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Tim Cawkwell

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A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement (A Dance to the Music of Time, #7-9)

by Anthony Powell

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Tim Cawkwell said: " The TLS review of Michael Schmidt’s ‘The Novel: a biography’ (Harvard UP 2014) tells me that in it Schmidt ‘damns’ Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. As it happened, I was in the middle of a ‘compare and contrast’ exercise between volumes 7,8 and 9 of The TLS review of Michael Schmidt’s ‘The Novel: a biography’ (Harvard UP 2014) tells me that in it Schmidt ‘damns’ Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. As it happened, I was in the middle of a ‘compare and contrast’ exercise between volumes 7,8 and 9 of Powell’s ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ (Valley of Bones, The Soldier’s Art, The Military Philosophers) and Waugh’s ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy (Officers and Gentlemen, Men at Arms, Unconditional Surrender), both trilogies about the British Army in the Second World War, both with an autobiographical tone to them, although far from being slavishly so. The Waugh has its moments: the débâcle in Crete, Crouchback as liaison officer with the partisans in Croatia, but when he switches the narrative away from Crouchback the novel loses focus, and while there is nothing false about Crouchback’s Catholicism, there is something false about Waugh making the story of his war service an ‘obituary of the Roman Catholic Church in England as it had existed for many centuries’ (from his Preface) underlying as I think it does his lament for the condition of Britain, an unconditional surrender to secular, egalitarian forces, the end of Britain.

No such strictures relate to Powell’s trilogy which captures so well the despair induced by the phoney war of 1939/early 1940, but also the comedy of the army (Waugh does this as well, but I didn’t laugh) and victory achieved on the quiet as it were, by muddle but still victory. And striding through it all is Powell’s magnificent portrait of villainy in the person of Widmerpool, more unlikeable as each volume of the 12-volume sequence unfolds, and more unlikeable still on re-reading of the whole. Amidst the manners, amidst the comedy, amidst the comedy of manners, a dark story unfolds of how Widmerpool sends Stringham and Templer, who at school (along with the narrator, Nick Jenkins) had tormented him, to their deaths in the Far East and the Balkans. A TV adaptation of the books has been made, but I’d like to see a much narrower focussed drama involving these four characters. If I was cleverer I’d write it myself.

So – Powell be praised, Waugh be half-praised, and Schmidt be damned. I hope to goodness that he doesn’t represent a commonplace 21st-century view of Powell. If so it would be a gross injustice. ...more "

Aug 21, 2014 03:16AM · see review