Again this book, like the previous one, necessitates the question of whether to treat this as a “roman fleueve” or to take the books individually in terms of independent of one another. I am writing this review as a kind of liveblog and we will see what difference or effect it creates. My plan is also to read a book in between each of the sections as well, which should also create a more concrete break too.
Book 4: At Lady Molly’s — Like a lot of novels, but especially English novels and especially English novels of the early parts of the 20th century — well from early through mid — we begin with a conversation. We are at some sort of social gathering and our narrator is older than when we last saw him (at college or just finishing up if I recall correctly). Nick is working as a screenwriter now for film and television — which gives the book a slight feel to Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet, though without plot connections, in set up. He’s still interested in criticism, but the various vicissitudes of love and marriage have cropped up, along with the ways in which being employed for a living can really be a kind of punch to the jaw. He befriends multiple different people, but we’re definitely focused on a connection with a Northern critic named Quiggin, who apparently doesn’t have a direct real life correlation, but given his anti-fascist and Marxist stances, at least for now, reminds me some of Orwell, who I know Powell knew in life.
Book 5 – Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant
In this next book, we shift our focus away from the previous group to a new group, which contains many more writers. I was wrong about Quiggin being Orwell, but Orwell shows up in this book as the figure of Erridge, who is planning on going to Spain to fight in the Civil War. Politics are very much seen as badges and playthings in this book (and if you’ve read Homage to Catalonia, you might experience the same sense when Orwell is committed to the cause, but disillusioned by the dedication he fails to see in others). Another big element in this book is a more literal kind of passing of the guard, especially with the return of St John Clarke as a public intellectual. The air is thick with possibility for the 1930s, but the rise of Fascism is looming large and sometimes brings out the best of our figures and sometimes the worst.
Book 6 – The Kindly Ones
The final book in this volume, and marking the midway point in the series closes out the present in a way — through the death of an important character — and also visits the past, to help us better understand how we’ve arrived where we are.
It’s hard not to use WWII as a marking point. We know Anthony Powell survives the war because he’s writing the novels, so there’s little to gain through building up a kind of suspense about it. So instead, by looking back at what he knows and recalls about the buildup to WWI in the flashback sections of this novel he’s able to shed light on the novel’s present.
“Champagne, m’lord?’
‘Have we got any? One bottle would do. Even a half-bottle.’
Smith’s face puckered, as if manfully attempting to force his mind to grapple with a mathematical or philosophical problem of extraordinary complexity. His bearing suggested that he had certainly before heard the word ‘champagne’ used, if only in some distant, outlandish context; that devotion to his master alone gave him some apprehension of what this question—these ravings, almost—might mean. Nothing good could come of it. This was a disastrous way to talk. That was his unspoken message so far as champagne was concerned. After a long pause, he at last shook his head.
‘I doubt if there is any champagne left, m’lord.”
“However much one hears about individuals, the picture formed in the mind rarely approximates to the reality. So it was with Mrs Maclintick. I was not prepared for her in the flesh. When she opened the door to us, her formidable discontent with life swept across the threshold in scorching, blasting waves.”
“In fact the original memory of Miss Blaides returned to me one morning when I was sitting in my cream distempered, strip-lighted, bare, sanitary, glaring, forlorn little cell at the Studio. In that place it was possible to know deep despondency.”
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16115.A_Dance_to_the_Music_of_Time?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=j4bTe4EWjG&rank=3)