O, How the Wheel Becomes It!

Despite it's short length this novel manages to say a few nice things about death, particularly it's timing, and contains some nice digs at the progression of the academic study of literature.

Death, and it's companion failure, stalk the novel; and if most characters escape the clutches of the former, then they are all victim to the latter by one shade or another. The novels protagonist - Shadbold - is confronted by rivalries, real and imagined, that he vainly tries to battle against, instead manouvering himself into more and more uncomfortable positions. Other characters seem more successful but all are full of insecurities and all lie on the outskirts of success.

The character of Horace Grigham, a university lecturer, allows Powell to poke fun at literary theory. Many novels like to poke fun at the more fashionable end of studies of literature but few manage to create a character simultaneously so obnoxious and yet totally harmless. That Powell manages it in the space of one or two very short chapters speaks volumes for his skills with language. Particularly astute was Grigham's interest in a long out of print book that he felt would back up his theories on literature. This theory first, text later, aspect of literary theory sadly still lingers twenty five years after Powell's novel was published and shows no signs of weakness.

The novel is far from being as dry as I appear to have made out though. It is quite a light read being short and having some good jokes. The prose is superb.

Anthony Powell is a man I would probably like, though there are so many reasons why I think I wouldn't. Firstly, he demands that his name be pronounced like 'pole' with a long 'o', and not so it rhymes with 'bowel.' That I can understand.

His work is generally well-regarded, and I can see why - it possesses a literary flair that would attract many, but just like marmite it will put off a fair number too, and I fall into the latter group.

This work deals with the discovery of a minor writer/editor that the woman he most fancied as a young man slept with somebody for whom he had very little literary respect; he is then charged with editing this same man's memoirs for publication, and decides to attempt a cover-up.

Despite its prodigious shortness - 188 well-spaced pages - one rather feels that Powell, with a tighter reign on his flowery prose, could have made it even shorter, almost to the extent that his novel shifted through novella to become a short story and nothing more. ( )