The Saturday Morning Post (No. 20)

Well, we've reached the end of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series, so it's time to share my thoughts about them. I have a lot to say, so let's jump into it.

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 by Nicolas Poussin 

A Dance to the Music of Time Series of 12 Novels by Anthony Powell  C-

In my book grading system, a "C" is an average book. It is enjoyable, but not has nothing outstanding to recommend it over any other book. I usually do not finish books that would rate a "D" or "F" they just get "DNF". So, while I am not rating this series very highly, I did enjoy it enough to real all 12 books, which says something. And I should mention that the minus "-" it received was based solely on the last book, Hearing Secret Harmonies, which I did not enjoy at all. I think it "jumped the shark", so you can discount that "-" if you care to. However, given that the place and time period these books are set in is my favorite in history, this series of books had the potential to be an A+ series. The fact that it ended up a C- means that I will probably have a lot of rather negative things to say about it below. Just keep in mind that despite my criticisms, I enjoyed it enough to have read the entire series, and also keep in mind that I DNFed Lonesome Dove when McMurtry killed off Gus, after purchasing all four books and having read the two prequels, so that I have no problem not finishing a book I don't enjoy. Even if I paid money for it. With that out of the way, let's begin.

A Dance to the Music of Time, whatever it's literary aspirations may be, is a soap opera, pure and simple. The story involves a number entwined of families and characters woven together in an endless story. They grow up, start careers, fall in and out of love, get married, divorced, have affairs, advance, or experience setbacks in their careers, get rich, powerful, or not, in a closed loop, recounted in one long series of books, a series that could've continued on after the 12th book, even if I wouldn't have...  It can be looked on as a R. F. Delderfield saga on steroids.

While I am not much of a lad for literary fiction, I have read books by British authors such as W Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie, John Buchan, Nevil Shute, and Joseph Conrad, so that when I say that Anthony Powell's writing style is nondescript, even mundane, I say so in light of having read similar stories by some what similar British writers. His writing is wordy, thoughtful, and aspires to be literary. Heck there's passages of untranslated French and quotes from some classical literature in these books, so yah, he's a literary writer. Still, I found his writing serviceable, but unremarkable, his story telling pace slow, his scope limited.

I'm not a visual person, so that I don't expect to "see" a scene in my head like a movie, but the best writers, when they set out to create a scene,  or a place, evoke a sense of that place and mood. By and large Powell fails to do that, at least for me. Oh, he takes the time to describe rooms in great and concrete detail, and as such does a competent job of painting a scene, but unless you are familiar with similar rooms, descriptions of furnishings can only do so much in creating a sense of the place. When it comes to London, he attempts to create a mood, a sense of place. I found these descriptions interesting. Having taken dozens of YouTube bus rides through London including the districts he describes, I came away with an appreciation of how much London has changed since the time he was describing them. Some of the rundown areas of the city he talks about are today's very trendy neighborhoods, and a house on Regent Park that he visits would be accessible only to millionaires these days. I guess that is the dance of time. However, once you get beyond rooms and London, his description of the countryside entirely failed to evoke any sense of place, time, mood. These descriptions often seemed to be meant more as symbols than actual places. And in general his failure to evoke the mood the historical times the story was set in was a major failing for me, since it applied to the entire time period this series covers. I hardly recognize England at any of them.

There was a British TV mini-series drama made from these novels. The people on the covers of the books I used to illustrate the series are drawn from this series. Now, if I was asked to filming this series, I would've filmed it in black and white, since the entire series of books seemed to me to be very grey in tone. Not quite noir, but in the entirety of 12 books there is not one scene of authentic joy. Every scene is told with a flat, reflective, semi-cynical eye towards the people and events. Dances and parties are attended, people gather for drinks or dinner, and if people are having fun, the narrator sees it all, people and events, as merely a guise. Life is grey, and if life has any bits of joy, happiness, and true laughter, they are not recorded by the narrator. To have filmed these books in black and white would've been faithful to the source material.

Talking about grey brings us around to the first person narrator, Jenkins. In a first person narrated story, the narrator is a character in the story. In these books Jenkins is hardly a character at all. He is mostly an observer, hardly ever an actor. We learn next to nothing about him. For example when he meets his wife, we are merely told that having done so, he knew from the start she was the girl he was going to marry and no more. He doesn't even describe her. Their marriage happens between books, and with the exception of a few scenes in the later books, she remains off camera, as does his children, his family life, his work. He makes some sort of living, first working for a publisher, then for a film studio, and later, I guess as a writer and a book reviewer, but all this is mentioned only in passing. 

What he does is observe and ponder in long passages is what the other characters are thinking and why they are doing whatever it is they are doing. If these books were written in today's popular third person style with multiple point of view characters, the series would be half its length, and we, the reader, could've gotten to know the characters so much better, seeing their lives from their actual points of view. For the thing is, despite Jenkins' observations and pondering, we really don't get to know the characters very well. They remain opaque and vague. On one hand, do we ever know what people are truly like? But on the other hand, if pages and pages of speculation get you no closer to knowing... well what exactly is the point? One gets the impression that they are just objects upon which abstract observations about humans in general can be hung, rather than using these observations to craft true characters.

In any event, Powell uses this vagueness, the opaqueness, and the malleability he gives his characters to enable him to do whatever he wants with them. Indeed, I felt that the characters were always doing things that seemed to make no sense based on what we knew of them; things that seemed to be just for the convenience of the plot. Despite supposedly having a cast of 300 characters, he used and reused the core characters over and over again, regardless if, in my view, it made sense for that character to do whatever he had them doing. For example he has one extremely unpleasant female character who, for some reason, and I can only think for reasons of plot, everyone seems to fall in love with, including Winderpool who marries her, despite being the most unlikely character in the story  for him to marry. Or, for that matter the most unlikely person for her to marry. 

Speaking of Winderpool, he turns out to be the main character of the series, despite, or because, he is an altogether unpleasant character. No matter where Jenkins is, or what he is doing, you can always expect Winderpool to turn up, and you will never be disappointed. The whole series follows his story arch depicted in bits and pieces. There are, of course, many other characters as well, each described and pondered, but they come and go and come again, as needed across 12 books, only to fade away, die, or become a generic character, a mere name. Whatever their character was in the beginning long forgotten or blurred by age. They appeared in the later books just to dress the set as it were. The fact of the matter is, that with Jenkins being such a nonentity, there are no really memorable characters beyond Winderpool, in the 12 book series. He wins by default.

The blurb for this books says, in part, "It is unrivalled for its scope, its humour and the enormous pleasure it has given to generations." I found almost no humor in this book. Humor is a tricky thing, what some people find funny, others don't, so I can't say that the blurb lied, but I'll be damned if I could find anything more that a single remark, and some dialog by a character named Stringham that I felt were amusing. There is a scene where Winderpool, often the object of misfortune, gets a bowl of sugar poured on him at a dance by a girl. I assume this was meant to be a humorous incident, but Powell spends 7 plus pages setting up, describing, and pondering the incident... far too long and seriously for it to be funny. I have a feeling that the humor in these books, if there is any, and it wasn't just something a kind fellow book reviewer tossed into his review out of friendship, was the type that you had to be there, and know the people, to appreciate.

So did the books enrich my life in any way? Well, they passed the time and kept me interested in the dance of time. But I must confess that I'm not much of a lad for philosophy, so if there were nuggets of universal wisdom in the text, I overlooked them. Not being a regular reader of literary fiction, I probably wasn't the ideal audience for these books, so take that into your account when considering my opinions. 

What is there left to say? The story was interesting enough to keep me reading, though I would've DNFed it after the last book if it hadn't ended there. However, I have to admit that I would not recommend it to anyone I know. Read W Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge instead.