"[T]he future is ever the consequence of the past." - Dr. Trelawney

Volumes #4 to #6 of Powell's epic sequence are collected here: At Lady Molly's, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant and The Kindly Ones. These volumes take place over a compressed period of time from about 1934 to 1939 (with a flashback to that last innocent summer of 1914, when our narrator was but a boy). Here, Powell expands considerably - both in scope and in literary achievement - by taking Nick Jenkins and Kenneth Widmerpool, and their various hangers-on, through the realities of adulthood. The world still feels rather prelapsarian, and the retrospective voice of our narrator regularly reminds us (without often saying it directly) that War is just around the corner. The cast widens substantially, and the reader may be surprised by which characters from Jenkins' early years play major roles and which ones don't.

Perhaps these novels will only be read in future by a select few determined Anglophiles. This was always a rare project, a rather niche collage compiled by a rather niche college artiste. From my vantage point in 21st century Australia, many of the issues contained herein seem irrelevant or even absurd. (You may have a different view; perhaps you too have often had to remind yourself to call your brother by his new landed title rather than his old landed title, neither of which are his first or last names!)

Yet the dedicated will be rewarded with moments of true insight, tableaux of joy and sorrow, of hope and woe. And I believe rereading of the series will enrich the experience even more. The famously large cast of characters features many who appear only at strategic moments laced intermittently through the series, but who are reflected in the eyes of several others. The reader, then, is left with a mindboggling sense of every characters as a complete person just out of our reach, more complex perhaps than Jenkins himself realises, and certainly moreso than many of their interlocutors. (Well, for the most part; Betty Templer seems like she's exactly as wacko as described.)

Powell was writing these well after the fact. He was fully aware that the way of life which he clung to was archaic and almost willfully rejected by the post-war world order. And while this rejection was the right decision, it is lovely to return to this alcohol-soaked, class-conscious, endlessly literate Wonderland... for a while, at least. ( )