A Dance to the Music of Time | this nerding life

Jul 10 2012

The Resolution Project Season Two: A Dance to the Music of Time Book Six – The Kindly Ones (1962)

The Resolution Project Season Two: For my New Year’s resolution last year (2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I got almost halfway through. I’ve decided to bull-headedly push on through and try and finish the challenge, continuing with the same caveat as before: I’ve exempted myself from reading books I’ve already read, leaving eighty-six or so left to go. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that. It’s not really worth getting that angry about though.

“My mother – together with her sisters in their unmarried days – had always indulged a taste for investigation in the Unseen World, which even the threatened inconveniences of the Stonehurst ‘ghosts’ could not entirely quench. My father, not equally on terms with such hidden forces, was at the same time no less imbued with belief. In short, the ‘ghosts’ were an integral, an essential part of the house; indeed, its salient feature.” (p. 5)

The Elevator Pitch and What I knew going in: Second (sixth, actually) verse, same as the first. If you’ve been following along with my missives from the land of Widmerpool, Jenkins, et al., you’ll know what you’re getting into here. If not, Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is a twelve-volume novel about various middle- and upper-class English people, with a time frame spanning from the 1920s all the way up to the beginning of the Second World War (so far). Nick Jenkins, a writer of … something, is ostensibly the main character, and each book chronicles his interactions with various sets of friends and acquaintances, usually with some overarching theme.

Thoughts: Where the last book, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, dealt a lot with the world of feuding musicians and composers, this volume had the feeling of clearing the decks somewhat before WWII kicks off. The Kindly Ones, aka. the Furies of Roman mythology, were cthonic vengeance goddesses, who would pursue oathbreakers and the like. A few characters reach the end of their mortal coil in this volume, but the relatively light-hearted world of the Dance does not allow for sinners to suffer too much. I have a feeling that as the war progresses, this’ll change a lot. There’s definitely a feeling of the old guard getting tossed out in favour of the new this time out.

It was interesting to see Jenkins kind of take some initiative this time out, but as far as I can tell it’s only to save his own skin; he spends most of the book trying to secure a commission in the Army, which I feel is probably his way of avoiding the draft and attempting to get posted somewhere less dangerous? I don’t feel a lot of patriotic fervour coming from Jenkins, so I’m assuming he doesn’t want to haul ass and fight the Hun face to face. I guess I’ll find out next book what position he finds for himself.

While reading this latest entry, I began to long for a chart, or a set of family trees, something like that, to keep straight the sheer volume of characters in the saga. I don’t really know why it took me so long to break down and admit I need help keeping everyone straight, but a chart in the style of the ones you find while reading Love and Rockets would be really handy.

Love and Rockets Issue 31 cover, by Jaime Hernandez

Actually, working my way through the L+R I had available to me when I worked at a comic store is probably one of the closest experiences I’ve had to reading A Dance to the Music of Time, except for the fact that I liked it much better. Its scope is as far-reaching, if not more so, and the characters found within are sketched out much better. I guess if I go with this hypothesis, this makes Widmerpool the Penny Century of the Dance world? Wealthy London industrialist Sir Magnus Donners is obviously H.R. Costigan in this scenario, and… No. This way lies madness.

“‘Why should we wish to ruminate on your most secret orgies?’ said Dr. Trelawney. ‘What profit for us to muse on your nights in the lupanar, your diabolical couplings with the brides of debauch, more culpable than those phantasms of the incubi that rack the dreams of young girls, or the libidinous gymnastics of the goat-god whose ice-cold sperm fathers monsters on writhing witches in coven?’” (p.194)

I liked the introduction of Doc Trelawney, a self-styled hedge wizard and cult leader in the style of an Aleister Crawley. There’s always been a bit of flirting around with mysticism in these books, but it was kind of nice to see someone go balls-out in its pursuance this time. There was a big section I skimmed over, though, where Jenkins reads his and his Uncle Giles’ horoscopes and then is amazed by how much they coincide with his own self-image. Dude, they’re written in a vague, yet reassuring, way for that very reason.

Anyway, this marks the halfway point in my reading of the Dance saga, and so far my rating is meh? It is a pretty impressive project, and it’s pretty amazing how Powell’s writing style evolves over the course of the books, but remains similar enough to the others that it’s never too jarring. Over all, I can’t really recommend this book on its own, but wouldn’t exactly warn you off attempting to read the series if it sounds like something you’re into.

“Just as most of the world find it on the whole unusual that anyone should be professionally occupied with the arts, Moreland could never get used to the fact that most people – in this particular case, Templer – lead lives in which the arts play no part whatsoever.” (p.103)

Similar books on the Time 100 list: Well, the other five books, A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer’s Market, The Acceptance World (combined review of the first three here), At Lady Molly’s and Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant are pretty similar considering they’re all the same book. This volume reminded me a little bit of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, with a similar setting at the seaside for some of it, and similar attitude towards women in love.

Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 16964 pp. (2505 this year)

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 60/113, or 53% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: A House for Mr. Biswas, (1961) by V.S. Naipaul. Maybe even more for real this time.

Tagged 1930s, A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell, England, non-protagonists, Time 100, World War II

Jun 11 2012

The Resolution Project Season Two: A Dance to the Music of Time Book Five – Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960)

Musical Accompaniment: The Clash, “Spanish Bombs”

“To hold a friend in the background at a certain stage of a love affair is a technique some men like to employ; a method which spreads, as it were, the emotional load, ameliorating risks of dual conflict between the lovers themselves, although at the same time posing a certain hazard in the undue proximity of a third party unencumbered with emotional responsibilty – and therefore almost always seen to better advantage than the lover himself. (p. 41)

The Elevator Pitch: Here we go again. When we last left our “hero” Nick Jenkins, he’d wondered about potentially getting married, found a girl, and then got married within the span of two hundred words or so of the last novel, At Lady Molly’s. In this volume, Nick tells us the tale of another group of his friends, this time a feuding bunch of composers, music critics and actors who spend their nights drinking at Mortimer’s, and eating and lusting after waitresses at the improbably named Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. The plot is similar to the four novels that proceeded it in the Dance series; people fall in love with each other, get married, get divorced, and the incomparable Widmerpool puts in an obligatory appearance.

What I knew about this book, its subject and its author going in: See my last post on the subject.

Thoughts: For the most part, this fifth volume in the Dance series was pretty similar to the rest. I do feel, however, that this one introduced a bit more darkness into the world of 1930s London, as the spectre of the Spanish Civil War begins to loom large over the proceedings. I chose The Clash’s “Spanish Bombs” as the musical accompaniment, not only because it’s one of my favorite songs of all time, but also because the lyrics blend a sort of intellectual, writerly group of allusions with the horrible conflict, in much the same way as Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant does. When Joe Strummer mentions that he’s “hearing music from another time”, it’s hard for me not to reconcile that feeling with this volume, which is all about musicians attempting to interact with their surroundings, blithely unaware for the most part of the mechanized horrors that are to come for the entire world.

Powell kicks this one off with a move right out of the Brideshead Revisited playbook: at an indeterminate time in the future (sometime either during or after the London Blitz), Jenkins is exploring the ruins of one of his old haunts, the Mortimer, where he and yet another group of his cronies used to while away the hours. Right from the get go we realize that this set of friends are only going to exist as they are for a brief period of time. The state of play at the end of the book, which includes an illicit affair, a suicide, and the breaking of a few friendships, shouldn’t be too much for the reader to comprehend considering all is literally in ashes in the book’s opening pages.

As per usual, the big picture events of the period are backgrounded in favour of checking in on Jenkins’ old friends and new ones, in this case Charles Stringham, the alcoholic aristocrat fallen from grace, and, for a brief moment, Widmerpool, who literally runs onset and off again. The Spanish Civil War is related to us through Erridge, Lord Warminster, a progressive thinker who is continually busying himself with left-wing politics and projects. He is of course treated with a little bit of derision by his more traditional family, who see his action (which to be fair is somewhat ridiculous considering his being a pacifist and all) as just another phase:

“‘Like big-game hunting in Edwardian days’ said Robert, ‘or going to the Crusades a few years earlier … I hope he doesn’t go and get killed. I shouldn’t think he would, would you?” (p. 66)

I’m hoping that more and more the people in Jenkins’ world are going to realize that history is coming for them, in a big damn way. I’m sure they will, but for now the darkness is still pretty far off.

I’m starting to realize that Jenkins’ non-protagonist status is just how things are going to go in these books. It’s almost a running joke at this point. This time we find out that his wife is very sick, and staying at a nursing home. We find out a little later it’s because she’s had a miscarriage, but for the most part this scene serves instead to characterize his friend Moreland, whose wife is coincidentally also having a tough pregnancy too! And Widmerpool is here as well (because he is contractually obligated to perhaps), getting treated for boils!

So for what could have been a situation rife with drama for the Jenkins household, it really isn’t. His wife Isobel makes a brief appearance, then is relegated to convalescence and get ready for whatever she gets up to in the background of the next book. While I’m normally not really in favour of those sorts of “expand the world of a book by elaborating on what a secondary character was up to” sort of books, but I do feel as if a compelling story could be told about the life of Dance‘s essentially invisible narrator and his wife. As ridiculous as it sounds, you probably could just tell his story, which so far involves multiple love affairs, a marriage, and a miscarriage, and have a decent story come out of it. The main character of this book series could maybe serve to have a book about him and his life specifically. Or maybe you could write a book about Isobel, and how her husband is always out watching important events happen to other people, and she’s got a string of adulterous relationships or she’s depressed or something, I don’t know.

Powell kind of lets us in on his approach to writing about marriages in this volume though, and why it’s so hands-off:

“A future marriage, or a past one, may be investigated and explained in terms of writing about one of its parties, but it is doubtful whether an existing marriage can ever be described directly in the first person and convey a sense of reality. Even those writers who suggest some of the substance of married life best, stylise heavily, losing the subtlety of the relationship at the price of a few accurately recorded, but isolated, aspects.” (p. 97)

Seeing as how I’ve never been married I can’t really say, but this seems legit. He also gives us a brief glimpse into what goes on in Jenkins’ head while he hears everyone else’s sordid details, giving us perhaps some of the only characterization we’re going to get for this guy, and why he does what he does.

“That odd feeling of excitement began to stir within me always provoked by news of other peoples’ adventures in love; accompanied as ever by a sense of sadness, of regret, almost jealousy, inward emotions that express, like nothing else in life, life’s irrational dissatisfactions.” (p. 155)

Similar books on the Time 100 list: Again the previous Dance books (1-3, and 4) would be likely suspects, and as I mentioned before Brideshead Revisited deals with the sort of wartime reminiscence thing pretty well too.

Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 16710 pp. (2251 this year)

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 59/113, or 52% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: A House for Mr. Biswas, (1961) by V.S. Naipaul. Maybe for real this time.

Tagged 1930s, A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, England, non-protagonists, socialism, Spanish Civil War

Jun 04 2012

The Resolution Project Season Two: A Dance to the Music of Time Book Four – At Lady Molly’s (1957)

“There is something overpowering, even a trifle sinister about very large families, the individual members of which often possess in excess the characteristics commonly attributed to ‘only’ children: misanthropy: neurasthenia: an ability to adapt themselves: all the traits held to be the result of a lonely upbringing. The corporate life of large families can be lived with severity, even barbarity, of a kind unknown in smaller related communities: these savageries and distillations of egoism often rendered even less tolerable if sentimentalised outside the family circle.” (p. 31)

The Elevator Pitch: Hooboy, here’s another one that’s simultaneously really easy and really difficult to summarize. A Dance to the Music of Time is a twelve-volume megabook by Anthony Powell that looks at the way the lives of four men and their respective worlds revolve around one another over the course of the first few decades of the Twentieth Century. The main character, Nick Jenkins, is a bit of a cypher, in the grand English tradition of non-protagonist protagonists; he’s more of the lens by which we view the world than any real sort of character (I’ll discuss this more below). In this episode, Nick makes friends with Lady Molly Jeavons, a minor aristocrat who is known for having elaborate and strange dinner parties at her house. Also, the perennial font of ridiculousness Kenneth Widmerpool gets engaged and also contracts jaundice.

What I knew about this book, its subject and its author going in: This isn’t my first time at the Dance rodeo. I read the first three novels of the cycle last year, so I was fairly well acquainted with the subject matter. The book’s in the running for one of the longest ever to be written, giving this list project an added masochistic thrill of conquering it in addition to 99 other books. Based on my experience with the first three, I expected this one would have lots of aristocratic types in it, a frisson of 1930s Socialism, a hint of Hitler’s rise in Germany, and a lot of people falling in and out of love with each other. I was not disappointed.

Thoughts: There’s only so much you can say about these books, it’s basically the same thing as reviewing a big book like Infinite Jest chapter by chapter except with less formal experimentalism and tennis jargon. So far, 1/3 of the way done the book, I think it’s … pretty good? At Lady Molly’s is definitely better than the second book, A Buyer’s Market, but not by much.

This one did continue the annoying (to me) trend of having large events happen in Jenkins’ life basically get backgrounded into irrelevance. Seriously, the main character of the book cycle decides to get married, to Isobel Tolland. While you’d think that this is a pretty important character development, it isn’t really, it doesn’t even get a full page of recognition! Here’s one of the two (!) real mentions of this turn of events, wherein a line makes Jenkins irrelevant again!:

“A background of other events largely obscured the steps leading up to my engagement to Isobel Tolland. Of this crisis in my life, I remember chiefly a sense of tremendous inevitability, a feeling that fate was settling its own problems, and too much reflection would be out of place.” (p.203)

Too much reflection? You’re getting married, man! You’re allowed to reflect on your life for more than one paragraph here, it’s perfectly alright!

For those of you who remember my review of Kinglsey Amis’ Lucky Jim, you’ll recall that I compared Dixon, the hero of the piece, to the Canadian comics slacker icon Scott Pilgrim. If I were to pick a character from that universe that would recall Dance‘s Nick Jenkins, it’d be Joey Comeau, the guy who knows everybody and tells Scott about Ramona Flowers. I’m sure he’s a great guy, he certainly knows a lot of cool people, but he’s not the main character of the book. It’s really frustrating for Jenkins to throw you a little bit of info about himself, then go right back into hearing about how other peoples’ lives are dramatic.

This book continues the apparent English tradition of not being able to deal with veterans of the Great War. Just like in The Death of the Heart, At Lady Molly’s features a WWI vet who articulates the huge differences between the generation who fought in the war and those who came after, Lady Molly’s husband Jeavons:

“‘People don’t think the same way any longer,’ he bawled across the table. ‘The war blew the whole bloody thing up, like tossing a Mills bomb into a dug-out. Everything’s changed about all that. Always rather feel sorry for your generation as a matter of fact, not but what we haven’t all lost our- what do you call ‘em- you know- somebody used the word in our house the other night-saying much what I’m saying now? Struck me very forcibly. You know- when you’re soft enough to think things are going to be a damned sight better than they turn out to be. What’s the word?’

‘Illusions?’

“Illusions! That’s the one.’” (p. 178)

So in short, I can’t recommend this book unless you’ve read the three before it, as you’ll be incredibly lost. If you want to read the prior books, this one’s pretty solid though. Here’s a bit I thought was funny about monkeys and people who don’t like them.

“He spoke in a preoccupied, confidential tone, as if Miss Weedon’s reply might make all the difference by its orientation to plans on foot for Maisky’s education (he’s a monkey named after the Soviet Ambassador to England).

‘I don’t care for monkeys,’ said Miss Weedon.

‘Oh, don’t you?’ said Jeavons.

He stood pondering this flat, forthright declaration of anti-simianism on Miss Weedon’s part. The notion that some people might not like monkeys was evidently entirely new to him; surprising, perhaps a trifle displeasing, but at the same time one of those general ideas of which one can easily grasp the general import without being necessarily in agreement. It was a theory that startled by its stark simplicity.’ (p. 168)

Similar books on the Time 100 list: Well obviously the three Dance books that came before this one have some similarities, but I feel as well that The Death of the Heart portrays the same time, social sphere and place in a similarly interesting fashion.

Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 16481 pp. (2022 this year)

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 58/113, or 51% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: A House for Mr. Biswas, (1961) by V.S. Naipaul.

Tagged 1930s, A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly's, England, non-protagonists, socialism, The Great War, Time 100

Jun 29 2011

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the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Twenty-Five: A Dance to the Music of Time – 1st Movement (1951)

“Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.” (A Question of Upbringing, p. 229)

The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that.

Here’s where the wheels kind of come off my project. Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is a twelve book cycle, a “dodecahedral masterpiece“, says Lev Grossman, which by my count should make the Time Magazine list actually number 111 books, not the vaunted 100. The bet that myself and the Lady E. had between us was to see who could get farthest through 100 books (or movies, in her case) in one year. I am definitely winning the bet at this point in time, if you were wondering, but I have a sneaking suspicion she’s just stringing me along with the intention of absolutely crushing me with a week-long movie marathon down the line. So we came to a compromise. I only have to read through the first three books of Dance, the “1st movement”, while she only needs to sit through one of the Lord of the Rings movies (what can I say, she really hates them). And now that I’ve read through those three books, I’m somewhat conflicted. I’d like to keep going through the cycle, but alas duty calls. Anyway, here’s the synopsis.

Nick Jenkins, when the story begins, is a young man just about to leave Le Bas’ secondary school and head to university. He’s friends with Peter Templer, a charming womanizer-in-training, and Charles Stringham, a restless aristocrat with a talent for mimicry. There’s another boy at the school too, named Kenneth Wimperpool, whose sartorial and social eccentricities have made his last name an adjective for that which is out of the ordinary. A Dance to the Music of Time follows these three boys into manhood and beyond, though the three books I’ve now read, A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer’s Market and The Acceptance World, only take them into the early 1930s or so. Time is not clearly delineated in the narratives, you have to instead rely on your knowledge of early Twentieth Century history to orient yourself in time (the Manchurian Crisis is mentioned by name in Acceptance, marking it as occurring around 1931-1932), or look it up on Wikipedia, if you’re lazy.

Question follows the four boys as they leave the last year of what we’d call high school now, and through the early years of college. Buyer’s Market takes place a little later, as the now young men have begun to find their footing in business and life, and concerns itself mostly with the courting rituals of the time. Acceptance continues down the romantic avenues set up early on, and introduces politics into the stew in a big way, mostly Socialist politics, reminding me a lot of Resolution Project Book Thirty-Four, The Golden Notebook.

Nick Jenkins comes from the great English tradition of narrators who are more like mere observers, also seen in the form of Herr Issyvoo from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, and especially in Charles Ryder from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I understand why this device is used over and over, as it’s a great way to analyse cultures anthropologically (especially when you’re reading about them from our time period, without the benefit of total understanding of the era), but honestly these sorts of guys remind me more and more of Crono from Chrono Trigger, sponges who experience everything vicariously through their friends. I’d like a main character with a little more agency, please.

As for the books themselves, I liked two out of the three quite a bit. Question is an entertaining schoolboy lark that is cut through with hints of the darkness looming over everyone’s heads. Buyer’s Market, though, was a bit of a chore to make my way through. It concerns itself for about half the book with the events of one long night in the world of London’s hostesses and parties. It was interesting at first to see how well-to-do types at the time courted one another, and the etiquette involved in place settings, dances and attire, but after 100 pages or so of this and little else, it got old. I did like Powell’s spot-on depiction of a young man in “love” with various women of his acquaintance, more infatuated with the idea of love itself than any one girl. That was excellent. Acceptance picked up again, though, and I pretty much devoured it in two days. You can see Jenkins maturing almost page by page in this one, and his eventual (real) romantic pairing felt very organic and recognizeable.

I noticed an interesting theme running through these three books, the idea of great men and their influence on the relatively small world of the London upper classes. A few figures loom large over everyone else in the books, and here Powell’s use of Jenkins primarily as an observer works really well. We never really get to know Sir Magnus Donner, a successful businessman and owner of the Donners-Brebner industrial concern, nor his secretary Bill Truscott, who was a big deal during Jenkins’ university years. Rather, we hear about them in hushed tones more resembling tales out of mythology than anything else. In fact, you can extend this metaphor to give each book an older patron who sets the tone for the story; Le Bas, schoolmaster to the boys before they leave for college or the City, is the big influence over Upbringing, while Edgar Deacon, a bohemian painter and friend of the Jenkins family is a major player in the events of Buyer’s Market.

The author St. John Clarke, who is beginning to fall out of popular and critical favour, is fought over by two more of Jenkins’ university pals in Acceptance, the dueling authors Mark Members and J.G. Quiggin, who both want influence over him. In addition to those three, we also learn a lot about Jenkins’ Uncle Giles; we actually learn more about him than we do his nephew, at least in these three volumes. He’s kind of a crank, whose primary aim when dealing with his family members is to try and weasel more money out of “The Trust”, this being the inheritance held for everyone. His ideas about how the world works are entertaining, as he finds that “all material advancement in the world was the result of influence, a mysterious attribute with which he invested, to a greater or lesser degree, every human being on earth except himself.” (Upbringing, p. 66). We all know someone like that, who believe that people who “get ahead” are just lucky assholes who overshadow their own obviously misunderstood geniuses.

The real problem with trying to talk about this section of the greater cycle is that there’s not a lot more I can say about these three volumes; they’re basically the first few chapters of the real book, full of portent and foreshadowing for what’s to come. Jenkins drops a few references to what happens to him in World War II, for example, and now I really want to find out what happens to everyone. I’m still mulling it over, but I think I’m going to take a crack at the rest of the cycle once my current reading project has come to an end. While I’d recommend the “1st movement” to someone who would enjoy the examination of the milieu, it’s like me recommending Blood Meridian based on the strength of its opening five chapters (which I wouldn’t do, by the way, as I really hate that book and am dreading trying to read it again). While I’m closing in on my current goal of 100 books, my real reading list keeps growing by leaps and bounds…

“But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned –or everything is– because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be. (Acceptance, p. 63)

The List:

1. ~~The Adventures of Augie March~~

2. ~~All the King’s Men~~

3. ~~American Pastoral~~

4. ~~An American Tragedy~~

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

6. ~~Appointment in Samarra~~

7. ~~Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret~~

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~