A Dance to the Music of Time: Third Movement

Good

Beautiful, robust edition of a favourite book: this volume was expensive but worth it.

Part of my agreeable occupation this autumn and winter is to read the work; I can't review it until I've read it.

Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time" runs from the early 1920s to the beginning of the 1970s and consists of 12 volumes in which around 400 characters appear. The first, "A Question of Upbringing", was published in 1951 and the last, "Hearing Secret Harmonies", in 1975.Quite a feat but was it worth it for the writer and reader? I've just read the first two novels in this trilogy and, although I found them lively and amusing, I am not sure I could face another 10 volumes.There is surely a limit to the amount of satire, sarcasm and japes about the English upper and middle classes Powell chronicled anyone can take.The humor is juvenile, rather than witty, and the characters, like the anti-hero, Widmerpool, are painted with strokes that are thickly applied, to say the least.It is not in the same league as some of Evelyn Waugh's books like "Scoop", "Black Mischief" and parts of the "Sword of Honour" trilogy.Guessing who the original was for certain of Powell's characters is part of the attraction although I feel this will fade among younger generations who have never heard of people like Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Mountbatten. C. P. Snow, F. R. Leavis, John Galsworthy, Diana Cooper etc.In conclusion, I would mention Powell's idiosyncratic style of writing in which colons, semi colons and dashes are given freedom to run around the page and break grammatical rules. How he got away with this is beyond me.I would like to give an example but the sentences are so long and rambling that the reader would never reach the end. Maybe that's why Powell needed 12 volumes when three or four might have sufficed.

cdrt