The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 21 February 2023
by Anthony Powell
As noted in reviews of the earlier volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell, who died in 2000, has taken us on a journey through decades of the 20th century, as seen from a circle of middle-class and upper-middle-class men and women in England during times of war and times of peace. In this volume, first published in 1968, our narrator is again Nicholas Jenkins. We first met him in a boys' school after World War 1, and we see him here in diplomatic service during the height and closing year of World War 2. The Blitz continues, and the bombs become more sophisticated, with the buzzing V-1 flying bombs devastating neighborhoods throughout the city. Nick is quietly ensconced in an underground London office, responsible for the provision of refugee armies from Poland and the Low Countries. Many of the people and places who featured large in the earlier volumes are here referred to in passing as Nick reflects on where they may be stationed and whether they have survived; or when he walks in London and recognizes places he remembers, seeing them now in their military drab. Meanwhile, large events in the war play out in the background, but do have an effect on Nick's journey. We glimpse the evacuation of Singapore, the massacres of Polish officers in the frontier forests of Poland and Russia, intrigues in northern Africa, evacuations and redeployments, the dropping of an atomic bomb, and the promise of peace. Some new characters arise, of course, most particularly Pamela Flitton, a beautiful young woman, a distant relative of Nick's friends, but who is also a force in her own right, another front in the war, laying waste to the assumptions of men and their reputations. Perhaps even Kenneth Widmerpool, the long-suffering and insufferable anti-hero of the books, is swayed by her powers.
Along the way, there is a coy reference to Marcel Proust, as Nick and his entourage stop at a French seaside hotel in Cabourg. Powell's vast story is often compared to that of Proust, though he resisted the comparison, and, indeed, there are many differences. The similarity, however, is the brilliance of the observations and the beauty of the writing, and of course the overwhelming power of memory. We're in the ninth installment of the Dance, with three to follow, a return to peacetime and professional life. We shall see. Some of the significant protagonists here, going back to the first pages of the first volume, are left in an air of mystery, missing, presumed dead, in the war. And yet, others keep popping up, seemingly to no big surprise on the part of Nick. And that lack of overt drama is part of the beauty, also, of Powell's writing. The reader senses a murder, when merely the supposed victim has gone out for tea.
Also by Anthony Powell: [A Question of Upbringing] [A Buyer's Market] [The Acceptance World ] [At Lady Molly's] [Casanova's Chinese Restaurant] [The Kindly Ones] [The Soldier's Art] [The Valley of Bones]