A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement

_A Dance to the Music of Time_ is an extremely absorbing and well-crafted novel (composed of 12 smaller novels). Its subject is the decline of the English upper classes from the First World War to about 1970, a decline seen is inevitable and probably necessary, but somehow also regrettable.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 first volume of the University of Chicago Press' beautiful four-volume Trade Paperback edition contains the first three books: _A Question of Upbringing_, which follows Nick Jenkins and his friends Charles Stringham and Peter Templer, along with Kenneth Widmerpool, through the last few terms at Eton, and summer spent in France, and then time at Oxford; _A Buyer's Market_, which covers Nick and his friends in their early 20s, attending dances and dinners, having love affairs, and beginning to make careers; and _The Acceptance World_, which shows the young men becoming settled in their careers, and beginning to marry and divorce and have more affairs as their "dance" continues.This is simply outstanding stuff.

Holds your interest like a best-seller, yet there is a lot more here than just a good yarn. The completely realistic way all of the characters act as they advance from youth to old age, combined with Powell's understated ironic style (and a series of clever twists of novelistic fate that continually reinvent the main characters) make this a great, guilt-free, read. Buy all three volumes, and hit the beach!

I place this work among literary mammoths of our time, including Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past," Durrell's "The Alexandria Quartet" and Henry Williamson's "A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight." My judgment results not merely from this work's great length, but rather in Powell's greatly detailed characters, sprawling plot development and sheer READABILITY. Despite its great length [about 3,000 pages] it still pales in length in comparison to the aforementioned "Chronicle," which at times, plods along and tallies up to approximately 8,000 pages. Bravo to the University of Chicago Press for re-publishing this work in such a beautiful edition, as well. Buy this set and read this wonderful work. You'll enjoy it.

First, although I adore this series, I would like to demur from the description of this series as a comedy. Certainly there are many comic situations and laughable characters, but Powell's (pronounced POE-UHL, not POW-UHL) comedy is intended less to make uslaugh than to make ussmile. I know many novels that are far funnier than this one, and if that were the book's only virtue, it would not enjoy the status that it does.Above all, this is a work that limns in almost tedious detail the interrelations and interworkings of a segment of English society in the 20th century. These first three books take you from the early twenties into the early thirties. Despite the series great length, there is nothing epic about the scale of the novels except for the overall length of of the series as a whole. The scenes are all horribly mundane. A party here, a dinner there, a chance meeting in a bar, more parties, more dinners. But as the parties and dinners multiply, and as one social encounter builds upon another, the series does indeed take on an epic quality.This new edition is far more attractive than the old mass market edition of the series, but I do wish that someone would have taken the effort to supply an appendix (perhaps to the final volume) that would (as in some editions of Trollope and Proust) explain who all the characters are and to whom they are related. By the sixth volume in the series, I began to find it extremely difficult to remember precisely where each character fit in the social world as a whole.The greatest virtues of Powell's series are his richly delineated characters (of which there are at least fifty to a hundred who are to some degree significant) and his marvelously elegant prose. I believe that anyone who loves novels would love this series, in particular those who have enjoyed Proust.