A Dance to the Music of Time - Twelve Times!

The '50s look to be a hard decade on this list.  I don't mean that the books look more challenging than usual, but that there are a few surprises.  First, I saw that The Lord of the Rings was listed as one book, even though it was published as three.  But I suppose that is a fair grouping, since Tolkien intended it to be one book and wrote it as such. So, the authors of this list managed to fit 102 books, into their list of a hundred.  Imagine my surprise then, when I was looking up the next book on the list, A Dance to the Music of Time, and discovered that this title is actually an epic collection of 12 books!  Moreover, they were not written as one book.  Volume One, A Question of Upbringing, was published in 1951, the second book in 1952, the third in 1955, all the way up to the last book being published in the mid-70s.  So now we are up to 113 books.  They are tricksy!

 The whole of the novel, I am told, follows our narrator, Nick Jenkins, throughout 50 or so years of his life.  The books appear to follow strict chronological order, and this first book, A Question of Upbringing, begins somewhere in the 1920s at Oxford for the three years Jenkins is at university.  And while Jenkins is a first-person narrator, and while the book follows his life, it is less about him than about all the people he encounters.  He is very much like Isherwood's camera in The Berlin Stories.  (Actually, that's another book that was built out of two books!  That puts us at 114!).

According to an interview with the Paris review (http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3475/the-art-of-fiction-no-68-anthony-powell), Powell knew he wanted to write a very long piece of fiction.  Here's how he explains it:

 Well, this is rather a long story. You see I haven't any great talent for inventing plots, and indeed it seems to me that even the best writers are inclined to churn out the same stuff in eighty thousand words, although it's dressed up in a different way. And so I thought that there would be all sorts of advantages for a writer like myself to write a really long novel in which plots and characters could be developed, which would cover this question of not doing short-term plots—doing rather larger ones, in fact. But of course I didn't know at the beginning quite how long all this was going to be . . . I knew there would be a great number of novels, and about, I suppose, halfway through I realized that I should have to do at least three about the war. Well, having done six before, it seemed the obvious answer to do three to end it up with, because I think it's quite a good idea to have some sort of discipline imposed on yourself in writing, and therefore I deliberately wrote the last three with the idea of ending it up and doing the neat twelve volumes. But I have to admit that in 1951 I didn't know there'd be exactly twelve.

 He is right about this novel not having much to do with "plots."  There are only four chapters in the book, each about 60 pages long, and each acting like something of a short story.  We follow his encounters, mainly, with three other boys who were friends or acquaintances his first year at school:  Stringham, Templer, and Widmerpool.  There are things that happen (and some stories are quite amusing unto themselves), but for the most part, Powell focuses on the interplay between characters.  And I'm wishing I had more to say about that interplay.

My enjoyment of this novel suffered somewhat from following fast upon Catcher in the Rye.  Caulfield's narration in Catcher is so alive and fresh and wild, that Jenkins's proper English and detached tone felt leaden.  Both novels were about young men away from home at school, but Holden's adventures and encounters were much more gripping.  As it is, I'm not even sure what the significance of A Dance to the Music of Time is, and I have not grasped its greatness yet, or why it is considered such a literary achievement.  Something tells me that I need to read much more to appreciate what the book is doing, so I will leave analysis to later books, which I will read in the order they were published with the rest of the list.  I am about to embark on the second book, A Buyer's Market, and should get a better sense of what Powell is doing from there.

This is what I know for now.  The first novel opens with the narrator watching men work on a street corner where they had made a kind of camp as they work by the hurricane lamps in the growing dark.  The images of these men moving in and out of and around the light makes the narrator think of Poussin's painting, A Dance to the Music of Time:

These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing Outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays.  The image of time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

And that is the image and theme that ties together the next twelve books.  And while I am not in love with the first book, I am hopeful that their will be a reward over the course of the novels, a power built up over time.