A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

(Cross-posted from the book blog, but significant to me so I've duplicated it here.)




So the Dance to the Music of Time comes to an end and I would say that, cumulatively, the twelve novels make up one of the greatest reading experiences of my life. Impossibly elegant and stylish, with a panoramic view of aristocratic and artistic life through the twentieth century and a glorious representation of the way that life is subjectively lived.

Our narrator, Nick Jenkins, is both passive, stoic and so self-effacing as to be almost absent from his own narrative, to the extent that I'm not even sure we ever learn the name of his children. Instead we are left with a series of indelible images; Widmerpool having a cup of sugar poured over him, a servant walking into a dining room bereft of clothes, a tableau of photographs representing the Seven Deadly Sins.

There are classical references throughout (the picture above by Poussin provided the title), most of which passed me by. What I took away instead was an array of unforgettable characters, some magnificent serio-comic prose and a shamefaced sense of nostalgia for a world I never knew.

A Question of Upbringing - (1951)
A Buyer's Market - (1952),
The Acceptance World - (1955)
At Lady Molly's - (1957)
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - (1960)
The Kindly Ones - (1962)
The Valley of Bones - (1964)
The Soldier's Art - (1966)
The Military Philosophers - (1968)
Books Do Furnish a Room - (1971)
Temporary Kings - (1973)
Hearing Secret Harmonies - (1975)