influence with the help of a literary magazine. _Temporary Kings_ features Jenkins at a conference in Venice, then back in London, and introduces a couple of curious Americans, Louis Glober and Russell Gwinnett.Read more ›

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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

The worst thing about it is that it came to an end

By Robert Moore HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on August 10, 1999

Format: Paperback Verified Purchase

C. S. Lewis once wrote that one of the greatest services that literature offers is the opportunity to experience worlds and lives not our own. This is rarely more true than with Powell's magnificent series. I had come to feel that Nicholas Jenkins's friends were my friends, and by the end I felt almost as if I had experienced another life.
If one is willing to make the commitment of time, I wholeheartedly recommend this superb series. In a hundred years time, it might be the single work that I would recommend to anyone wanting to know what life in the 20th century was like.

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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

Final steps of the "Dance'

By A Customer on October 30, 1998

Format: Paperback

The last three novels of this twelve-volume series take place in post-World War II England. The cast of characters has been substantially trimmed, as many of the narrator's closest friends have died, but new and unforgettable individuals emerge in the feverish literary world of London and the international conference circuit. We wait, and root for, the horrible Widmerpool to get his comeuppance, and watch as the other characters grow older, some gracefully, some less so, but always moving to the stately rhythms of time's music. Those who have read the first three-quarters of the series should definitely go on to the end--many treats are in store for you!

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

Now is the Winter of Our Discontent

By Stephanie De Pue VINE VOICE on May 15, 2008

Format: Paperback

To arrive at the 4th movement of 20th Century British author Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time," is, of course, to arrive at the season of winter, as we can see from the front of the soft-cover volume, a reprint of the painting by the 16th century French artist Nicolas Poussin, from which title Powell's masterwork, initially a 12-book series, takes its own. The series'1st movement, chronicling the schooldays of Powell's narrator, Nick Jenkins, was spring; the second movement, chronicling the palmy young adulthood in London of the narrator, his friends and acquaintances, was summer. World War II was fall. We now arrive at winter, melancholy; discontented, to quote Shakespeare's Richard III; and shot through with death. Powell's language is frequently more Latinate and pompous than in his earlier books; his plots and characters are less dense, and less funny. Our narrator, Jenkins, becomes less an actor in the tale than a bystander; the books read almost as a prolonged afterword as loose ends are tied up.

"Books Do Furnish a Room," first in the final trilogy, is set in the immediate post-war years of the late 1940's. Mention is made of the many people Jenkins knew who were lost in the war: his closest friends from schooldays, Peter Templer and Charles Stringham; his friend from young London salad days, Barnby. Several of his wife Isobel's many siblings have also been lost: as well as her aunt Molly Jeavons. Our narrator Jenkins is working on a study of Robert Burton, sixteenth-century author of The Essential Anatomy of Melancholy (Dover Books on Literature & Drama), and the mood is melancholy indeed.Read more ›

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

This last quarter of the Dance is of lesser quality than the first three

By Christopher Culver TOP 1000 REVIEWER on May 28, 2011

Format: Paperback

After a hundreds of pages dealing just with World War II, Anthony Powell brings us through the postwar decades with the last three novels of "A Dance to the Music of Time", which tracks Nicholas Jenkins and his social circle across an enormous breadth of 20th-century Britain.

BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM, the tenth novel, opens in the winter of 1945/46 as Britain settles back into peacetime, though not without annoying rationing and shortages. Jenkins has come to his old university for research towards a biography on Robert Burton, but soon first himself involved in the launch of a new literary magazine with distinct leftist tones. Indeed, we return to a world of shady politics left behind in the early 1930s in THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD, the third novel of the sequence, and many of the characters from those days return. Widmerpool, his political career now taking off, also comes into the picture, and his continual defence of the Soviet Union makes him a more repulsive antagonist than ever.

But beyond revisiting old friends, BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM introduces two new characters with very distinctive personalities. One is the novelist X. Trapnel, whose bohemianism mystifies his fellow characters and ultimately leads to his grisly ruin. The other character is Pamela Widmerpool. Though she appeared first in the previous novel, she was mostly a force of nature destroying the lives of numerous male characters offscreen. Here Jenkins talks with her on several occasions, revealing something of her as a person. As this volume was written at the end of the 1960s in a more frank era, Powell felt that his language could be a bit more coarse, and it is Pamela who utters all the profanity.Read more ›

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

An all-in-all excellent book, the Fourth Movement still left me...

An all-in-all excellent book, the Fourth Movement still left me wanting more somehow. How is it that an older malignant narcissist, an essential character to the entire collection... Read more

Published 4 months ago by star gazer

The Best

The twelve novels that make up, A Dance to the Music of Time, are probably the best novels I have ever read. Read more

Published 7 months ago by R. H. Nichols

An extraordinary look at the ordinary lives of people who hang out in...

Having depicted your characters attempting to live day by day during the most involved conflict that the world thus far had ever known, where do you go from there? Read more

Published 8 months ago by Michael Battaglia

This four-part Mega-novel is a unique and utterly charming view ...

This four-part Mega-novel is a unique and utterly charming view into life in England in the 20th century. Don't be put off by the cover, this is a light-hearted masterpiece.

Published 12 months ago by Mercedes Lackey

Two Stars

The binding was falling apart. I had to repair it in order to read it

Published 14 months ago by Amatour

A dance to the music of time byt anthony powell

the writing is beautiful
It is quintessentially English
I cannot put it down
I will read it again and again
The only other books I have reread are Jane Eyre and... Read more

Published on August 15, 2013 by diana williamson

Just Not My Cup of Wine

Sometimes you can't appreciate the good things in life. One man's appreciation for a $500 bottle of wine can seem awkward when my own tastes like the $30 imitation just as much. Read more

Published on April 26, 2012 by Miami Bob

Wisdom's Harmonies

During the two years that I have been reading A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell(1905-2000) has become one of my three favorite authors. Read more

Published on January 25, 2012 by Gary Severance

A Review of "Hearing Secret Harmonies"

The first two novels in this, the last movement of "Dance," are wonderful, just as those in the three preceding movements are wonderful. Read more

Published on October 29, 2011 by Liron Rubin

An implausible slog

As in previous volumes, things in this volume "just happen." Perhaps Powell's frequent allusions to myth and legend, both in literature and in art, are intended to elevate his... Read more

Published on August 12, 2010 by David B. Rankin

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