A Dance To The Music Of Time: 1st Movement (1995) - Plot & Excerpts
I’ve been somewhere tonight that Ant has never been and frankly, I’m thinking maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s better to discuss how posh people lay the cutlery for dinner parties than life at the bottom. And I have only myself to blame. [Much, much later: the rest of this entry has been cut on the grounds that it is crap, even by the standards set here]And, as usual, I hope it is understood that a review of A Dance to the Music of Time can be about absolutely anything.------------------------------------------------------------------------Really, this is no more than an apology. Throats cut, Lebanese men with big knives, Penelope what's her name. I realise this review is in danger of becoming interesting. Might I calm things down with the information that it is 44C here where I live just now. Too hot to cut throats, wave knives about, or care what nationality your neighbour is. Too hot to sleep. Too hot to do anything but be exceedingly dull on goodreads. You are welcome to vote for me if you sincerely think I've been boring enough.-----------------------------------------------Oh dear, I can't resist.So, one of the things that happens in A Dance to the Music of Time is that the narrator mentions a lot of completely obscure books, whether or not they were so at the time of reading, I don't know. Like, what is the point of my telling you here that I'm reading An Iron Rose? Then moving on to explain that I am doing so in my LBD at The European while eating Turkish eggs and drinking tea. I confess I think I was especially irked because I tried to catch him out with his dates, so I'd look up all these books to see if any of them had come out at a time that contradicted the story line, and they don't. Yes, we seem to have established that I'm that petty-minded.Later on in the day I went to see Broken Embraces, so I know now what Penelope what's her name looks like. I guess you need to be a boy to get the full rise from that. The movie could have done with a good looking man, but considering it was Spanish...So, my LBD, had a full day of it, posh restaurants, a film, and then tea at the Windsor while we discussed how great Australia is and what the fuck do those Indians know anyway? No offense, any Indians reading this but India is a country where the value of human life is virtually nil. People are killed every day for pure fancy. They are killed because they are women, because they are poor, because they are from the wrong part of town and yet apparently Australia is this incredibly racist place because an Indian was murdered here the other day without being robbed. Like Australians aren't killed for kicks? I think they are. I used to collect statistics on women killed in India by their husbands and mother-in-laws. It is generally done by dousing the wife in petrol and then setting them alight. Some of these poor women don't actually die. Shaking my head. Get your own house in order, please, India.Meanwhile, I gather that England has been so cursed by the need to be politically correct that my sister-in-law tells me this story. They are sitting in a London restaurant with their daughter and son-in-law. The people at the next table see Sarah say 'I'll fucking kill you, you fucking Jew. If you don't stay away I'll fucking kill you.' Sarah is brandishing a knife while saying this. Now, the reason is that she is telling the never ending saga of the Lebananese restaurant owner next to their apartments. He most certainly isn't particularly anti-Jewish, he has threatened them all with knives and other tasty Lebanese treats, some involving stuffing - the Lebanese do like to stuff things. Martha and John completely freaked out. Evidently this was enough to get them arrested, Sarah telling this story. Racist tensions much be an awful thing to live with in the UK, but fortunately in Australia everybody still gets on in a natural way without having to legislate racial harmony.All of which brings me back to An Iron Rose. Might this segment of my review of A Dance to the Music of Time conclude with an archetypical description of some Aussies playing footy in the bush. This is Australia.pp. 61-63Ten minutes into the last quarter, it began to rain, freezing rain, driven into our facts by a wind that had passed over pack ice in its time. We only needed a kick to win but nobody could hold the ball, let along get a book to it. We were sliding around, falling over, trying to recognise our own side under the mudpacks. Mick Doolan was shouting instructions from the sideline but no-one paid any attention. We were completely knackered. Finally, close to time, we had some luck: a big bloke came out of the mist and broke Scotty Erwan’s nose with a vicious swing of the elbow. Even in the rain you could hear the cartilage crunch. Scotty was helped off, streaming blood, and we got a penalty.‘Take the kick, Mac,’ said Bill Garrett, the captain. He would normally take the kick in situations like this, but since the chance of putting it through was nil, he thought it best that I lose the game for Brockley. ‘Privilege,’ I sad, spitting out some mud. ‘Count on my vote for skipper next year. Skipper.’I was right in front of goal but the wind was lifting my upper lip. I looked around the field. There were about twenty spectators left, some of them dogs sitting in old utes.‘Slab says you can’t do it,’ said the player closest to me. He was just another anonymous mudman but I knew the voice.‘Very supportive, Flannery,’ I said. ‘You’re on, you little prick.’Squinting against the rain, I took my run-up inot the gale, scared that I was going to slip before I could even make the kick.But I didn’t. I manged to give the ball a reasonable punt before my left leg went out under me. I hit the ground with my left shoulder and slid towards goal.And as I lay in the cold black mud, the wind paused for a second or two and the ball went straight between the uprights.The final whistle went. Victory. Victory in round eight of the second division of the Brockley and District League. I got up. My shoulder felt dislocated. ‘That’ll be a slab of Boag, Flannery,’ I said. ‘You fucking traitor.’‘Brought out yer best,’ Flannery said. ‘Psychology. Read about it.’I said, ‘Read about it? Psychology in Pictures. I didn’t know they’d done that.’Paul, I've been called to dinner. I trust you will proofread this.-------------------------------------------------------------------In deference to Paul.p.196 'This was an unnpleasnt surprise for everyone. The girls could not have made more noise if they had been having their throats cut.'Now, this really did make me think. In my opinion the girls certainly could not have made more noise if they had been having their throats cut. But this is not what Ant means. Ant means that he considers one would make a lot of noise while having one's throat cut. More noise, perhaps even, than Manny would make if anybody actually gave him a vote for his review of Go book number two. I have to say, I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about this. I considered googling it, but I'm fairly sure that I'd get taken somewhere I really don't want to be. I'm not talking about Manny squealing with delight, I'm talking about the girls with the cut throats, of course.My own sense of what would happen is that the loudest noise during this process would be that of blood hitting a hard surface. Or maybe the sound of 'shit' as the blood meets the clothes of the throat cutter. The cuttee, nup, surely silent.Then, just this morning, as I'm eating sourdough baguette toast and tea at my local French coffee shop I come across the following scene in An Iron Rose p. 138He'd been killed where he lay, his head pulled back by the ponytail and his throat cut. More than cut. He was almost decpaitated.....Carlie mance was in the bathroom, naked....the man had been behind her when he cut her throat....Now this is merely inferential, but. The place has been staked out by the Feds, it is tapped for sound. There is no doubt that if these people had made so much as a squeak while having their throats cut, the Feds would have been right onto it.I rest my case.--------------------------------------------------3.30pm I cruise into the kitchen, not unnnoticed.'What are you doing?''Looking for lunch''But you had lunch half an hour ago'I hate people who count your food. Hate, hate, hate. And I feel sure I said somewhere on goodreads just a day or so ago that I haven't hated anybody ever, but let's just exclude people who count your food out of that rash statement.'You can't have another lunch now just because that book is making you miserable'.And it is true. Absolutely true. I didn't even want the first lunch I had. I certainly don't want this one. But.I feel like I've given this book more chances that Jesus gave all humanity. I wouldn't care to speak for him, but for me, I'll say too many. Way, way, way too many.I keep thinking that I will nail my case here by quoting a really really really boring passage. But what to choose? Honestly dip in anywhere and prepare to be bored to death by pompous formal writing of a kind I'm gobsmacked got into print. p.250At school I had known Tom Goring, who had later gone into the Sixtieth, and, although we had never had much to do with each other, I remembered some story of Stringham's of how both of them had put up money to buy a crib for Horace - or another Latin author whose works they were required to render into English [fucking hell, why oh why this tedious qualification. Are we going to find the narrator out? Ah ha. YOU said it was Horace and actually:] - and of trouble that ensued from the translation supplied having contained passages omitted in the official educational textbook. This fact of her elder brother having been my contemporary - the younger son, David, was still at school - may perhaps have had something to do with finding myself, immediately after our first meeting, on good terms with Barbara; though the matter of getting on well with young men in no circumstances presented serious difficulty to her.Sorry if that had you on the edge of your seat.I formally throw in the towel. I've done my hundred dollars. Bugger.-----------------------------------Later.If you happen to have read this book you will understand that digressions are the essence of the thing. So, it is in this spirit that I mention I went to Brightstar and I make a note to myself never to shag Keats should he come across my path. I take note that he's dead these days, but I can't see that this detail will make him less lively. In fact, make that poets fullstop. Pop poet on your profile, send me a little something about the affinity you feel for - some body part or another, my mind, even, if you like - and I promise I'll stay well clear.And I go to bridge and somebody asks me if I know anybody with influence in the city and a big house. The whole passing acquaintance with an academic who might live near Cambridge just hasn't really done it for me. So, I've got a better approach now. 'Well, Bob of course. And Jeff...' And there is nothing the other person can say to that. They are in terrible danger of showing inexcusable ignorance if they get pursue the details of this claim. Honestly it works.And our young wanker, - well, Manny thinks otherwise, so does that mean it's the author who is a wanker - narrator spends two pages of such tedium describing the process of thinking about kissing somebody and then kissing entirely the wrong person, honestly, truly, you don't want to know, that I revise my opinion about Brightstar. I have to admit that I would shag Keats dead or alive (him, not me) rather than the earnest sad little sod who fancies himself as a writer in this First Movement. Maybe you have to have been a young man sometime in your life to fancy him. Maybe you have to care about money and influence and big houses. I just don't know.At bridge certain interesting things happen, but I shan't tell you about then since it would be against the spirit of this book to pep you up that way. So, I will merely mention that my partner forgot a baby bit of system on board one, leaving us in the wrong game (which I made) rather than the right slam. And the very next board my opponent failed to understand the simple truth that aces are not necessarily highest. Hmm. That last point is almost philosophically interesting. I beg your pardon.-----------------------------------------------------------------Later. At dinner, Gowers asks me whom I know with a big house and an important position in the City. Panic. Are there no names I can drop, anybody of note I know? Will I be invited back here again? Umm, I reply after a frozen moment, I know an academic I believe lives near Cambridge. Gowers sniffs. But do you know any Oxford academics, Gowers replies, in those two words sweeping away the entire concept of there being academics outside that institution. Of course! My own niece lives in Oxford with her husband who is an academic there. I lean back in relief. Not to be invited back to the Gowers, well, the shame of it. Gowers is pleased.Donald changes the subject. Any good practical jokes lately? He describes his mother in a nursing home. He turned off her TV at the powerpoint and she spent an entire day thinking her TV wasn't working. It was such a hoot. That prompted Andrea to say she was thinking of moving the newspaper her 94 year old mother gets delivered to the edge of the stairs. Wouldn't it be hysterical if the old bint fell down the stairs while attempting to retrieve the paper? We all smile at the prospect.Then I woke up. This is what comes of reading First Movement before bed. The subject matter of the book to date, as you can see, is gross. Nasty boys with nasty values doing nasty things. One might hope they grow up except that the rest of the cast to date are nasty adults with nasty values doing nasty things. This book has a mighty lot of characters in it so far, but not one that is likeable.One wonders if it is the author or the narrator who is a wanker. Well, obviously the narrator is a wanker in a literal sense, he is a young man. But intellectually, metaphysically? Are we supposed to be appalled by the entire thing? Would I have a different understanding of this book if I lived in a country like England where social status is so important that one can write hundreds of pages about it without being either offensive or dull?And please God, could you not lighten up a bit, Ant? Could we not have a knock knock? An I say I say I say? So it's Sunday, I'm going to have tea and toast for breakfast soon at one of my favourite coffee shops. I was going to wear my NYE party frock today, but it's too cold. Sorry cute LBD. You have to wait again. Next I'm going to be playing bridge all day and coming back to whereever I'm staying right now. Then I'll be cooking dinner or I will have dinner cooked for me.And anything, absolutely anything is a review of A Dance to the Music of Time.------------------------------------------------------------------So, it's New Year's Eve, I had three parties I promised to go to - come as a celebrity, Marta said; you mean other than a famous writer, I ask? Marta is Hungarian, she didn't get it - a gorgeous new dress, the sexiest heels...and what am I doing?I'm writing about A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement. The bloody thing's twenty-eight hundred pages long, I don't have time for parties. You might say, you are so not doing that, writing about this book, but hey, I'm learning on my feet while I'm reading Powell. Pithy he is not. To the point? Hardly. I'm reading Les Miserables as well right now and frankly, Ant - I hope he wouldn't mind my being intimate, I'm going to be with the guy for two thousand eight hundred pages, I don't see how to avoid getting too close to him - well, Ant makes Victor Hugo look like he's on a word diet. He makes Hugo look like he's on a bet, just how short can you make this book. And to his credit, Hugo takes a quarter of the space Ant does. Maybe he collected.Having stated that this book is about a certain Myriel, the first sentence of Les Miserables reads:Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese.The first sentence of Ant's testament to the English language, if we might compare, reads:The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes.What happened to sucker your reader in with your first sentence? What happened to 'It was love at first sight'? Oh. Joseph Heller was still on his way.I guess the fact is that you don't want to give too much away in your first sentence when you have about - hmm, let's see, 2800 pages, say a dozen sentences to a page, that's 33,600 sentences to go. Face facts right from the very beginning, tight writing we are not looking for.The sandals are wedges, the dress has lace and beads and red bits and a drop waist, which I adore, and it's close fitting to the waist, after which it's got the most gorgeous skirt, and well, I'm SORRY, dress. Sunday. Maybe you get an outing Sunday. And I know it's sounding again like I'm not reviewing Dance to the Music of Time but honestly, everything is a review of this book. Absolutely everything.
I've been meaning for some time to post a review of Dance to the Music of Time, which is pretty much my favorite book ever, but it's hard to know where to start. If you've read it, you know it's a masterpiece, and anything I say is irrelevant. If you haven't read it, I'm faced with the daunting task of persuading you that it's worth your time to get through it. Not only is it 12 volumes long, but everyone calls Powell the English Proust. Why read some inferior Proust wannabe when you can get the real thing?The above notwithstanding, if you are the kind of person who likes long novels, you will probably find Dance an unforgettable trip, irrespective of whether or not you have read Proust. I have read both of them more than once, and, although there are similarities, there are also huge differences. Let's start with the style. Proust, of course, is famous for those incredibly long sentences, but, try as I will, I can only bring myself to be half-enthusiastic about them. OK, every now and then you are stunned by the syntactic elegance and perfect balance. Rather more often, unfortunately, it feels more like a really impressive Jenga tower: you are amazed that it can stand upright, but everyone has to tiptoe around the room as long as the game is in progress. Proust readers will all be familiar with the maddening phenomenon of being close to the end of a 500 word sentence when something interrupts your train of thought, and you have to go back to the beginning, losing 15 precious minutes that you will never see again. In a perfect world, the police would regularly check GoodReads, and divert noisy traffic away from the Proust readers who'd asked for this service; even with Obama coming in, it's not going to happen any time soon. Powell's sentences are satisfyingly long and elegant, but he doesn't go to the absurd lengths that Proust does, and you can for example read them when small children are playing in the vicinity.Still on style, I hope will not offend the hard-core Proust fans when I say that he's not usually that funny. There are of course comic passages, some of them very good (I'm particularly thinking of the Duchesse de Guermantes and all her witty remarks). But on the whole, the tone is quite gloomy. So, when reading Proust, not only do you have to make sure you're alert and not being distracted, you also shouldn't be feeling too down. One begins to see why it's significantly harder to reach the end of Le Temps Retrouvée than, say, the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Dance, in contrast, is basically a comic novel; it's amusing most of the time, in a very dry, understated English way that definitely grows on you as the story progresses and the author builds up more and more possibilities for complex irony based on the past histories of the characters. If you're still thinking of it as basically like Proust, you may have trouble believing me, but I assure you that Powell can cheer you up when you are unhappy. It's that different.Moving on to content, another major difference is that Powell characters inhabit a world that recognizably has some connection to the one most of us inhabit. In Proust, no one has anything as mundane as a job, and people spent most of their time attending fancy parties, agonizing about whether they can arrange to be presented to members of the French nobility, appreciating immortal works of art, and getting laid at houses of ill repute. (I really liked Jessica's comment that SHE wanted to have that kind of life. If only!) A lot of Powell's characters are from the English upper classes, but they do mostly end up working for a living, getting married, having children, and doing other things readers will find familiar. You aren't constantly having to apply your internal cultural translator, and figuring out what the thing Proust is talking about might correspond to in your own dull, bourgeois existence.I'm sorry if this review has so far has a defensive tone, but I've been saving the really good stuff for the end. The thing that makes Dance brilliant rather than just very good is the character development, which is simply unequaled in any other novel I have come across. Usually, when the novelist wants the reader to significantly change the way they see a character over the course of the book, he has technical problems because he needs to fit it all into the three to five hundred pages he has at his disposal. Hence all the tiresome foreshadowing that so often spoils the book, and makes it seem so unlike real life. (I love Christina Ricci's comments about foreshadowing at the beginning of The Opposite of Sex). Because Powell is working on such a huge canvas, he can do without all that crap. The first time you meet Stringham, he is so funny, charming and witty that, just like the narrator, you are completely bowled over. He does perhaps seem a bit impulsive and irresponsible, but that is all part of the charm. Similarly, Widmerpool first comes over as a complete idiot. In retrospect, one does wonder whether it really was so funny for Stringham to make a prank call that got his teacher arrested, and you also see that the absurdly over-earnest way in which Widmerpool sorts out the quarrel over the tennis match at the French pension pointed towards something. But Powell's touch is so light that I never suspected anything at the time. The next time you see them, you are just a little surprised that Stringham seems to have become rather thoughtless, but you ascribe that to the exhalted social circles he moves in; and when you see that Widmerpool has landed himself a better job than you expected, you don't really pay much attention to it, particularly after he, once again, manages to cover himself in ridicule by knocking over his employer's flower pots while reversing his car. It's only when you've got many hundreds of pages into the series that it starts coming together. Stringham is drinking far too much; it's not funny any more, at least not most of the time. Widmerpool, on the other hand, suddenly has acquired some real power, without you quite being able to see how it happened. This is exactly how you experience it in real life. Some of the people you worshiped when you were a teenager have turned out to be hopeless failures; others, whom you laughed at, have somehow become very successful. You can't quite reconcile the two views: some of the time, you accept them at their new value, and some of the time they still seem like morons. Powell succeeds perfectly in presenting all these contradictions, without ever seeming even to work up a sweat. It just flows naturally from the narrative.Well... I probably still haven't managed to convince you to read Dance. But think about it :)
What do You think about A Dance To The Music Of Time: 1st Movement (1995)?
Powell takes you back to a time and place, Britain and France in the 1920s, that no longer exists. He also describes a class culture that is unfamiliar to this reader who grew up in the Midwest. He does this with a prose style and a structure that, through episodes in the lives of four boys on the verge of adulthood, slowly builds a story that seems very true to life. You gradually learn about the relationships through the eys of the narrator, Jenkins, and by the time he says goodbye to his Uncle Giles at the end of the first volume, A Question of Upbringing, you have become engaged with these individuals, their loves and dreams for the future.
—James
My favorite novel of the 20th century is probably Anthony Powell's twelve-volume marathon, A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME, written between 1951 and 1975. Supremely civilized, enormous in design, an unforgettable picture of a way of life (and a class) that were disappearing even when Powell was one of the "bright young people" who were so visible in the 1920s in London, the books that make up Dance are also very funny.I first read DANCE when I was in my early thirties, and the story (in the first three books) of the friendship of three boys thrown together in school and the gradual dissolution of those friendships as the world calls the young men in different directions, meant a great deal to me at the time. I'd never read anything that seemed to speak so directly to my own life. This was emphasized by the loss, in the book, of one boy -- the most brilliant one -- into a life of drink and another into sexual dissipation that ruins his relationships and irremediably coarsens his character. I had watched several friends hit the rocks by that time and had sailed pretty close to them myself.The remaining books chronicle the irresistible rise of the boy the others had scorned, the implacable Widmerpool, who amasses power almost as revenge for being unloved and unliked, and who demonstrates a resilience to humiliation -- even sexual humiliation -- that's almost mythical in scope. I think Widmerpool may be the fictional creation I most admire. By the way, Powell's four-volume memoir, TO KEEP THE BALL ROLLING, also speaks to a level of civilization that seems today to be as lost to us as Atlantis.
—Timothy Hallinan
Some books take a while to get into. That first 50 or 100 pages that require faith or pigheadness to get through, and then all of a sudden the door opens, you're inside, and you're so glad you lasted.Like that, only it took two and a half novels. I had to start book 2 two times, but I sailed right into book 3. Whenever Widmerpool is on the scene, I can't stop reading. He is so grotesque (at least through the narrator's eyes) but so very fascinating. In a way, he is the only character who is really alive.Which may explain why I've hit another wall with book 4. No Widmerpool, no characters I've already met...these books really are weird.*****(From in-progress review): I've read the first book of the first movement, but flagged at the beginning of the second. I thought it would be so good. And it is good, but it keeps such an emotional distance from all of the characters, including the narrator, that it's hard to sustain an interest. I guess I just like my fiction a little less chilly. But I must press on. The 2nd book of the 2nd movement is "Casanova's Chinese Restaurant." Now there's a title that calls my name.
—Alisa
