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

I'm almost finished with the First Movement, and I'm absolutely impressed and amazed at Anthony Powell's ability to write what amounts to gossip in such an intelligent and thoughtful way. He just keeps on writing in a way that makes me just keep on reading, until I tire (I'm old). I have to presume that the next 3 books are as good as this one. I tried to complete Proust's In Search of Lost Time, but though his ability to hold complex thoughts in a sentence are impressive, he can be boring. Anthony Powell has yet to be boring. And he continues to come up with intelligent, spot-on insights into people and relationships and life. I don't know how he does it.

It took me about a year to read the twelve novels that make up A Dance to the Music of Time. I stopped between each novel in the series to read other authors. Each time I switched to someone else, the prose seem ragged and imprecise compared to Powell's. The Dance kept calling me back.

A Dance to the Music of time follows the lives of numerous upper-class English men and women as they emerge from college, get married, get divorced, establish careers, lose careers, grow old, and die. The narrator is Nick Jenkins, a keen observer and minor participant in the comings and goings of what must be by the end forty or fifty developed characters. The people in Powell's tome are educated, erudite, and mostly engaged in artistic and academic professions. These are not the kind of people I would ordinarily find interesting, but Powell hooked me and never let me go.

It is hard, considering the similarities in length, in subject matter, and title not to compare Powell to Proust's, In Search of Lost Time. Both Proust and Powell can write pages describing conversations that took place at an afternoon tea, and, at the close of the scene, leave the reader saddened that it has come to an end so soon. Proust's long novel, however, was an epic dissection of the human need for love and belonging; a work of genius. The social interactions that delight us in his writing are lenses by which we examine our most inner selves. Nick Jenkins, Powell's narrator, is a distanced social observer--a wry, polite and ever forgiving chronicler of the human condition. Powell's heroes are flawed and his villains, are oddly likable. Even the ever-present Widmerpool--a Uriah Heep who gets squeezed by society into the upper realms of financial and political power by his sheer inability to assimilate anywhere else--is easier to pity than to hate.

Characters in A Dance to the Music of Time come and go, disappear and reappear, die and live again through their progeny. You meet the neer-do-well Uncle Giles, the cult leading Dr. Trelawany, the alcoholic Stringham, the beautiful enchantress Pamela Flitton, the Marxist J.G. Quiggin, and so many more. Whenever the action--to the extent that there is any action in the traditional sense--flags, we hear a knock at the door or turn a street corner, and there stands a character from the past ready to fill us in on the remarkable turns of fate that have brought the person back to the fold. A Dance to the Music of Time is filled with happenstance meetings and homecomings. The motif is used so often that it becomes humorous and then delightfully comfortable.

The books are funny and quotable. Powell's easy precise prose is always a comfort. I finished Proust and was ready for it to be over. I finished the last book in A Dance to the Music of Time and wished there was one more.

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.