A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement, Spring

A Dance to the Music of Time follows a group of British men as they move from school to university to adulthood. The story begins in the 1920s when the narrator, Nick Jenkins, is at boarding school with his friends Stringham and Templer. Their school days are coming to an end; will they go up to university or go directly to work? As they contemplate their next phase of life, they also spend countless hours mocking other students -- especially a boy named Widmerpool -- and playing pranks on their house master.

The "first movement" of A Dance to the Music of Time consists of three novellas spanning just over a decade: A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market, and The Acceptance World. Jenkins and his friends come of age, finding their show more adult footing and struggling with love and loss. Several other characters move in and out of their lives, like partners in a dance. A woman appears initially as one man's girlfriend, later as the wife of a second man, and still later as a third man's lover. Other characters have recurring roles in the dance, taking the floor every so often and then fading into the background. As Jenkins muses in the second book:
I certainly did not expect that scattered elements of Mrs. Andriadis's party would recur so comparatively soon in my life ... their commitment was sufficient to draw attention once again to that extraordinary process that causes certain figures to appear and reappear in the performance of one or another sequence of what I have already compared with a ritual dance.

The dance metaphor works very well in this book. The sequence and pacing reminded me of a ballroom filled with people gracefully stepping through a minuet. And while it is obvious that time is passing, precise measures of time are rarely mentioned, giving the book a languid, leisurely feel. Yet every so often Powell sums things up with powerful prose, like this paragraph towards the end of A Question of Upbringing:
I knew now that this parting was one of those final things that happen, recurrently, as time passes: until at last they may be recognised fairly easily as the close of a period. This was the last I should see of Stringham for a long time. The path had suddenly forked. With regret, I accepted the inevitability of circumstance. Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become. ... A new epoch was opening: in a sense this night was the final remnant of life at school.

A Dance to the Music of Time is very British, and very evocative of the period between the wars. Every time I sat down to read, I was instantly transported into that world, while simultaneously reflecting on the "dance" representing my life. While this "first movement" was more than 700 pages long, I never tired of it and was sad to say good-bye to characters who have inhabited my imagination for over a week. I will most definitely be reading the rest of this series. show less

The next book on my 1951 reading list was [A question of Upbringing]; this is the first part of Anthony Powell's 12 volume series A Dance to the Music of Time. It was much better value to buy the first three volumes in one book rather than just the first volume and as they were there in front of me I read all three volumes: I am just grateful that I did not buy all 12. Powells immense saga follows the lives of a number of individuals who meet as students at their Public School in the early 1920's. We follow the story in the first person through the eyes and many thoughts of Nick Jenkins, who like most of his school friends comes from a well-to-do family and these three books take us up to 1933. Anthony Powell was educated at Eton and show more Balliol college Oxford and his series of novels has the feel of an autobiography, certainly the milieu of Public school and debutante balls and then sliding into well paid positions of employment either in the city or through contacts made at University has a ring of authenticity. The social milieu could be described as upper middle class with plenty of Lords and Ladies hovering around the upper echelons.

Readers seem to have a love-hate relationship with this series of books and I can understand just why that is. Powell writes, as one might not be too surprised from his background, with a plum in his mouth and sometimes that plum becomes so large that the reader losses much of what is said. His long sentences with their many sub-clauses can become indistinct at best and completely obfuscate any meaning at worst. I lost count of the number of times I got to the end of one of these epics with only a vague impression of what I had just read. This style of writing is particularly evident in the second volume, and although it does occurs in volume three; The Acceptance World this book is a little more focused. One might give credit to Powell for imitating the confused thoughts of a 20 year old just making his way in the world, but I think this would be generous. Much Of volume 2 is focused on two events a debutants ball and a rather more bohemian party that some stragglers get to afterwards. Our protagonist Nick while spending much time describing the details of the guests dress and manners, their opulent surroundings and some of the events he witnesses, seems at a loss to understand their behaviour and even incidents in which he becomes involved remain a bit of a mystery.

Powell looks at everything through his protagonist Nick from an establishment point of view. This is a novel that reinforces the rigid class system that existed for wealthy people in the 1920's-30's and one could argue that Powell has his finger on the pulse of this era, however I sense an admiration of the social milieu in which he places his characters, it is though he is saying how wonderful it all was. One of the characters Widmerpool (we hardly ever learn their Christian names) who is less wealthy than most and realises he must work twice as hard as his contemporaries to get on says "brains and hard work are of very little avail unless you know the right people". This proves to be over optimistic because it is not the connections you might be able to forge, but the connections that your father or grandfather were able to make. It was all down to the position of your family in society. Widmerpool like other characters who were not from the right families are figures of fun in Powells hands, all the jokes are on them because they do not know how to behave correctly. It is all very well to have an accurate description of the young wealthy class in the period in which they lived, but not perhaps at the expense of all else. Reading the novels made me feel that they were outdated, but then thinking about the public school boys that currently run the British government in 2021; perhaps nothing much has changed.

Powells characterisations of his female characters are depressingly familiar; judged on their attractiveness to the male gaze and their propensity to conform to their partners wishes. Independently minded women are seen as either a threat or something to be managed and forever remain a mystery to their male counterparts. Nick himself who is very much a cypher in that he is a witness to events that happen around him, rather than instigating any of them, becomes in the third volume active in pursuing a love affair, but he is like a blind man stumbling towards an urge that needs satisfying.

There is much in these novels that were not to my taste, but they can have a dream like quality enhanced by Powells writing style. Characters did not elicit my care or sympathy for their predicaments, but I did enjoy the slow pace of the events and the insight of a world that I know existed and perhaps still exists. I will not be tempted to read any more of the books in this series; three were enough and I rate them as follows:
A Question of Upbringing - 3 stars
A Buyers Market - 2.5 stars
The Acceptance World - 4 stars. show less

Anthony Powell published twelve volumes of a wonderful novel from 1951 to 1975. He divided this continuing series into four musical movements depicted in a Nicolas Poussin 1639-40 painting. The painting and the novel are entitled, A Dance to the Music of Time. The first movement includes three volumes: A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market, and The Acceptance World. These volumes introduce and describe four male characters as they progress through British schools and university, enter the professional world of work, and accept a loss of illusions as they interact with others in the real world.

The first three parts of the story take place in the post World War I era of the 1920s and early 1930s. The characters are associated with show more British socioeconomic levels that include very wealthy (Templeton), wealthy (Stringham), upper middle class (Jenkins) and middle class (Widmerpool). After university, the characters go their separate ways determined by their economic classes but end up meeting in London while pursuing different individual goals.

Nicolas Jenkins, the narrator of the novel, gets a job at a firm that publishes "art books" and uses free time offered by his relatively unstructured job to write novels. Like Robert Musil's character in A Man Without Qualities, Nick is a keen observer who seems to be continually on the edge of the social dance, jumping in on occasion but content to ruminate about the motives and behaviors of others. As he focuses on his three school acquaintances, Nick's commentary becomes increasingly reliable as he compares current incidents to reinterpret collective experiences of the past. He learns to abandon simplistic rules for understanding of the choices of his friends and others. He also learns his station in life and the limits of his ability as observer to discover immutable standards of acceptable social actions. Life is just too complex and changeable to maintain superficial and immature interpretations of the dance of life.

Each volume of the first movement is self-contained as Powell gives readers descriptive reminders of characters and events that preceded the current action. The writing style is simple and direct and the pace is slow and deliberate. Powell presents many allusions to art, philosophy, and history like James Joyce in Ulysses with much less tangential writing. Using the Kindle dictionary and an iPhone, I enjoyed looking up each reference.

The tone of the first three works is humorous and satirical without being overly cynical (except for the spoof of John Galsworthy). Readers can visualize Poussin's painting and observe the dance of the four main characters. Economic, political and social parallels can be seen with our own turn of the century culture.

I highly recommend the first movement of Powell's omnibus work to readers who love to observe the dance of life. I have not encountered a contemporary writer who is such a good chronicler and analyst of the unfolding and interacting lives of realistic rather than stereotyped characters. I feel fortunate to have 9 more volumes in 3 more movements to read in the 4 paperback edition published by the University of Chicago press (1995). Though life is beautiful and upsetting, comical and tragic, expected and catastrophic, Powell shows readers the worst action they can take is to drop out of the dance. As in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the social isolate is irrevocably self-centered forever missing the chances of a lifetime to listen to the music of time and in Powell's words move "hand in hand in intricate measure" with others. show less

"This is perhaps an image of how we live."

The first three novels in this 12-volume series: A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market and The Acceptance World, tracing the lives of the young male protagonists from their final year in school in the early 1920s to their years after university, discovering love, career, hope, loss, jealousy, society, and art.

Consistently enjoyable in its recreation of a world that for Powell was already his long-lost youth, and for my generation seems impossibly distant.

These first three volumes are the least exciting in the series, for my money, although the moments of high comedy often shine. But they gain much from the resonances they will leave for the remainder of the series. Perhaps now that I'm so show more abysmally old (gosh, nearing my mid-30s), I understand all the more how crucial, how seminal, how heartbreakingly eternal are the loves and joys of our youth. show less

Imagine if you will.......you.....settled into a cozy chair, inside the mind of the protagonist of a novel, with nothing better to do than be a silent observer of his every thought and feeling. Weird? Boring? Fascinating? All of these feelings were part of my experience reading this first volume of "A Dance To The Music of Time:First Movement". I am thoroughly impressed with Powell's ability to communicate the impressions, feelings and thoughts of a character to the degree he has done so in this novel. Set in the early 1900s in London, the story moves through the development of a prep school coy as he matures and moves out into London society, dipping his toes in several different social groups. As the volume ends, he may or may not show more have found love, and the reader is left heaving a sigh of relief at finishing this somewhat strenuous read, and also looking forward to the second volume. Reading this novel is not for the reader who requires action. It is more for the lover of the psychological. It would be a five star read if not for the occasional long tedious stretches. show less

Anthony Powell’s comic satire makes a tedious start with its first movement. The introduction of the four principal characters, around whom this twelve book series revolves, leaves little to recommend the later movements.

Jenkins, our narrator, provides color commentary on his schoolmates and young friends Stringham, Templer, and Widmerpool. Each occupies a slightly different station in a rigid social hierarchy that is driven largely by family wealth, or the lack of it. Stringham and Templer, both from upper-middle class families come across as lazy and bored with life. Widmerpool, a Machiavellian social-climber with a masochist’s capacity for effort but no inherent ability, is the most interesting of the four. Jenkins describes him show more as “forever floundering towards the tape in races never won” and “a kind of embodiment of thankless labor and unsatisfied ambition.” But, toward the end of the third book in the movement, through sheer will, Widmerpool has begun to inch his way up the ladder, and his is keenly position to break out. In the same time, Stringham and Templer have wasted much of their personal live’s capital, either in self-indulgence or in blind ambition. Hopelessly enamored of the lives of his two more affluent friends, Jenkins maintains a sort of disdainful curiosity about Widmerpoo, and passes most of the three books confused, whipped to and fro by the events around him, never able to comprehend in the moment.

Powell’s writing is first-class, the language rich and colorful. But the story and the characters left me wanting more. I admit this is likely just a personal preference, but I like strong characters. The people in Powell’s book are shallow, weak people. They are not thinly drawn characters; they are just feeble. The repetitive and endless detail regarding seating arrangements at parties, pointless arguments, and perceived social wrongs, paints a picture of a people constantly bashing their heads on the glass ceilings of the next social strata, desperately convinced of their superiority and their entitlement to move up in the food chain.

And, by the way, nothing really happens. Save for a tennis match between two Swedes, a car wreck, a political march, and some unusual party behavior, Powell never allows Jenkins, our narrator, to see anything happen. He learns of most of the important events in the character’s lives second-hand, through conversations, usually at a party.

The books seem to have been intended as a comic satire on English society. I would much rather have spent my time reading a Dickens or an Austen.

3 bones!!! show less

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.