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

by Anthony Powell (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 44 ratings
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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.

Includes these novels:
Books Do Furnish a Room
Temporary Kings
Hearing Secret Harmonies

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker
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  1. Print length
    804 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    University of Chicago Press
  4. Publication date
    May 31, 1995
  5. Dimensions
    8 x 5.2 x 2 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0226677184
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0226677187
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Powell's epic of 20th-century England is actually composed of 12 novels divided into four "movements," although they can be read individually as separate works. The novels were originally published from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Back Cover

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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; 1st edition (May 31, 1995)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 804 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0226677184
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226677187
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.84 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8 x 5.2 x 2 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 44 ratings

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Anthony Powell

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4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
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44 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Gary Severance
5.0 out of 5 stars Wisdom's Harmonies
Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2012
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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. In his novel, divided into four "movements" with three volumes each, Powell followed his narrator, Nick Jenkins, from boyhood to semi-retirement in Great Britain during most of the 1900s. Along the way I became acquainted with a variety of interesting characters living upper middle class lives in London and the countryside. Jenkins is a writer of fiction and non-fiction who is a keen observer of behaviors of his family, friends, and fellow writers and artists. Nick's observational skills are not hampered by over- reaction, and the narrator may appear uninterested in other people's feelings. The depth of his character is revealed in the compassionate and humorous interaction, observation, and description of others.

The twelve volumes of Powell's work make it one of the longest novels in the English language. It is similar to Proust's In Search of Lost Time in length. The two novels also share many topics if not style, and are on a similar intellectual level. A way to help the reader decide to read A Dance to the Music of Time is to say that it is a "thinking person's" Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. In fact, as I mentioned in reviews of the first three movements, Galsworthy is represented in the novel by a successful but egocentric and foolish literary character, St John Clarke.

The fourth movement that I am reviewing here is composed of the volumes: Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), Temporary Kings (1973), and Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975). In this movement, the theme that has been recurring throughout the saga continues; people one meets early in life tend to come around again in middle life and yet again in later life. Each time these social seasons come around, the view of the people changes with an increase in observer wisdom. Certainly Nick Jenkins gains wisdom during his many decades as a family member, student, soldier, lover, husband, and writer. At the end of the story, Nick and the reader of the many volumes are able to hear the secret harmonies of the span of life described so beautifully and with good humor by Powell. See my other reviews of this novel written Powell wrote from 1951 to 1975.
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Daniel Myers
5.0 out of 5 stars Annabel Lee - Redux
Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2007
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About this fourth movement, two salient features strike me: 1) If you are not deeply steeped in literature or, perhaps, to put a finer point on it, the history of literature, if you don't understand this remark, made by Nick in The Temporary Kings, the second of these three final efforts, that, "It is often pointed out that one form of Romanticism is to be self-consciously Classical.", you are going to miss out on much of the work's depth. Indeed, if you have not read one particular book, Burton's delightful, age-old, rambling The Anatomy of Melancholy, you will miss out on much. So much is seen through a literary lens. 2.) This movement is indeed a departure from the other three, in that, were I asked to sum up its theme in one word, that word would be: Necrophilia

I'm not going to delve into the psychology of Pamela Widmerpool nee Flitton or into that of Russell Gwinnett here. But let's just say that, primarily through these two characters, this movement plumbs the depths of sadism and masochism (particularly the latter) so subtly and deftly, and yet so uncompromisingly that it makes just about anything else written on these themes seem exhibitionist and superficial by comparison.

Also, a word on the opus as a whole, now that I've read all four movements: It does not measure up to the standard of Proust, as is often claimed. Really, it's an entirely different sort of work than Proust's. Proust is solipsistic (in a profound sense) and poetic. Powell is gregarious and deeply prosaic. His style of writing reminds me of the Latin I had to construe as a youth.

Near the end of the third movement, our narrator Jenkins confesses to a weakness for Poe. Here, that "weakness" blossoms improbably like a rose in a charnel house. After completing this fourth movement and meditating on the entire "Dance" for some time, I discovered that the overall affect on me was that it was extremely weird, weird in a way that I find impossible to put into exact wording, weird, no doubt, in the way that critic Harold Bloom uses the word when he avers that all great literature strikes the reader in this way, as weird.

As odd as this recommendation may sound, one could do worse, far worse, than to return to Poe's poem Annabel Lee after completing this massive opus in order to gain a sort of perspective, whether one likes the poem or not, perhaps particularly if one does not.
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Liron Rubin
4.0 out of 5 stars A Review of "Hearing Secret Harmonies"
Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2011
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The first two novels in this, the last movement of "Dance," are wonderful, just as those in the three preceding movements are wonderful. I'm going to limit my review to the last volume, and that's because I hated it so much. Complaining about an appalling desert to a sumptuous meal is, of course, ungrateful, but such is human nature. (Amazon demands that we rate books, and my 4-star rating applies to "Books do Furnish a Room" and "Temporary Kings.")

What ails "Hearing Secret Harmonies" is simple: Powell, after having spent nearly 25 years on his ambitious series, no longer knows what to do with his characters. This is especially true of Widmerpool, Powell's power-mad, creepy and ultimately intriguing antihero. Here, in "Hearing Secret Harmonies" we reencounter said Widmerpool as an aspiring leader of a crackpot cult, an amusing but trite end for a pompous Eton pupil, a wunderkind London businessman, a ruthless military officer, a journalist and a Communist spy. Are we really to believe this of one who, for most of his power-hungry life, posed as "another Lord Chesterfield" (Stringham's apt description)?

Jenkins, too, is also a bit of a disappointment. The astute observer loses much of his muscle here, and what we end up with is a rather charming Tory who heaps scorn on the generation of the 1960s as embodied in the person of Scorp Murtlock and in those of his minions. Disappointing stuff from the penetrating Jenkins, a verdict that will, I think, make sense to you after you've completed such delights as "The Acceptance World," "The Kindly Ones" and "The Valley of Bones." With Jenkins, too, Powell has run out of ideas.

That said, read the series!
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Top reviews from other countries

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Markus Breuer
5.0 out of 5 stars !945-1970's
Reviewed in Germany on September 11, 2021
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The old generation dies. Lord Widmerpool gets unmasked as a crypto communist fellow traveller, while his nymphomaniac wife gets killed by an overdose in a seedy hotel. Jenkins, the narrator writes a book about Burtons "Analysis of Melancholy". Widmerpool ends up in a pagan cult, where he dies under mysterious circumstances in a prehistoric pagan temple.
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M. K. Tomlinson
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 11, 2018
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A very nice copy which arrived quickly. Thank you.
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緑川虫太郎
5.0 out of 5 stars やや難解
Reviewed in Japan on December 8, 2008
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第三部まで読んできて、この第四部に入ると、途端に調子が変わる。やや難解な文章で、読み通すのに苦労した。しかし、最後に感動が来る。やはり大長編小説は好い。特にこの作品は戦後の奇跡ともいわれただけあって、素晴らしい。やはり文学書は原書で読まなければ駄目である。
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SEAPWilliams
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 7, 2015
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Beautiful cover, robustly bound.
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Mercurius
4.0 out of 5 stars Three novels to conclude Powell's great sequence
Reviewed in Canada on July 4, 2020
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Again much to admire in this very extended description of a world of privilege and confusion, at once comic and here increasingly elegiac.
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