Here is the third installment of my review/thoughts on Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, which I am treating as a novel in 12 parts rather than a 12 novel series. Rather than dragging this out, I am including the last two omnibus books, i.e. six installments in this review, and will give you my overall review next week.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
A Dance to the Music of Time; Autumn by Anthony Powell
The Valley of Bones (1964)
The Soldier's Art (1966)
The Military Philosophers (1968)
The Valley of Bones covers the first year or so of World War ll. Jenkin is now in the army as a second lieutenant commanding a platoon in a regiment that is stationed in Northern Ireland for training. We meet a mostly new cast of characters, the officers and enlisted men he works with. Most of the officers are not regular army, but civilians like Jenkins who had signed up at the beginning of the war. Some of them are old enough to have served in World War l, or been part of the Territorial Army, a part-time army like the American National Guard. Most of them, however, are finding their way in the army as they go along. For some it is a dream come true, others an escape from a less than successful life, and still others, a long grey nightmare. I found this installment with Jenkins in this entirely new situation more interesting than the usual dinner party/meeting format that characterizes the series. That said, it is still mostly concerned with Jenkins trying to decipher the character and motives of the people, new and old, that he meets in the course of the story.
The Soldier's Art gives Jenkins a new job while still in the regiment stationed in Northern Ireland. In this installment he is an aide to the now familiar, though unpleasant character, Windmerpool from his school days, who is a Major at the regimental HQ. We get some new characters, plus the appearance of another old school pal who shows up. A leave allows him to get to London and encounter yet more familiar characters. By the end of this installment, we are into 1941, with first months of the London Blitz behind us, but London is still experiencing raids nightly. As with all these books, the world outside of Jenkin's focus on people is hinted at with off handed mentions more than even sketched in.
In The Military Philosophers we find Jenkins now working in London working for an Army organization that liaisons with the remnants of the armies of defeated and overrun countries like Poland, the Belgium, etc. As in all these books, exactly nature of what Jenkins does, or for that matter, what the office he works for does is not really fleshed out in any great detail. There is a problem or two, and a trip to meet Field Marshall Montgomery (never named), and a glimpse of the war in London, but mostly the setting gives Powell an opportunity to introduce new characters for Jenkins to deal with, as well as bringing back old ones. This story takes us to the end of the war with Jenkins collecting the civilian clothes that British soldiers are issued at the end of their service.
A Dance to the Music of Time; Winter by Anthony Powell
Books do Furnish a Room (1971)
Temporary Kings (1973)
Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975)
Books do Furnish a Room is set immediately after World War ll. Jenkins is working on a biography of one Robert Burton that brings him back to his old, unnamed university, and an old tutor. We meet some new and some old characters there, and he gets involvement with a new publishing house and a new magazine that involves a cast of characters from previous installments. While he is not directly involved in the venture, he is a contributing book reviewer. The main focus of this installment concerns a new character, Trapnel, a rather bohemian writer who writes pieces for the magazine and is working on a new novel. This aspect of the story struck me as something like W Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, which followed the career of a painter. In our story Jenkin recounts the ups and downs of Trapnel, as he becomes involved with more familiar characters.
The next installment, Temporary Kings, is set a decade later, 1958 to 1959 and opens at a writers' conference in Venice. Here we meet several new characters, including a female college professor and a rather strange American professor who researching the now late Trapnel with a view of writing his biography as his dissertation. Along with these new characters, we meet the usual suspects and explore the various mysteries concerned with the tragic end of Trapnel and his mistress, and the implications of that end in regard to the usual suspects.
The long novel concludes with Hearing Secret Harmonies, once again skipping ahead a decade to be set in 1968 to 1971. In this one some of the characters from the last installment reemerge, as well as a charismatic hippy cult leader. The old characters are dying off and those that remain are so generic now that all that remains of whatever characteristics he described in earlier installments have been lost, at least to me. You would needed to have taken extensive notes to know who these people are and what they did in previous installments. I am going to save most of my thoughts about A Dance to the Music of Time to next week, but I will say here, that I really did not like this particular installment and felt that the book fell off rather sharply in Winter, which characters acting not as you would think they would, give their established characteristics, but as needed by the author, which is something I do not like at all.
But enough, stay tuned for my full review of the 12 book novel coming next week.
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