A Dance to the Music of Time (First Movement)

I finished the First Movement (three novels) of Anthony Powell's twelve-part A Dance to the Music of Time. As the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, tells us at the beginning of the first installment, the Poussin allusion is the key to the novel's structure. Powell's concern is not so much events--in fact, remarkably little happens--as it is our ability to perceive the complex patterning of human relationships. In the "dance," Powell's characters face outwards, away from their partners, forcing them to rely on intuition and partial estimates of individual character; as a result, their "steps" often result in unintended consequences that then reshape the dance's overall pattern. (This sense of patterning also informs the novel's social world: everyone knows or is related to everyone else, and characters have a habit of vanishing for long stretches before suddenly--but, as it always turns out, logically--turning up again.) Therefore, as Jenkins-the-narrator repeatedly reminds us, human relationships are forever transforming themselves into new patterns, but these patterns are never visible while the characters actually occupy them. The novels' tragicomedy derives from that gap between memory (which retrospectively crystallizes the pattern) and present perception (which most often organizes all action around the ego--much like George Eliot's famous candle image in Middlemarch).

While not a "historical novel" in any conventional sense, A Dance to the Music of Time does try to diagnose the nature of the post-WWI "epoch" (a term Jenkins employs more than once). Much of the novel feels particularly arid and airless, which is precisely the point: the characters' often petty concerns, their weightless sexual affairs and the sheer meaningless of their social politics all point to a kind of cultural decadence. The Second Movement, which I've just started, partly chronicles the collapse of this culture in front of the storm cloud that is WWII. So far, I'm finding the novel quite fascinating and absorbing, although on occasion a little voice at the back of my head inquires "Isn't this all awfully English?" It's the same kind of response I had to Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited--which otherwise is not comparable in either quality or scope--and is no doubt an artifact of the novel's emphasis on upper-crust English society, the kind of power relations at stake, or perhaps just the very brittle dialogue. A flaw in my reception, in other words, and not the novel.

(The Anthony Powell Society is the place to look for more information. Among other things, there's a useful brief overview of the entire sequence and, for those who like biographical data, a guide to the models for various characters. Amazingly, the BBC somehow managed to produce an adaptation. The Guardian and Salon have nice overviews of Powell's career, making some useful critical points about Dance along the way.)