The notion that "nothing happens" in A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement, is preposterous. True, there are no car chases, murders or coup d'etat. If that is what you insist upon from fiction, these books are definitely not for you. But plenty else is happening. People you met in the first three novels are growing up. Some are finding spouses, some divorcing them. A few are succeeding terrifically. A number are floundering or worse. The "Slump" (aka The Great Depression) continues unabated and continues to take its toll upon the upper-middle and upper classes. And Poussin's classical painting of the eponymous title and its depiction of unchanging grace and beauty seems increasingly ironic.
Again, a triptych of novels (At Lady Molly's, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant and The Kindly Ones) depicts Powell's late 1930s. Nick Jenkins, hero and narrator, has moved on to screenwriting and from debutante balls to the more mature haunts of the drawing room. He continues (at first to my dismay--now I am simply resigned to the device) to continually and "coincidentally" bump into old acquaintances. ALM literally is a laundry list of these run-ins, and told with perfect comic pitch. Widermerpool resurfaces and is as great a buffoon as ever. The buffoon of youth, who seemed so hopeless before is still appallingly clumsy socially-- but successful otherwise. Love affairs that seemed so passionate and exciting have dissipated, and from the outset we are aware that Nick will get himself a wife before long. Why? Because that's what people do.
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant is less comic. More a meditation on art, relationships and trying to find happiness. In my opinion it is the best in the series thus far realistically and plaintively depicting that ache of first love and the subsequent disenchantment that inevitably follows. The composer Moreland is depicted from the first stages of infatuation to the brink of an affair that could reck his marriage. What he decides and why is beautifully wrought. Jenkins's in-laws provide the comic relief in this volume, but here Powell is happier to stay focused on the more serious. The aside of Erridge going off to the Spanish Civil War anchors us in time, provides some amusing remarks about Lefties but doesn't really create concern for his fate. The focus stays on the Moreland marriage throughout with an ending that is and is not surprising. Very well done, indeed.
The Kindly Ones abandons the melancholic for Powell's more jocular tone. Indeed the first chapter is one of the best send-ups of English Uppper Class life I have ever read. Quite hilarious and btw the only glimpse in six novels of Nick Jenkins's parents or his childhood. The comic tone is a bit "now or never" as we are teetering upon the onset of WWII. There won't be much to laugh at for years to come. The Kindly Ones though is no misnomer-- it's the name the ancient Greeks gave to the Furies, the bringers of disease, war and strife. And TKO does the same. It brings us to the beginning of the end--when empire and centuries' old ways are all threatened. We know it will all be swept away--the only question of course is how it affects the dozens of people we have met thus far in these splendid novels.
- Amazon Business : For business-only pricing, quantity discounts and FREE Shipping. Register a free business account
