Slow Dance

I first tried to read Anthony Powell's Dance To The Music of Time when I was between girlfriends, a long time ago. It seemed a good time to sit down and try to read something substantial - a good time to take on a little wisdom perhaps - and the only time, possibly, I would attempt a novel in twelve books. I remember having reached the end of the second volume in the series almost without noticing that I had read it. I remember too, that even at that stage, things about it seemed strange.

There's the pace. The characters hardly seem to move at all. Small events happen around and to them, and they recount tales of their own, but it's only when you look back over what you have just read, that you realise how many and how intricate are the themes. It's an odd feeling, and it is like time itself - you only see what has happened when you look back. Some of this has to do with the books being told in the first person, through a narrator (Nick Jenkins) who is so passive that sometimes he almost seems asleep.

Local Difficulties

The books seem to be talking about universal values, even though they are primarily concerned with what happens to a wealthy and well-connected set of people. The books are quite reticent about the upper-class setting, but the houses where the plots are enacted are usually grand, decked with pictures (from Eton to Sir Magnus Donners's castle to a palazzo in Venice), and the concerns of the characters are about art and politics. It is a privileged world, but it doesn't feel like it. Its characters are people who are determined to make things happen – from Sillery the Oxford don, to Widmerpool the administrator and politician, to Quiggin the writer and publisher – and the fact that these people are so motivated gives it all a fascination and significance that goes beyond character. And there's the subtlety of it all. I told a friend about Louis Grober, the film producer, who feels obliged to keep snippings of his girlfriends' pubic hair to stuff cushions with. 'Oh' he said pointedly, 'it's one of those books.' You could make a substantial case that it's all just a salacious romp.

Motivations

The narrator's first girlfriend turns out to be double-dating with the awful Duport as well as with the occult-obsessed Stripling. Stringham's niece Pamela Flitton (strongly hinted to be a devotee of the devil) is exhibited naked by her husband Widmerpool to the revolutionary writer Ferrand-Seneschal and finally gives herself in death to the gothic Puritan academic Gwinnett. This is even without mentioning the painter Barnby’s relentless womanising; Moreland's wife, Matilda, who is prepared to put up with Sir Magnus Donners's strange sexual habits, and finally the Scorpio Murtlock crowd who all have to have sex with each other (men and women) in order to make their rite effective. It's part of Anthony Powell's skill that these twelve books can read as models of respectability. They are most definitely not there to shock into a reaction. They don't even feel modern in the sense that DH Lawrence can sometimes feel modern, let alone George Orwell - these books read like Thackeray.

In that, the books are like two of the oil paintings that help to give shape and impetus (and a title) to the series. A Dance to the Music of Time is about the dance of life which begins haltingly, is fuelled by sex, and gradually shades into a dance of death. But sex is at its heart from the moment that Templer, up in London from Eton, pays for an afternoon with a prostitute. From there on, sex drives the characters relentlessly as they bounce off each other in their race for success and power.

Alternatives

I read the 12 books. Now A Dance To The Music Of Time is something I go back to - perhaps in the same way that people revisit a place like Venice, somewhere magical where there are always new things to discover. It is not a perfect book. The focus is sometimes too much dictated by external events (in particular the Second World War, which is the backdrop to three of the volumes). It is annoying too, as Philip Larkin pointed out, that the career of Nick Jenkins so much resembles that of his creator. Anthony Powell probably had a good deal of fun in portraying thinly-disguised characters from real life in amongst the text, but that seems a little too arch from this distance.

Those criticisms aside, the achievement of the overall result is to create a kind of soap opera, which has all the advantages of both form and substance, and in which characters and events are martialled in a way that perhaps no-one since Charles Dickens has been able to do successfully. A Dance To The Music Of Time has all the restless, edgy, ego-driven motivation that make the best TV soaps compulsive viewing. It combines that with the coolly-analytical view of the narrator, who like us, seems amazed that events should conspire to take such a course.

The alternative to getting involved in that race is to pursue the life of the artist, like narrator Nick Jenkins. In the end, it is the favourite possession of Stringham – the Modigliani drawing – (not to mention Mr Deacon's newly fashionable homo-erotic classical paintings) which survive them all. And if it is the enduring power of art as an interpreter of human motivation that the author sees as the final truth, then the enduring quality of mankind is to take itself much, much too seriously.

END

(c) Michael Spring 2008

Reviewed 27 February 2008 / London

NOTES - A Dance to the Music of Time, 12 volumes first published over the period 1951 and 1975, written by Anthony Powell, is available from eg Amazon (www.amazon.com). There's a summary at The Anthony Powell Society's web page http://www.anthonypowell.org.uk/; and further details at eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dance_to_the_Music_of_Time. The 12 books, in order, are: A Question of Upbringing (1951). A Buyer's Market (1952). The Acceptance World (1955). At Lady Molly's (1957). Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960). The Kindly Ones (1962). The Valley of Bones (1964). The Soldier's Art (1966). The Military Philosophers (1968). Books Do Furnish a Room (1971). Temporary Kings - (1973). Hearing Secret Harmonies - (1975).