What is the book about?
Here’s where it gets tricky. Perhaps it’s best to quote the novel itself on this matter. ‘Like everything that’s any good, it has about twenty different meanings.’ A Dance to the Music of Time is about many things—and yet most of the ‘action’, as it were, consists of social engagements or the like in which aristocrats, hangers-on or seedy bohemians discuss distant family members, various affairs and marriages, politics and social issues. Even the novels that cover the period of Word War II are less concerned with battles or the progress of the Allies than the machinations of bureaucrats vying for power on the (English) home front—although there are some incredibly interesting and moving scenes involving the Blitz. I fear this makes the novel sound tedious, but I assure you it’s not—although admittedly, the later sections concerning what we might think of as a more tangible past (ie: the late 60s) are less successful. Powell, like his characters, was perhaps a product of a vanished time and struggled to adapt to that period quite so well.
The novels are narrated by authorial stand-in Nick Jenkins who, like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, is an observer and analyst of proceedings rather than an active agent. But what an observer: Eloquent, wry, equal parts bemused and knowing.
Sometimes you just know, don’t you, that a book has been waiting for you all along—or you for it.
A Dance to the Music of Time (named after a painting by Nicolas Poussin) begins at Eton in 1921 and follows the varying fortunes of a variety of Nick’s classmates and their teachers and friends and family over the course of fifty years. Although concentrated on Nick’s immediate circle of half a dozen friends and acquaintances, there are more than one hundred characters. They rise and fall. Those who were derided when young become powerful later in life and those who were full of promise fail spectacularly to fulfil it. London is bombed, people are betrayed, everyone drinks far too much, the sixties land with a rise in neo-paganism. The times, they change.
A Dance to the Music of Time is about fate and fortune. Life can be a long and unpredictable game. There’s a lot of sex. Or talk of it, anyway—but only in a quintessential English roundabout fashion (‘Later that night mutual approval took physical expression’). It possesses the sly wit of Evelyn Waugh paired with Marcel Proust’s elegance and sombreness of tone.
What do you love most about it?
There are so many things to love about A Dance to the Music of Time—its vital characters (the villainous Widmerpool, tragic but endearing Stringham, the alluring sourpuss Pamela Flitton), its scope, its observations (witty, wise, perceptive), its glimpse of a time and world that is crumbling even as it’s being lived and recorded—but what I love most of all, and which might be considered the umbrella under which all of these things huddle, is that it’s immensely generous. Not only in its size and sprawling nature but in the way it allows so much room for its characters to move about and become their complete selves—for good or ill. ‘Wisdom is the power to admit that you cannot understand and judge people in their entirety,’ our narrator Nick observes at one stage.
Many of the characters in the novels are based on real people (George Orwell, Aleister Crowley) and, for those who might be interested, there’s an entire scholarship devoted to figuring out who’s who. For me, reading the books is akin to living an entire life, with all its unexpected vicissitudes of fortune. Characters vanish for long periods, only to reappear at unexpected moments, rather like (at least in my own experience) life itself.
