Hearing Secret Harmonies: Book Twelve of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

I did it! I reached the end of the 3000-or-so-pages Dance to the Music of Time series. And I have to say I will miss always having the latest volume in the Kindle app on my phone.  (After all, I've been reading the series since last August.)

My feelings are pretty much in line with those of Christopher Culver, the one guy on Amazon who has read and reviewed the whole series. I don't know if I would call this the weakest book in the series--it does at least have pagan sex orgies to liven it up--and I definitely don't think the homosexuality is a problem, or that it's overdone. (The book seems to take place in the 70s, so it's certainly not out of place culturally.) But I do think that introducing a cult and the character of Scorpio is far from the most interesting direction Powell could have gone. I want to read more about why he made that choice, as opposed to keeping the final novel more on the level of more quiet interpersonal drama.

(Oh, speaking of which, we learn absolutely nothing about the narrator's kids, even though by now they are adults. The whole family goes to a big wedding at the end, and the kids don't show up, even though some of their cousins play major roles in the plot. We don't learn their names, what they do, how many of them there are, anything.)

Anyway, sorry, just kind of getting my initial thoughts out here in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way. What I was saying was, if I had to pick a "weakest volume" it would probably be book nine, which bored me. This book definitely didn't bore me. (See above re: pagan sex orgies.) I think Powell was trying to offer his views of the 60s counterculture. The narrator tolerates a lot (he doesn't even recoil from the NECROPHILIAC who marries HIS NIECE in this book) but he doesn't quite understand it, it seems like. This volume is a convincing portrait of an aging man, watching people drop in and out of his life, watching the next generation take his place.

I guess my biggest frustration is that the fate of Widmerpool, the series's antagonist, is pretty cartoonish and not quite convincing.  But overall, I really did enjoy reading this entire series. There is some lovely writing, there are compelling characters, interesting ideas, an epic flavor to the whole thing. I don't know if I would say this is a must-read--read War and Peace first for the epic-ness, and read Brideshead Revisited first to get a feeling for this milieu--but I'm definitely happy I had the experience.

Here are two quotes--one fun one about the role of the novelist, and one thematic one. Thanks for reading all my ramblings about this series!


"You mention Molly Bloom. She offers an example of what I am saying. Obviously her sexual musings—and her husband's—derive from the author, to the extent that he invented them. Such descriptions would have been a thousand times less convincing, if attributed to Stephen Dedalus—let alone to Joyce himself. Their strength lies in existence within the imaginary personalities of the Blooms. That such traits are much diminished, when given to a hero, is even to some extent exemplified in Ulysses. It may be acceptable to read of Bloom tossing off.  A blow by blow account of the author doing so is hardly conceivable as interesting."

"In any case it was impossible to disregard the fact that, while a dismantling process steadily curtails members of the cast, items of the scenery, airs played by the orchestra, in the performance that has included one’s own walk-on part for more than a few decades, simultaneous derequisitionings are also to be observed. Mummers return, who might have been supposed to have made their final exit, even if – like Dr Trelawney and Mrs Erdleigh – somewhat in the rôle of Hamlet’s father. The touching up of time-expired sets, reshaping of derelict props, updating of old refrains, are none of them uncommon."

Temporary Kings: Book 11 of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

This is the penultimate volume of the twelve-novel series Dance to the Music of Time. Ian told me that my reviews weren't convincing him he should read it. Hmm. What if I told you that this volume includes some straight-up necrophilia? And a cushion made out of pubic hair? How many old-timey classics do you know of where stuff like this happens?

I still don't know if anyone "should" read it, but I know that this volume is far from boring. Tons of intrigue, a great villain and villainess (the Widmerpools still, of course), lots of salaciousness, and this sense of scope that comes from having already read eleven volumes in the series. For instance, you can really see here how the roles of women have changed between 1912-ish and 1958-ish (which is I think approximately where we're at). In this volume Nick goes to a conference and hangs out with Dr. Brightman, a female academic, and a publisher and a novelist who are also both women. This series really illuminates, I think, how quickly the roles of women changed after WWII.

(Oh, and this is just for Ian: One of the characters is a descendant of Button Gwinnett!)

Here are a pair of quotes presented just for contrast. 

"Musings about the past shifted to...that eternal question of what constitutes experience. A close examination of what happened in any given period in itself provokes an unnatural element, like looking at a large oil painting under a magnifying class, the overall effect lost."


"'One rather odd thing about Glober, he insisted on taking a cutting from my bush--said he always did that after having anyone for the first time. He produced a pair of nail-scissors from a small red leather case. He told me he carried them round with him in case the need arose.'
     'We all of us have our whims.'"

Books do Furnish a Room: Book Ten of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

We're back to the post-war period with plenty of good interpersonal drama, especially between Widmerpool and his wife. (Even if it is, as usual, stretching credulity for our narrator Nick to just happen to be around for some of these events.) I think anything I write here about these books is clearly for an audience of one--not like anybody's going to suddenly pick up Volume 10. I think it was worth slogging through 8 and 9 though to get to this one, personally.

One weird thing: in the last volume, the narrator's wife had a son. Not only do we barely hear anything at all about his wife, we've just spent two books without having the son appear "on screen" at all, and not even learning what his name is! Then 3/4 of the way through this book Nick's all "oh and my wife was about to have another baby." It's really externally focused--I think because Powell was basing it so much on his own life, and he wanted to write about the characters he knew and who surrounded him, rather than the character of himself. It's this weird curtain of privacy... strange. But anyway, a good volume!

There's also a terrific discussion of literature courtesy of the character X Trapnel:

"Do you call Hemingway's impotent good guy naturalistic? Think what Dostoevsky would have made of him... Hemingway would never allow a hero of his to be made a fool of. To that extent he's not naturalistic. Most forms of naturalistic happening are expressed in grotesque irrational trivialities, not tight-lipped heroisms."

The Military Philosophers: Book Nine of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

These books are each divided into quarters, and at the end of the first quarter I put a note in my Kindle: "boooooring." Yep. This one was boring. I wrote about Volume Eight after I'd started this one, and basically all my complaints are articulated there. You'd think the war volumes would be exciting, but I'm more excited to get back to the post-war years and see how things have changed.

Still some amazing writing, though. Such as this, when Nick runs into an old lover at the end of the book:

Like so many things that have actually taken place, the incident was now wholly unbelievable. How could this chic South American lady have shared with me embraces passionate and polymorphous as those depicted on the tapestry of Luxuria that we had discussed together? Had she really used those words, those very unexpected expressions, she was accustomed to cry out at the moment of achievement? Once I had thought life unthinkable without her. How could that have been, when she was now only just short of a perfect stranger?

The Soldier’s Art: Book Eight of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

Reading the second volume about WWII, and now 20% of the way into the third one, I'm thinking some of this could have been condensed. Yet another new cast of characters is introduced, and yet the most enjoyable parts are those featuring old friends like Molly Jeavons, Widmerpool, or Stringham.

I love the sense of the toll war is taking and the fact that Powell isn't afraid to kill off some characters, but I the roman a clef aspects of this series mean that the narrator is actually not involved in any actual, exciting war. Powell is able to weave the war into the fabric of ordinary (or ordinary-ish life) in a way that seems new, but Nick is just a bureaucrat, who has yet to be involved in anything resembling an actual battle. I suppose this is a take on the wartime experience that is just as valid as the tales of heroism and battlefield exploits--honestly, I think it's just volume nine, which so far is just boring boring boring pointless bureaucracy and literally nothing but, that's seeping into this review.

"We paid the bill, went out into Regent Street. In the utter blackness, the tarts, strange luminous forms of nocturnal animal life, flickered the bulbs of their electric torches. From time to time one of them would play the light against her own face in self-advertisement, giving the effect of candles illuminating a holy picture in the shadows of a church."

The Valley of the Bones: Book Five of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

So in this book, Nick goes off to war, sort of. He is training with a regiment in Northern Ireland. The book continues to be unconcerned with anyone who isn't of high military rank (which I mentioned last time, when Nick was like "oh hell no I'm not joining the lowly infantry") and Nick's fellow officers are the only characters that really get fleshed out at all. This whole series is really an exploration of a very specific social class--the upper one.

It's yet another new cast of characters (though you just know Widmerpool is bound to show up at some point) who all, weirdly, have w-themed names. (I don't know why I noticed this, but there's Gwylt, Rowland Gwatkin, and Idwal Kedward.) The single guy who writes the reviews on Amazon liked this installment a lot because it is a satirical take on military life. As far as that goes, it's no Catch-22, and I preferred the brief time when Nick goes on leave and we see his in-laws the Tollands, etc.

I think this is also partly because the war is going on, but there's no actual fighting yet. I want to get to the death and destruction and fighting! I guess this installment felt like the first one that was really kind of killing time, though I do see the point--the calm before the storm and all that. So I enjoyed it, but I'm looking forward to the next installment.

There are a bunch of really awesome quotes from this one though. I usually just pick one of my highlights (love the highlighting feature on my Kindle app) but here are a bunch of them, I'm just going to include them all:, since I think it gives a really good overview of Powell's style:

"All love affairs are different cases, yet, at the same time, each is the same case. Moreland used to say love was like sea-sickness. For a time everything round you heaved about and you felt you were going to die — then you staggered down the gangway to dry land, and a minute or two later could hardly remember what you had suffered, why you had been feeling so ghastly."

"When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards, as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance. Buster Foxe and Dicky Umfraville, between them, brought about that state."

"I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already."

"Matilda, for instance, would take the line that no woman was worth a moment's consideration unless she were capable of making a man neglect his duty. Barnby, on the other hand, would say no duty was worth a moment's consideration if it forced you to neglect women. These things depend so much on the subjective approach."

"The London streets, empty of traffic, looked incredibly bright and sophisticated, the tarts in Piccadilly dazzling nymphs. This was before the blitz. I knew how I knew how Persephone must have felt on the first day of her annual release from the underworld."

"As in musical chairs, the piano stops suddenly, someone is left without a seat, petrified for all time in their attitude of that particular moment. The balance-sheet is struck there and then, a matter of luck whether its calculations have much bearing, one way or the other, on the commerce conducted. The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal ending."

The Kindly Ones: Book Six of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

Halfway through the sequence, and this one really gives you a feeling of scope, incorporating flashbacks to the narrator's childhood (a childhood that abruptly ends when WWI begins) and ending with the beginning of World War II. (The implication is that the author is going to be enlisted; he doesn't want to join the infantry, but is supposed join as an officer--I guess this is because he's from the upper classes.)

In this book we spend more time with the characters we've spent five books getting to know, including the ridiculous Widmerpool and the (as gossip tells it) sexual deviant Sir Magnus Donners. (There's a whole scene where a bunch of people are at Donners's castle and they act out the seven deadly sins; it's the comic setpiece of this book, though of course there's something tragic about it in the person of Betty Templer.) I love the interpersonal drama here most, and I look forward to seeing it played out in volume seven against the backdrop of war.

"He used to read in the evenings, never with much enjoyment or concentration. “I like to rest my mind after work”, he would say. “I don’t like books that make me think.” That was perfectly true. In due course, as he grew older, my father became increasingly committed to this exclusion of what made him think, so that finally he disliked not only books, but also people – even places – that threatened to induce this disturbing mental effect."

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant: Book Five of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

Love the title of this one. (They do indeed go to the eponymous restaurant at the beginning of the novel and have a discussion about professional seducers that was really rather funny.)

Continuing to work my way through this series. I really enjoyed this installment. The backdrop is the Spanish Civil War as well as rumblings heading towards World War II, but the focus is still on high society. The main character has married into a large family of ten children, and we get to know a little bit more about them. (The eldest son is an eccentric named Erridge, and he apparently was based in part on George Orwell.)

It's an interesting mix of explicit and implied--there's a discussion about the terms "abortion" and "miscarriage" (characters in this series have had both) and there are a lot of gay and lesbian characters, some of whom are shown living together. There's even a guy who is totally this one lady's gay BFF--he even does her interior decorating! But the main character's marriage and the character of his wife remain misty because the narrator says almost nothing about them. There are still seven volumes to go, so perhaps we'll find out more!

This volume jumps back in time a little to introduce a new character named Moreland and a bunch of his compatriots(this series has a ton of characters, y'all) but it's worth it just for the setpiece of this big party after the debut of one of Moreland's symphonies, a tragicomedy where the alcoholic Charles Stringham shows up and where Lord Huntercombe spends the evening breaking into cabinets to examine the hostess's fine china. But there's also this air of foreshadowy gloom hanging over everything--it's no accident that one character commits suicide by "gassing himself," and the novel ends with a metaphor about a "Ghost Railway" ride hurtling towards an unknown, dark destination.

"The notable thing about professional seducers," said Maclintick... "is the rot they talk when they are doing their seducing. There is not a single cliche they leave unsaid."

"Although by definition the most egotistical of men," said Moreland, "they naturally have to develop a certain anonymity of style to make themselves acceptable to all women. It is the case of the lowest common factor - or is it the highest common denominator? If you hope to rise to the top class in seducing, you must appeal to the majority. As the majority are not very intelligent, you must conceal your own intelligence - if you have the misfortune to possess such a thing - in order not to frighten the girls off."

At Lady Molly’s: Book Four of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

I often go to check out Amazon reviews after I finish a book. There's one lone guy reviewing all of the books in this series, but I'm enjoying his thoughts on them. There's also a "popular highlights" feature for the Kindle edition, where you can see what other people highlighted on their Kindles. It's a little creepy that Amazon is tracking my highlights, but I do enjoy seeing what people decide to highlight. It's never the same stuff that I do. (Except this quote, for obvious reasons: "Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.")

I liked At Lady Molly's quite a bit. The beginning is slow, since yet more characters are introduced, but the narrator's observations of life continue to be witty and the characters are interesting (if perhaps somewhat too numerous and slightly difficult to keep track of at times). Strangely, in this book the narrator gets engaged, but there's almost nothing in there about the woman he's engaged to, or anything about their courtship at all. It's strange because in the previous book, there's a lot of detail about his love affair with another character. But maybe we'll get to spend more time with her in the next volume.

The other quibble I have is that it's getting to be way too coincidental for the narrator to happen to show up at almost every significant event or bump into all the main characters continuously or have seemingly every character divulge deep dark secrets to him. It's really the secrets thing that's the most glaring, since in a couple of cases towards the end of this book (Jeavons and Conyers) there's really no reason for them to have these explicit conversations with Nick, of all people. But the conversations themselves are interesting, so there you go.

"Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I should marry her? Something like that is the truth; certainly nearer the truth than merely to record those vague, inchoate sentiments of interest which I was so immediately conscious. It was as if I had known her for many years already; enjoyed happiness with her and suffered sadness. I was conscious of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered."

The Acceptance World: Book Three of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

For some reason, this volume didn't grab me as much as the first two, and thus it took me a while to finish it. I also saw some reviews (which I guess only show up on your Kindle, not on the Amazon site) talking about how Powell is clearly satirizing his friends like George Orwell and all these other people. Reading that I realized how much of the satire I'm probably missing in these books! But I'm enjoying them anyway. This one less so. Still overall, an interesting world is beginning to develop. Plus, the narrator is having a hot and heavy affair with a married woman who at one point answers the door naked. So how bad can it be?

"There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other."

A Buyer's Market: Book Two of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

I'm still enjoying this series of novels, and already on to number three!

Usually I like to read through the Amazon reviews after I've finished a book, but this book doesn't even have Amazon reviews. It's like living IN THE DARK AGES.

(They do have a list of "popular highlights," of which my favorite is this one: "For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.")

In this novel, the protagonist has a job of some sort in an art book publishing house, but the novel barely touches on his job at all, more about the people who drift in and out of his life. I'm starting to get a feel for him as a slightly unreliable narrator; in the scene where he loses his virginity, he says something like "and there may have been an embrace," either downplaying the sex, or (perhaps) putting a fissure in that layer of trust between the reader and the narrator. It makes the narrative voice that much more interesting. (One of the characters also gets an illegal abortion, which is presented more clearly, and one of them makes some kinky remark about tying up "bad girls," so I don't think it's prudishness in general happening here.)

I was less interested in the characters introduced here (primarily Deacon and Gypsy Jones) than the ones introduced in the previous volume who come back in this one (Jean and Widmerpool), though Barnby has potential. I have to say I love the character names in general here: Widmerpool, Stringham, Mrs. Ardglass, Magnus Donners.

I know this writeup is pretty confused; it's late and I'm sleepy. But I did want to say something before I lose track of what happened in Book Two vs. Book Three, which I'm reading now!

"Barnby used to say that he knew a bill-broker, scarcely aware even how pictures are produced, who could at the same time enter any gallery and pick out the most expensively priced work there 'from Masaccio to Matisse', simply through the mystic power of his own respect for money."

A Question of Upbringing: Book One of A Dance to the Music of Time (by Anthony Powell)

So I was taking a look at ye olde Time 100 book list to see if I had any prayer of finishing the list before the end of the year. I only ("only") have 21 books left, but it turns out that in addition to Gravity's Rainbow, which I know is very long, and The Sot-Weed Factor, which I started but misplaced in the move (bad since it's a library book), which is also long, The Recognitions is also almost 1000 pages long. (It sounds absolutely amazing, though; apparently it was a huge influence on Catch-22.)

So I learn all of this and think, well maybe, and then I get to A Dance to the Music of Time, which it turns out is not one but twelve novels. Twelve! So, yeah. Finishing the list this year might be a challenge.

Anyway, I bought this first book on my Kindle. It was only $6, but still, buying all twelve books won't be cheap, so I'd better look into library lending for the later volumes. (If I can learn not to lose books.) It also was a quick read; 223 pages for the paperback version. I also love love loved it. It's more of a British novel of manners, not a whole lot of action, more human observation, but the writing is just fabulous, with a lot of wit, and I loved the characters and the details of this world (aristocratic England in the 1920s). I'm not sorry at all there are 12 books in the cycle, because I have a feeling I'll enjoy them. How great is this quote?:

"I thought, at first, that he worked far harder than most of the men I knew. Later I came to doubt this, finding that Quiggin's work was something to be discussed rather than tackled, and that what he really enjoyed was drinking cups of coffee at odd times of day."