A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement

About this fourth movement, two salient features strike me: 1) If you are not deeply steeped in literature or, perhaps, to put a finer point on it, the history of literature, if you don't understand this remark, made by Nick in The Temporary Kings, the second of these three final efforts, that, "It is often pointed out that one form of Romanticism is to be self-consciously Classical.", you are going to miss out on much of the work's depth. Indeed, if you have not read one particular book, Burton's delightful, age-old, rambling The Anatomy of Melancholy, you will miss out on much. So much is seen through a literary lens. 2.) This movement is indeed a departure from the other three, in that, were I asked to sum up its theme in one word, that word would be: Necrophilia I'm not going to delve into the psychology of Pamela Widmerpool nee Flitton or into that of Russell Gwinnett here. But let's just say that, primarily through these two characters, this movement plumbs the depths of sadism and masochism (particularly the latter) so subtly and deftly, and yet so uncompromisingly that it makes just about anything else written on these themes seem exhibitionist and superficial by comparison. Also, a word on the opus as a whole, now that I've read all four movements: It does not measure up to the standard of Proust, as is often claimed. Really, it's an entirely different sort of work than Proust's. Proust is solipsistic (in a profound sense) and poetic. Powell is gregarious and deeply prosaic. His style of writing reminds me of the Latin I had to construe as a youth. Near the end of the third movement, our narrator Jenkins confesses to a weakness for Poe. Here, that "weakness" blossoms improbably like a rose in a charnel house. After completing this fourth movement and meditating on the entire "Dance" for some time, I discovered that the overall affect on me was that it was extremely weird, weird in a way that I find impossible to put into exact wording, weird, no doubt, in the way that critic Harold Bloom uses the word when he avers that all great literature strikes the reader in this way, as weird. As odd as this recommendation may sound, one could do worse, far worse, than to return to Poe's poem Annabel Lee after completing this massive opus in order to gain a sort of perspective, whether one likes the poem or not, perhaps particularly if one does not.

_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 final volume of the University of Chicago's beautiful Trade Paperback edition includes the last three books. _Books Do Furnish a Room_ is set shortly after World War II, when Nick Jenkins is moving in London literary circles, dealing with such characters as the doomed, eccentric, novelist X. Trapnel, his mistress Pamela Flitton Widmerpool, and of course Kenneth Widmerpool himself, clumsily but successfully trying to maximize his political influence with the help of a literary magazine. _Temporary Kings_ features Jenkins at a conference in Venice, then back in London, and introduces a couple of curious Americans, Louis Glober and Russell Gwinnett. It also features the final destructive acts of the terrible Pamela Flitton's life. _Hearing Secret Harmonies_ concludes the sequence, as Jenkins rather bitterly views the radicalism of the '60s, and especially Widmerpool's usual attempts at ingratiating himself with the latest fads in power. The novel closes with a remarkable vision of Widmerpool's end, oddly, bitterly echoing his first appearance. A great, great, series of novels. Incomparable.

C. S. Lewis once wrote that one of the greatest services that literature offers is the opportunity to experience worlds and lives not our own. This is rarely more true than with Powell's magnificent series. I had come to feel that Nicholas Jenkins's friends were my friends, and by the end I felt almost as if I had experienced another life. If one is willing to make the commitment of time, I wholeheartedly recommend this superb series. In a hundred years time, it might be the single work that I would recommend to anyone wanting to know what life in the 20th century was like.

The last three novels of this twelve-volume series take place in post-World War II England. The cast of characters has been substantially trimmed, as many of the narrator's closest friends have died, but new and unforgettable individuals emerge in the feverish literary world of London and the international conference circuit. We wait, and root for, the horrible Widmerpool to get his comeuppance, and watch as the other characters grow older, some gracefully, some less so, but always moving to the stately rhythms of time's music. Those who have read the first three-quarters of the series should definitely go on to the end--many treats are in store for you!

This volume contains the final three novels of Anthony Powell's masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time. Readers coming to this series for the first time should start with the first volume. Powell's work is social comedy in the tradition of Jane Austen and George Meredith. Contemporary writers with whom he is often compared include Marcel Proust and Evelyn Waugh. The 12 short novels of A Dance to the Music of Time give a panoramic picture of English upper-class social life from 1921 to 1971 that is both intensely realistic and amazingly funny. Readers either love Powell's work or can't understand what others see in it. My own opinion is that Dance is the best novel written in the twentieth century. Others share this view: A Dance to the Music of Time is #43 on the recently constructed Random House/Modern Library 100 Best Poll (of twentieth century fiction) and was made into a 4-part miniseries on British television just about a year ago.