The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 10 March 2016
by Anthony Powell
Lady Molly has been married a couple of times. She is boisterous and loves to entertain. Her husband, Jeavons, is more low-key, but he has a history of his own, too. Their parties aren't glittering events, though, and there is a distinctly downbeat quality to the guests they entertain. These aren't occasions like those we've seen earlier in Powell's saga of social life in the years between the wars in England. It almost goes without saying that our narrator, Nick Jenkins, who is a bit of a wallflower himself, would run into his old school chum Widmerpool at one of Lady Molly's gatherings. It is in the intricate pattern of relations that Powell expresses his perceptions of our paths through life. He keeps running into familiar characters, and Widmerpool, with whom he has only a tenuous relationship, keeps cropping up like a nerdy Greek chorus, to tag the latest adventures in Nick's own life.
In this volume, we discover Widmerpool is at last engaged, to an even more flighty older woman, Mrs. Mildred Haycock, who has also popped up before. Along the way, Nick spends a shadowy weekend with the old Communist J. G. Quiggin at a country retreat with Mona, the beauty who once modeled for now-deceased Deacon. Nick, himself, is now writing screenplays for the British film quota. But the various connections between the many men and women in Nick's milieu don't stay static for long. And we see a world in which men and women are bouncing between one another in a way we hardly expect from a time so long ago. But, maybe that's what the late 1920's and early 30's were all about, prior to the disaster of the next war, hinted at here and no doubt to transform all of these lives. Except, perhaps, that of Widmerpool. We keep comparing this work to that of Proust, and the parallels are inescapable. Nick is watching a social milieu evolve and dissolve as the modern world swirls about him and his old school friends. By the end of the book, Nick is engaged, a romantic entanglement that happens almost entirely off-stage. So, there's more to come in later volumes.
With this book, we are a third of the way through the twelve-volume saga. Anthony Powell's language is articulate, given to British precision, but also subtle, observant, atmospheric and rather funny. Recommended.
Also by Anthony Powell: [A Question of Upbringing] [A Buyer's Market] [The Acceptance World ] [Casanova's Chinese Restaurant] [The Kindly Ones] [The Valley of Bones] [The Soldier's Art] [The Military Philosophers]