Into the Final Movement of A Dance to the Music of Time

*As always, there are spoilers ahead.*

It is very exciting to be heading into the final movement of Anthony Powell’s twelve volume series, A Dance to the Music of Time.  The tenth book, Books Do Furnish a Room, takes place in the years following the end of World War II.  Nick’s military career is at an end, and he is taking a break from writing fiction to put together a scholarly work about Richard Burton.  In addition to this personal interest, Nick signs on to head up the literary review section of a newly formed magazine, Fission.  Over the course of the novel, the magazine is formed, survives for two years, and then comes to an end.  We meet again many of the recurring characters who have populated the first nine novels of the series and, as always, meet a number of new ones.

Books Do Furnish a Room is one of the finest novels in the series, and my favorite so far.  Powell had always planned on creating a long-form narrative, attempting to avoid the restrictions imposed by putting an entire plot in 250 pages.  In my blog to the first book, A Question of Upbringing, I quoted this excerpt from an interview with Powell from an interview published in Paris review:   

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.

 When I started the series, I thought of the novels as being essentially plot-free.  There were a lot of beautifully drawn characters all interacting with each other in interesting ways, but there were no moments that seemed to be setting up some future event.  Instead, each chapter read as a sort of short story involving multiple characters in a single universe.  There is much that is funny and some that is moving, but Powell’s writing and power of observation always made the reading interesting and rewarding.  Each novel moves us forward in time, taking us from the narrator’s time at university to, here in book ten, when he is in his early 40’s. 

Two things make Books Do Furnish a Room particularly enjoyable.  First, the novel feels more cohesive in its focus than previous novels in the series.  Perhaps I feel that more than in the other novels because I am particularly interested in Books’ focus on writing and publishing.  Second, I begin to feel the gathering force of the larger story working towards its conclusion.  I don’t expect anything especially dramatic at the climax of the series, but all the characters and relationships have the strength of familiarity and time.  Early in the series, it was hard to tell where everything was going.  The individual stories were all overlapping in their way, building off each other and calling back to past episodes as different elements moved in and out, vanishing for several chapters or volumes, only to come back in again with extra weight.  I had assumed that the four men at the heart of the first novel would be the recurring center of the entire series, but with Stringham and Templer dead (or presumed dead), only Nick and Widmerpool remain.  Widmerpool has appeared in every volume and he seems to be the only character with a central arc, having begun as an object of humor and worked his way up to an MP in the government.  As Le Bas in the final chapter of the tenth book notes, Widmerpool is the last of Nick’s classmates that anyone expected to achieve so much.  As we build to the end of the series, I suspect that Widmerpool has a fall before him.

I have observed in past posts what a wonderful narrator Nick is, full of observation and judicious opinions while at the same time possessing such humor and an eye for irony.  While the novels are not about him at all, he is a wonderful character whom the reader wants to hang out with as much as everyone else in the novel who insists on his company when it’s available.

I also suspected from the beginning that we would watch the world change over the course of the series, and while that is certainly true, the consistency of Nick’s tone makes that change more subtle and gradual than I anticipated.  As we move from post-Victorian to post-war England the tone of the world has changed, but Powell avoids over-dramatizing those changes, giving us continuity as well as changes.  Certainly the younger generation, represented in Books by Pamela Widmerpool and Trapnel are very different from Nick’s friends, but Nick is hardly shaking his head wondering about the youth of today.  The parties that Nick attended in the first movement of the series are a quaint tradition of the past, but there is no bemoaning that absence.  Politics have changed too, as Gypsy Jones, Quiggins, and Erry show.  But like time itself, the change is so gradual that it feels as natural as life as we live it, drawing more attention to similarities than differences.  Whether that was Powell’s intentions, I do not know, but I find it a very interesting effect.

I am excited to see how and to what extent all the threads come together, or to follow the metaphor Powell himself sets out in the opening novel, how the dancers conclude their time on the floor and who will still be among them.  It is on now to the penultimate book in the series, which has the wonderful title Temporary Kings.