The Valley of Bones

‘No porridge?’
‘No porridge, sir.’
General Liddament pondered this assertion for some seconds in resentful silence. He seemed to be considering porridge in all its aspects, bad as well as good. At last he came out with an unequivocal moral judgement.
‘There ought to be porridge,’ he said.

In my review of The Kindly Ones, I said that the carnival of Europe was over after that heartbreaking day in September 1939. Here, however, in the 7th volume of Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, the carousel is still moving. The calliope is starting to wheeze, true. The horses' faces have taken on a slightly macabre appearance in the fading neon lights. But there is still merriment.

The Valley of Bones follows Nicholas Jenkins after he show more enlists in the army, posted to his Welsh regiment (training primarily in Northern Ireland) during 1940. The war is still an unknown quantity; there is little talk here of being posted overseas or of the grim horrors taking place on the continent. Instead, Powell's knack for deft character sketches, moments of high comedy, and comedies of errors proliferate. Aside from a brief stopover in London - where some old scenes are reframed in a new light - and the ominous final few pages, we see nothing of existing characters from Nick's background. This is a new war, a new world, and we are successfully estranged from his previous world.

It is almost exclusively a comic novel, with a tiny number of pathos-laden passages baked in - especially the death of a supporting character reported from the continent. More tellingly, the final scene is the first time that Powell has left a book without a feeling of independent closure. War does not offer such certainties.

This is wonderful stuff. As always, at least for readers who are (like me) younger and/or not British, I heartily recommend the unabridged recording of the novels by Simon Vance. So much of the dialogue in these books was designed to recall people - either specific individuals or more often well-known types from the era. Three generations and half a globe removed from Powell, I find Vance indispensable in introducing me to the speech patterns of these characters, and through their speech their personality - especially here, where dialect plays such an important role. I will feel more comfortable returning to the Dance - as I know I will several times - now that I have grasped the characters in all their complexity. show less

This is a lovely gentle entry in the series, which seems an odd description when it takes place in war. It feels like the phoney war, and Nick has a commission in a regiment drawn from the valleys of Wales and is sent to North Wales and then Ireland for training and to protect the border. There is a usual variety of male goings on, but it reads as if looked back on with nostalgia.

This was one of my favourite books in the series. After running out of puff after the end of the Summer books, I decided to take a break from reading the series and read something else. But the couple of books I picked up were not great and in the end it felt silly to enter a totally new imaginative world and try to keep this one simmering in the background. So after a week or two of no (fiction) reading, I came back to the series. I found this book very funny and poignant once again. I liked a lot of the characterisation and it was nice to see the narrator somewhat humbled.

For me, the beginning of three books that make up the war trilogy section of A Dance to a Music of Time was an entertaining read with more of a tendency to farce than any of the previous novels so far. I wondered if this was the result of Powell’s own experience in the war.

Those of you hoping for any action sequences will be disappointed. Nick Jenkins sees no combat service and is, instead, involved in a series of bureaucratic posts that seem, to me at least, interminably dull occupations.

There’s the occasional military exercise to spice things up a bit but, for the most part, this novel in the sequence is most memorably characterised by comic events involving various army personnel. When I say ‘comic’ here, please bear in mind show more that they might raise a faint smile rather than see you split your sides laughing. Like the narrator he has created, Powell seems far too straight laced to actually be able to make anyone laugh out loud.

The characters plod on. Widmerpool surfaces again (as I believe he does in all 12 novels at some point), this time in the role of a rising star of wartime administration. But several more are introduced often with most ludicrous names. What parents would ever call their son Odo for goodness sake? show less

I tried to find a picture of a wooden bound old prayer book without avail. Islam book binding sometimes has wooden boards covered in leather. I wonder, if there would be carved or inlaid book covers. The prayer book Kedward ist telling about probably is a Christian one, though.
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Meeting up with Kipling
Further on in „The Valley of Bones“, volume seven from „The Music of Time“ by Anthony Powell, the army has moved to new quarters, still back in Great Britain. Nicholas Jenkins shares the room with Captain Gwatkin who wakes him in the night because he himself was startled out of sleep by the thought that he might have forgotten to put the new codeword order into the safebox. -- It is only „The Jungle Book“ I ever have read by show more Kipling so far, and it was back in the late Seventies at the Diavolezza mountain hut above the mighty Morteratsch glacier, the day before our little rope team crossed the three summits of Piz Palü – a much nicer prospect than battling the Huns.
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The aftermath of the defeat of Dunkirk with victims among his acquaintances makes Nicholas Jenkins ponder:
"The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal ending." show less

For me personally 'The Valley of Bones' stands out as the best and funniest of this excellent series. It takes Nicholas Jenkins into the Army at a time just prior to the beginning of the Second World War. Second Lieutenant Jenkins is here involved with his Company Commander,Captain Gwatkin as well as a number of new and mostly engaging characters and a completely different world from that in the preceding six volumes. We also meet once more,but in a new guise, the monstrous Widmerpool.

It had long been suggested to me by my father that I should read something of Powell's, though I was long reluctant to do so. I think that now I know why - I didn't enjoy this book any more than I enjoyed my father's other suggestions, and having read it I felt a distance between us that would be hard to overcome.

"The Valley of the Bones" is not a bad book, and my review is somewhat harsh for personal reasons, but it left me dry and untouched, the language too flowery and too constipated to flow easily into my memory.