The Anthony Powell Reading Group discussion

Afternoon Men is our November 2019 group read. It was Anthony Powell's first published novel, appearing in 1931.

The novel focuses on the romantic adventures and discontents of one William Atwater, together with a circle of his friends and acquaintances, in London around the end of the 1920s. Atwater, a museum clerk, pursues a never-fulfilled relationship with Susan Nunnery throughout the novel, while other characters – painter Raymond Pringle, Harriet Twining, Lola, Verelst, the American publisher Scheigan, and Susan’s father George amongst them – carry on similar dissatisfying quests for emotional fulfilment. The novel is predominantly comic, with persistent melancholy and occasional vitriol also present.

Like much of Powell’s fiction, the novel portrays British society and its subtly stratified interconnections by focusing in detail on individual behaviour both in social situations–at parties, country weekends, at work–and in solitude.

I often wonder if the character name Undershaft is meant as an allusion to George Bernard Shaw (Major Barbra), or if it is simply an allusion to Saint Andrew Undershaft church. I feel the same way about Susan “get thee to a” Nunnery: Is that Hamlet, or a coincidence? The religious mania ascribed to Pringle’s father in chapter 1 is also intriguing. Pringle himself, eventually, seems to be a victim of a kind of mania, though it’s not at all religious. Even Atwater’s name makes me wonder. All the character names are ‘loaded.’