book review - From a View to a Death - Anthony Powell

"Mrs. Brandon did not answer. She had ceased to fan herself with the Illustrated London News and now she lay back on the sofa quite still. Her eyes remained open, but they stared in front of her at nothing in particular. Mrs Dadds made preparations to leave the room. She was an unobservant woman and did not notice that her mistress was dead."

Cards on the table I like Anthony Powell. I know some people think of his Dance to the Music of Time as an upmarket Eastenders but it charts a world that has gone forever blown away by the bombs of war and the decline of the aristocracy. But From a View to a Death is slightly different.

It contains all of the Powell hall marks of characters from country houses that have wealth and eccentricities that are designed to make the reader laugh. The problem is that those characters were probably seen with some fondness back in 1933, when this was first published, but now seem not just vulgar but irrelevant.

The world inbetween the wars was one when those that had served in the First World War got to stroll around and talk about the war and the need for everyone to be a gentleman. But the spectre of Nazism was looming when being a gentleman was not going to be enough and those in houses that were already in decline were facing serious problems.

But this is written before that was clearly happening. In a nutshell an artist, Arthur Zouch, who is neither successful or a hit with the ladies exploits the hospitality of a family in the country setting his sights on an engagement and marriage into a comfortable life in the country.

He finds away from London he manages to start a couple of affairs with not just his intended target but another pretty girl in the village. Set pieces about a pageant and hunting are played out as the characters move through a vanishing world. What you sense clearly is how boring it is to be part of that and how protected they all are not just from reality but ever being told about it. Butlers might grumble about them but they dare not say it to their masters faces.

The two problems for me were firstly that the humour didn't carry through 80 years and the scenes about transvestitism were just awkward when presumably they were meant to be rib tickling.

But secondly the main character of Zouch never really worked for me. Was the reader meant to like him as he broke hearts and schemed his way through engagements? Were they meant to feel pity when the family he had chosen to become part of closed ranks and made it difficult? I felt neither and as a result found it lacking any real engagement.

As a piece of social history charting a world that has largely disappeared then it is worth a read but those heading for Powell would be wiser to go for the Dance rather than this.

When the TV is almost as good as the book

It’s not often that a televised version of a book gets a thumbs up but one episode into the Channel 4 version of Dance to the Music of Time and its looking like a winner.

The series, which is on DVD, was shown years ago and manages to weave together several books into each episode in a way that allows the story to flow and develop in a surprisingly good way. In that respect it is similar to last year’s Radio 4 adaptation which managed to roughly cover three books per episode.

Although it’s a different from the book in its own way it’s an experience that provides just as much enjoyment. The screen version has been written with real sympathy and where there are omissions you hardly notice them.

Looking forward to watching the rest of the series.

book review - Hearing Secret Harmonies

In the end you are left with an old man standing in his garden in the Somerset countryside next to a bonfire. He is surrounded not just by the smell of the fire but by the sounds and smells or autumn. He knows that time is running out and the autumn of his days is soon to be replaced by winter.

The twelfth book in the Dance to the Music of Time series Anthony Powell winds up some of the characters threads but leaves you at the end with Jenkins wondering and pondering on what life is all about.

For many of the characters, no more so than Widmerpool, life seems to be about a conquest for power. Getting wealth is a by product of the real Holy Grail to be a person of influence and someone with the ability to decide the destinies of others. Jenkins always wonders if Widmerpool is haunted by his role in sending Stringham to his death but never finds any remorse.

Equally motivated by power are those in the publishing world that find as they get older they become part of the establishment to be lampooned and undermined. No more cruelly than J C Quiggin’s twins who infused with the spirit of the 1960s embarrass him on numerous occasions. People seem to become the role models that they initially fought so hard to replace.

But the central character of Jenkins, who has by now had a long and happy marriage and a consistent career in the literary world is not only still able to stand to one side of the action but turn out by surviving and valuing happiness to personify the alternative path that many could have trod.

One character who manages to surprise till the end is Widmerpool who moves seamlessly from University Chancellor to head of a hippy commune renouncing his former motivation but at the same time striving to carve out an alternative source of influence.

He manages to come into conflict with a younger much more driven man who has come from a world far removed from the Etonian privilege enjoyed by Widmerpool. Murtlock manages to take over Widmerpool’s sect and in the end the struggle between them for leadership is the cause of the older man’s death as he tries to prove he can still keep up.

But one of the main themes here is about reflections with Jenkins able to accept more than most that he is now at the end of a generation and everything is about looking back not forward. He is occasionally dragged back through what his old friend Moreland called sentimentality jogging memories by pictures or places but as he watches acquaintances self-destruct or lose a life’s work he manages to steer a course to his safe home in the countryside.

For the first time really you feel that this where there are real moments of truth with Powell’s home life in Frome being described in the passages about the countryside. There is also a feeling that out where the worst thing to fear are devils in old stone circles age has also taken Jenkins away from London.

The bright lights and parties that first attracted him to the capital and then the work that kept him there have gone. Released from the centre of power he is also released from the fever that grips those looking for power.

There have been numerous moments in the 12 book series when the reader wants to urge Jenkins forward but in the end his approach, with its wisdom and detachment, succeeds.

book review - Temporary Kings

Having mentioned in a review of the previous volume Books do Furnish a Room those connections are in the open here as Anthony Powell moves the location of the action to Venice.

Jenkins is on an academic publishing conference organised by Mark Members and along with some faces from the previous book, Ada now a successful novelist among them, there are some new comers. Among those are two figures that stand out. Russell Gwinnet, a academic from the US announces he plans to produce a biography of Trapnel who has died since the last volume. Then there is Dr Brightman who has the ability to combine an academic ignorance of the real world with an interest in gossip and intrigue.

There is plenty of that provided by the Widmerpools. Pamela is linked too the death of a French public figure and he is embarrassed and embarrassing as they drag each other round Venice. They are guests of a film star that Pamela wants to turn her into a film star but they all meet as the academics do a tour of the film director’s palace.

On the ceiling in the film director’s palace is a painting depicting a King quite happy to allow another man to sleep with his Queen while he looks on. As the book develops it becomes clear that this is the sexual activity enjoyed by the Widmerpool couple.

But Pamela is never one to sit tight and she makes a beeline for Gwinnet and after hearing that the American has purchased at auction a copy of Trapnel’s writings that will help him construct the great lost novel that Pamela destroyed the two enjoy a heated relationship.

Jenkins watches on as these relationships develop and is confined to the margins, even when he visits his first boss who has moved from publishing to painting and now lives in Venice. Throughout it all the twin figures of Kenneth and Pamela Widmerpool are the subject of gossip and scandal.

Once back in England Jenkins is reminded of the past once again as he sits by the bedside and watches his friend Moreland die but he is also keeping an eye on the future with Widmerpool embroiled in a spying scandal and Pamela missing out on her role as a film star.

The ghosts of the past are kept alive with Bagshaw meeting with Gwinnet to fill him in on the life of his autobiographical subject Trapnel. The American is an oddity who has problems conversing and is obsessed with death with his former girlfriend’s death being some cause of erotic stimulation for him.

The book is rather a watershed with not only the death of Moreland but also of Pamela. Maybe part of the problem for me with this volume is that never having particularly cared much for Pamela her rise and fall rather passes me by. Of course she has a role in influencing other characters and pushing life in a certain direction. But with it looking as if she has taken her own life to please her new lover Gwinnet it just feels like not only a waste but to some extent a relief that the remaining book will not be dominated by her personality.

Although it is becoming clear that Jenkins is getting older and his connections with the dance is becoming ever more limited as he fellow dancers dies off there is a real sense of the end coming and ironically it is Jenkins who starts to step into the spotlight. After years and years of describing other people and their achievements it starts to look as if his is not only surviving but also doing so with family, health and mind intact.

book review - The Military Philosophers

Of the three books in the series of Dance to the Music of Time that cover the war this is the most enjoyable. The other books that Anthony Powell wrote that covered the war had the main character Jenkins failing to find a role and hanging on to the coat tails of Widmerpool, hoping that his ambitious old school acquaintance will help him.

By the later stages of the conflict Jenkins is working in a department that liaises firstly with the Poles and then the Belgians. The war is coming to an end with the Germans in retreat. Jenkins still connects with people from his past with Widmerpool and Farebrother working in Whitehall. But a character that emerges, initially as just a minor mention driving Jenkins, suddenly becomes something quite obsessive. Pamela Flitton, the niece of Charles Stringham is an odd woman.

You are introduced to a woman who is rude, sexually a tease and spreading herself through London and at the same time an enigma that Jenkins keeps meeting but never quite getting to unwrap. She is going through men at a rate of knots and manages to bewitch most of the Poles and Belgians that Jenkins has to work with.

She also manages to drive Templer into the jaws of death making him feel too old sitting in Whitehall so he goes out to chase bullets. She also mingles with Odo Stevens who she leaves in the middle of an air raid.

If there is a theme apart from Pamela emerging it is about remembering the past. The numerous references to Proust are not accidental and then underlined when Jenkins and the allies visit the hotel Proust described in his books. This is not just about allies rediscovering the countries that they had been locked out of for years as Hitler was in control.

There is also a sense of Jenkins mulling over his own past as he hears of the deaths of his old school friends Peter Templer and Charles Stringham. Memories of the era that is described in the first couple of books is fading fast. There is a sense of how much the war cost a certain generation and a certain class. Those that had been able to exploit their connections and had their eyes on power managed to use their war to their advantage.

But those that came into the conflict already battered and weak were finished off by enemy and friendly fire. Although not too much is said it is the death of Stringham as a POW in a Japanese prisoner of war camp that is most poignant to Jenkins.

It is for that reason that as he sits with foreign officers at the service of remembrance he thinks of those he has known to have died and casts his mind back to a Proustian world of safe and comforting childhood.

As he leaves the church to walk off into a military-less future he comes across his old flame Jean and is reminded of a pre-war world and the reader is pulled back from further recollections. Unlike Proust, who naval gazes for too long over the same period Powell seems keen to move the reader on.

And onwards we go to the next volume...

Hearing Secret Harmonies - post IV

The end of the end comes with an odd move by Powell to use a long quote and an outro that has a dream like quality to it.

In some respects there is a feeling of anti-climax but the more you think about it there is an increasing sense of the right side having won. What I mean by that is that with the announcement of Widmerpool’s tragic death the last survivor of the original passages of the first book is Jenkins.

He actually reminds you of the start with a reference to the smell of the workmen in their hut using a brazier to keep warm as he stirs up his bonfire. Of those characters, Stringham and Templer died in the war and Widmerpool has now bitten the dust. He does so in a way that is so tragic. Bullied and victimised in his own home by the young cult leader Widmerpool tries one last time to assert himself and as they run through the woods, naked, he goes to the front “I’m the leader” he shouts before his old and infirm body hits the floor.

These books are about power, with Widmerpool’s quest for it the most obvious, but there are numerous characters in search of money and influence. Jenkins drifts in and out of these worlds. He is in a position to do so because he went to Eton and Oxford and so knows a great deal of the figures that come across his path at functions and in numerous settings.

But this is also about a lost age. Although Britain is still a country riddled by class prejudice and contacts and connections are vital to making your way through to the top the landed gentry described here have largely gone. The age of the debutantes slipped into history and the second world war saw off a number of the generation that would have carried the torch forward.

In that sense as the reader turns the last page and leaves an image of an elderly Jenkins burning a bonfire in his garden in autumn it is a world that you leave behind with that last lines. A world of intelligence, appreciation for beauty, art and culture, but also a world that had the ugliness of the hunt and quest for money and power.

A review will follow soon…

Hearing Secret Harmonies - post III

Dare I say it but you start to feel sympathy for Widmerpool. The young cult leader Scorpio bullies him and at a meeting with Jenkins at a wedding he reveals he has been forced to atone for previous moments of aggression with deeds of penance. You can only guess at what they are but in a moment when Widmerpool attempts to apologise to an old acquaintance for the things he did wrong by falling prostrate at his feet it gives you some idea.

Add to that the nudity, sense of the distance from the House of Lords to a house full of blue robe wearing harmony seeking cultists and the fall of Widmerpool is complete.

Jenkins remains detached as he has done all through but you wonder what he real feels as his old acquaintance who has shadowed his life ends literally begging in public to leave the cult and being bullied into heading back for more penance and punishment.

Powell is able to use father time to start to sweep up the numerous characters as most fall to old age and those that are left become increasingly obsessed with their health and immobile. Yet for all of that there is remarkably little reminiscing on the part of Jenkins. Others, Stringham’s Aunt for instance, are happy to talk about the past and try to draw some summaries but for the narrator it is simply a question of watching and recording.

Even when Gwinnet turns up and leaves the story with a bride clinging to his arm it gets the same straight commentary as the battle to protect his local stone-age monument from a local quarry expansion.

I am going to miss being able to look into this world when it is gone, which looks like being tomorrow…

Hearing Secret Harmonies - post II

Having described his role as a judge on the Magnus Donners biography prize Jenkins and fellow judges are panicking that nothing will turn up for this years award when Gwinnet’s biography of Trapnel is submitted. The prize is run past Widmerpool who is a trustee of the prize and he seems to have no objection but does demand to be allowed to come on the night.

He turns up accompanied by the Quiggin twins who wait until Widmerpool has stolen the stage shouting on about the need for non-conformity and the need to shy away from the system before letting off their stink bombs.

The impact of the moment is to underline just how strange Widmerpool has become and that continues with another chance meeting with Jenkins later on. Widmerpool is now obsessed with meeting up with Scorpio Murtlock and the idea of the two combining forces is something both strange and potentially interesting.

Will Widmerpool be able to hear the secret harmonies?

More Monday…

Hearing Secret Harmonies - post I

Right here we go. The last book, the promise of loose ends being tied up and although you sense this is going to again be about Widmerpool you want to see what happens to Jenkins.

The clock has ticked on from the last book and now a slowing Jenkins is involved as a judge on the Magnus Donners biography book prize. Totally embroiled in the literary world this book opens with a feeling that unlike the war novels or the school starts and Oxford this is really describing Jenkins in his own world.

There is more mention of his wife as a result and the chapters come faster than in some of the other novels. That gives it a pace that us fuelled by the move towards a meeting between Widmerpool and Gwinnet the American that Pamela Widmerpool fell in love with before her death. Piecing together the story it seems that knowing of his obsession with death Pamela took her own life to satisfy her lover.

But that is nowhere near as strange as the figure of Widmerpool who has become a university chancellor and also some sort of hippy and cult leader. He seems to have renounced all that he previously worked so hard for.

There is a sense that this is an era of cults, drop-outs and protests against the Vietnam war and the establishment and there is a passage where Jenkins allows a small-scale cult leader, Scorpio Murtlock, to camp on his land.

These books have been about the quest for power, the way it consumes, changes and destroys people and the society that helped create people like that. In some respects this is a historical novel but in others it is totally contemporary because the lust for power continues today as much as ever.

More tomorrow…

Temporary Kings - post IV

The book ends with confusion about the exact fate of Pamela Widmerpool but her death occurs after some sort of overdose. The painting described in the first third of the book with the King viewing his wife as she makes love to her lover is a theme of Pamela and Widmerpool's sex life.

he is the voyeur and she seems, and I might be wrong here, to love but also hate that fact.

But the final third of the book is saved by the reappearance of Moreland who is sadly dying. He reminds the reader of the power of nostalgia as characters of the past breeze through the pages and memories of those that have gone before reappear. Among the memories there is a sad reminder of Stringham's death in a Japanese POW camp.

By the close of the book Widmerpool has managed to save himself from a spying charge and although he is now without mother and wife his quest for power, which has defined him from the start, is now the only thing keeping him going.

Roll on the last book.

A review will follow soon...

Temporary Kings - post III

The action is still based in Venice with Jenkins bumping into old acquainteces and making new friends as he weaves between the writers conference and the house party being attended by Pamela Widmerpool.

Jenkins meets one of his first employers, who used to be a friend of his father’s, who has become a painter with high socialist principles after turning his back on the publishing trade. But the meeting with Tokenhouse is interrupted as they bump into some of the crowd from the conference.

Regardless of what people are doing the focus of attention seems to be the Widmerpool marriage, with its rows and odd scenes and talk starts to spread across the little groups at Venice that Pamela is seriously thinking of leaving her husband.

It would be good to get back to London but with everyone turning up in Venice, including now Odo Stevens the connection from the war, it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

More tomorrow…

Temporary Kings - post II

The reappearance of Pamela Widmerpool makes you wonder about the women across the whole series so far. Powell seems to have little difficulty describing the motivations and various different characteristics of men but women are a different matter.

With Jenkins’s own wife completely in the shadows the women characters are either mistresses, wives or oddities like the old fortune teller. Pamela is an unlikeable character because of her rudeness and her control of her beauty but she seems to be the main catalyst for various interlinks between characters and situations.

The problem is that by now, with the end of the series looming you rather wish that she would shuffle off and someone more agreeable could be introduced centre stage.

More tomorrow…

Temporary Kings - post I

The penultimate book starts in Venice with Jenkins among new acquaintances. The writers conference he is attending, organised by long running character Mark Members, provides a chance to update the reader with a refresher on some of the more recent loose ends.

Trapnel the writer has died spending one last night in the pub buying drinks all round before heading off to hospital and his death bed. Widmerpool has become a life peer and his wife Pamela carries on creating scandal.

I have to confess that the Pamela character doesn’t quite do anything for me. The idea of a frigid beautiful woman who gets off on teasing men is not something that is something I would have dwelt on for quite as long as a couple of books.

But at the heart of this book, already discernable, is the same Jenkins, who is slightly older and still happy to play the role of observer.

More tomorrow…

Books do Furnish a Room - post IV

Even when Widmerpool is partly begging his wife to come home you don’t feel too sympathetic towards him and even when he is clearly waiting on her as she has a fling he is still not a sympathy inducing character.

The reason is that all of those in the books so far he is the one that so clearly wanted power and so determinedly got it. To some extents though it is a hollow victory because he managed to get somewhere but lose other things on the way. Widmerpool doesn’t seem to value friendships and love in the way other people do.

Meanwhile the world of Fission comes tumbling down and in a few pages Jenkins summarises two years worth of history with it concluding that the magazine is no more and most of the characters involved have moved on or gone underground.

After the war this is still a London suffering from bombed out plots and the sings of austerity are most noticeable in the lack of taxis and the heavy descriptions of Trapnel borrowing money from people.

But on the flips side this is also a City out of uniform and as a result the war seems to have faded almost completely by the time the book ends.

A review will follow soon…

Books do Furnish a Room - post III

If there is a change that has resulted from the war it is probably in the way that Jenkins makes friendships and the way in which he describes the people he meets.

Before the war he was immersed in a world where the same characters came round following the rhythm of the dance. But now some of those friends are dead and age has changed the way in which Jenkins makes friendships. Things now are much more about settling into middle age rather than the optimism and ambitions of the past.

As a result there is a detachment that creeps in to the description of the breakdown of Widmerpool’s marriage and the inner workings of Fission magazine. Jenkins is still in the thick of it but now seems to be recalling better days and to some degree better friends as he mingles with the writer Trapnel and the editor Bagshaw.

The other development is the starting of the Cold War that puts a lot of the pro-communist sympathisers in a difficult position forcing some, like Quiggin, to grow up a bit and face reality.

But from the point of view of the book’s impact on the today it is much more than the other works because this is more of a London that is touchable close to the distant past.

More tomorrow…

Books do Furnish a Room - post II

Having buried his brother in law Jenkins is dragged into the publishing world set up by Craggs and his old acquaintance Quiggin. Given a job as a reviewer he starts to mingle with a host of characters that enjoy a drink, a good argument about Marxist politics and sponging money of wealthy friends.

Amongst all of this is Widmerpool who has dressed himself up as a Labour MP and is involved with the magazine venture produced by the left-wing publishers. He not only writes for the magazine they produce – Fission – but also helps manage the financial side of affairs.

Meanwhile Widmerpool is constantly upstaged by his wife Pamela Flitton who reaches new levels of rudeness being sick in vases and showing utter contempt for most of the people she meets.

Have to confess that I don’t like Widmerpool and he has gone from being a slightly clownish character to something clearly a slot more sinister as he is motivated purely by power.

There is a great passage that describes the social upheaval caused by the war, which ultimately saw the demise of the aristocratic world that Jenkins moved in at the start of the Dance novels – I will dig it out and update this post with it tomorrow.

Books do Furnish a Room - post I

With the months passing by ands one of the main ambitions being this year to read all of the Dance to the Music of Time it is straight onto book ten.

The title attracts anyone with a passion for books and the moment the phrase is explained, as uttered by someone as a bookshelf falls on him or alternatively something said as a lover walks through the library to his mistress, it becomes even more memorable.

Having finished one book with a service marking the mass dead a more limited funeral is held for Lord Warminster the left wing leaning Erridge.

As a relation through marriage Jenkins is invited to the funeral and watches on the sidelines as the left wing cronies arrive to try and retrieve some of the money the Lord was handing out to run various publications.

This is a post-war world where nothing is yet defined, including importantly the future for Jenkins himself.

More tomorrow…

The Miltary Philosophers - post IV

As the book comes to the end there is a sense in which a period of history is closing. In a very well crafted scene at the thanksgiving service in the presence of the King and royal household the service acts as a remembrance for all that the war has meant to Jenkins.

He recalls those that have died and the changes that it has led to in his own life. Surrounded by memories of the past he walks straight out into another one meeting Jean Duport, his old flame, but that coincidence is something to be expected in Powell’s world.

What you remember from this book is not just the way that Widmerpool raises through the ranks and settles on marrying the most unsuitable Pamela Flitton, but also how the war took away friends and family quite indiscriminately.

Of the three war books this is the most enjoyable and because it is primarily set in London, except for the interesting excursion to meet Monty in France, somehow more of a wider view. The other two books helped explain how Jenkins got to this point but it is in the war focused streets of Whitehall that the conflict finally seems to come alive.

A review will be posted soon…

The Military Philosophers - post III

You wonder just who the enemy is sometimes with nearly everyone obsessed with their own military careers rather than some sense of defeating an enemy. Widmerpool manages to go higher and higher but as he does so he seems to leave behind anyone that could have possibly liked him.

The other factor that starts reducing those that might have had a willingness to work with Widmerpool, regardless of his personality traits, is death. Templer appears to have snuffed it and quite a few of the other marginal characters are killed off. At this rate it should be a select and pruned cast that go into the final trio of books.

Jenkins sits at the centre describing some of the momentous events of history in reference to what is happening is his department rather than how it impacted the wider world. That is quite a genuine way of presenting it and Powell does not over do it when Jenkins manages to get a trip to the liberated parts of the French coast. Proust looms large again reminding you of the social structure that pervades the army, rather like that of Proust’s aristocratic world.

Last chunk early next week…

The Military Philosophers - post II

There is a moment when Jenkins’s mentions that in his boarding house he is reading Proust and you wonder if what immediately follows with mentions of lesbianism and sexual affairs is somehow a nod to the French author’s own particular themes.

Central to those issues is the character of Pamela Flitton, the niece of Jenkins’s school friend Charles Stringham. She has affairs with almost all of the cast all with the effect of traumatising the men who get involved with her. One of them includes Templer who is made to feel old and rejected at the end of the short affair and leaves his desk job to head off somewhere to prove he still has a bit of youth left.

As Jenkins moves from liaising with the Poles to dealing with the Czechs and Belgium he notices that Fitton has notched up various dignitaries on her bed post across the allied nations.

Meanwhile the book threatens to get immersed in the past as some old characters, Ted Jeavons in particular reappear, and through conversation reintroduce names from earlier volumes. There is nothing wrong with that but it reminds you of how static Jenkins life was before the war and you want to encourage him to look to the future.

More tomorrow…