Anthony Powell's DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME -- which derives its title from an allegorical painting by Nicolas Poussin -- opens with a painterly image of street workmen gathered round a bucket of coal on a snowy afternoon. Not long after this, an oddly-made schoolboy called Widmerpool comes jogging out of the damp fog. Carefully wrought, deliberately low-key, these pictures form the backbone of a huge 2,800 page novel that has as its plot nothing more or less ambitious than the movements, points of contact, affairs and aspirations of a generation of English youth between the end of the first world war and the beginning of the computer age. They meet, fall into love or conflict or both; they achieve, or do not achieve, their designs; some are killed, some die of other causes; some indulge in secret vices, others in secret alliances both personal and political; some deal with life better than others. In A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME, the title is the plot. Filled with a boatload of characters, carried along by a sustained grace of writing, it has that same effect of time distortion as Kurasawa's Seven Samurai: it's good enough that the reader is only dimly aware of its length. The individual volumes appeared between 1951 and 1975, and have now been republished by the University of Chicago Press in a beautifully designed four-volume set. Each volume contains three novels; part of the beauty of the thing's structure is that each novel stands well enough alone while drawing strength from the others in the series; but it isn't until the final page that Powell's whole plan for this giant-sized literary canvas snaps into focus. Twenty four years is a long time to sustain a vision; and to maintain a cohesive writing "voice" for all of that time, dealing with the lives of dozens of characters in a consistently humane and non-melodramatic style, is an achievement worthy of anyone's attention and admiration. Powell, whose other novels include THE FISHER KING, has painted a painted an elaborate, many-paneled mural out of words. A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME packs a lifetime of reminiscences into a passing moment on the streets of London. Its narrator is Nick Jenkins, a writer of no exceptional fame or fortune, who in his lifetime is witness to all sorts of what Faulkner called "human passion and hope and folly" among high and low figures alike. Though excessively close with details about his own life, Jenkins has no such scruples about the lives of others; at least so far as we are concerned as we follow his thoughts in and out of time. Early reviews applauded this as a comic work; but this ignores the unruffled melancholy of Jenkins's reflections. Doubters should make the effort to separate the novel's most tragic character: here the field is thick with contenders. Is it the writer Trapnel, whose life is (perhaps deliberately) crowded with the melodramatic trappings of tragedy; or Stringham, unloved son of a rich divorcee, who only seems to gain a modicum of self respect by dying anonymously in a Japanese POW camp; or Peter Templar, whose early success as a womanizer turns into a failure so terrible that he is driven to suicidal involvement in a branch of the secret service; or Deacon, inept in art, antiques and homosexual love; or Widmerpool, dogged runner of the early pages, who combines ambition with a taste for abject humiliation, and provides the novel with many of its squirmiest moments. The women don't fare much better, but at least outwardly most of Powell's women don't enjoy playing the tragic role. Most are far too busy getting on with things. From a critical standpoint Powell's women may be problematic: though beautifully drawn, many of them don't come into focus except in relation to the men. Pamela Widmerpool is a case in point: beautiful, almost excessively vivid, her only pleasure lies in torturing men, and her only suffering comes when she finally meets one who won't allow himself to be tortured. Characters are Powell's strongest point; and these are just a bare few of the principal players. Other novelists, notably Proust, Joyce Cary and Robertson Davies, have written long novels in triptych form that follow a group of characters over a long period of time, or view them from widely differing perspectives, or both; but Powell goes one step farther by focusing not on a narrow group or a triangle of players, but on an entire swath of English culture. This may be the only honest way of telling any story: that is, by telling it all, in bits and snatches, as heard or witnessed, from childhood to old age. |
