A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement [Paperback]

The second hazard is that you may be forever spoiled for reading anything less well crafted. The next author you read after Powell may seem shallow, simplistic, juvenile, obvious, crude, banal, overheated, or even vulgar. Powell's writing is objective, distanced, understated, intricate, subtle, acute, and highly precise; the apotheosis of ordinary detail. Powell's strength lies in closely observed and particularized character development, our understanding of each person altering slightly from one vignette, glimpse, or reference to the next. Allegedly a masterpiece of comedic writing, "Dance" is not, however, funny, farcical, or obviously, satirical. I really think it takes an English person to see and enjoy fully the comedy of manners I sense behind the prose. I felt I was always on the outside, vaguely aware that people might be not quite right, or "dotty," except for one passage in Book 5 where I laughed out loud. I probably need an "Annotated Powell."

You can see I'm deeply conflicted about this series: it is marvelously well-written yet I am not well entertained. An honest reviewer admitted that Powell "evokes a wry poetry from drabness and boredom." It took me 5 years to finish the first Movement, and dogged determination to read the next, and still I want to read one more! Just not immediately.

Such a description might make the novel seem stuffy, but it is not. _A Dance to the Music of Time_ is at times very funny indeed, and always interesting. always involving. It features an enormous cast of characters, and Powell has the remarkable ability to make his characters memorable with the briefest of descriptions. In addition, Powell's prose is addictive: very characteristic, idiosyncratic, and elegant.

The long novel follows the life of the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, from his time at Eton just after World War I to retirement in the English countryside in the late '60s. But Jenkins, though the narrator, is in many ways not the most important character. The comic villain Widmerpool, a creature of pure will, and awkward malevolence, is the other fulcrum around which the novel pivots.

This second volume of the University of Chicago's beautiful trade paperback editions features books 4, 5 and 6 of the novel series. _At Lady Molly's_ is centered around the eccentric title character and her parties, as well as such other characters as her eccentric husband, Ted Jeavons, and even Nick Jenkins' wife-to-be, Isobel. _Casanova's Chinese Restaurant_ opens with a bravura prose set-piece of flashback within flashback, and deals with Jenkins' great friend the composer Hugh Moreland, and with the tragically unhappily married critic Maclintick. The subject of the novel is marriage. The last novel in this book is _The Kindly Ones_, which deals with the coming of World War II. It begins with a flashback to 1914, as the First World War breaks out and impinges on Jenkins' childhood, then continues in the late '30s as Europe heads again into war.