A Dance to the Music of Time
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A Dance to the Music of Time is a twelve volume novel by Anthony Powell. It is often, erroneously, referred to as a roman à clef. One of the longest works of fiction in literature, it was published between 1951 and 1975 to critical acclaim. The story is a satire on English political and cultural life in the mid 20th century.
The sequence takes the form of the reminiscences of the narrator Nick Jenkins who falls into a reverie at the beginning of the first volume (A Question of Upbringing, 1951) while watching snow descending on a coal fire. This reminds him of "the ancient world - legionaries (...) mountain altars (...) centaurs (....)". These classical projections bring back to him his days at school which open A Question of Upbringing. Over the course of the following twelve volumes, he recalls the people he met over the previous half a century. Little is told of Jenkins' personal life outside his encounters with the great and the good, with events, such as his wife's miscarriage, only being related in conversation with the principal characters.
The title is taken from a painting by Nicolas Poussin, on which Jenkins reflects in the first two pages of A Question of Upbringing:
- These classical projections, and something 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 recognizable 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.
The story was adapted by Hugh Whitemore for a TV mini-series in 1997, starring Simon Russell Beale, James Purefoy and Miranda Richardson.
The novels
- A Question of Upbringing - (1951)
- A Buyer's Market - (1952),
- The Acceptance World - (1955)
- At Lady Molly's - (1957)
- Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - (1960)
- The Kindly Ones - (1962)
- The Valley of Bones - (1964)
- The Soldier's Art - (1966)
- The Military Philosophers - (1968)
- Books Do Furnish a Room - (1971)
- Temporary Kings - (1973)
- Hearing Secret Harmonies - (1975)
Principal characters
| Character | Details | Key |
| Nick Jenkins | Narrator | A cypher, everyman; Powell himself |
| Kenneth Widmerpool | A mediocre student who goes on to greatness | Any number of Labour MPs who rose to senior positions in World War II and were elected in the landslide UK general election, 1945 such as Robert Maxwell and Denis Healey. Many soon lost their seats and became labour peers. |
| Sillery | An Oxford don | F.R. Leavis |
| Howard Craggs | Left-wing publisher | Victor Gollancz |
| The Field Marshal | Leader of desert warfare | Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein |
| The C.I.G.S. | General in charge of the defence of Britain | Alan Francis Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke |
| X. Trapnel | Novelist and parodist | Julian Maclaren-Ross |
| Hugh Moreland | Composer | Constant Lambert |
| St John Clarke | Author | John Galsworthy |
| Max Pilgrim | Entertainer | Noel Coward |
| Erridge (Earl of Warminster) | Socialist peer; Jenkins's brother-in-law | The Earl of Longford, Powell's brother-in-law. Also Powell's friend George Orwell — he lives as a tramp for a time, fights in the Spanish Civil War and dies at a relatively young age. |
more to be done
