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Cover of A dance to the music of time

A dance to the music of time

Anthony Powell

First published 1951 · 816 pages

A sprawling, elegantly observed tapestry of English society that captures the comic and tragic rhythms of a changing world.

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What it feels like

Reading this monumental sequence feels like attending a decades-long dinner party where you slowly come to know every guest's deepest flaws, triumphs, and secrets. The pace is decidedly meandering, asking you to settle into its rhythm rather than rushing toward a climax. It is an experience defined by its wry, detached observation and an undercurrent of profound, autumnal melancholy as the bright young things of the 1920s weather the storms of war and middle age. The prose is elegant and labyrinthine, perfectly suited to mapping the intricate, shifting alliances of English society. It will thoroughly delight patient readers who savor dry literary comedy, psychological precision, and the bittersweet, inevitable passage of time.

Mood
  • nostalgic
  • autumnal
  • sophisticated
  • melancholic
Tone
  • wry
  • detached
  • ironic
  • elegiac
  • observant
Pace
meandering
Themes
the passage of time · social decay and mobility · the unpredictability of character · art versus life · fading aristocracy
The writing
Elaborate, precise, and highly structured, characterized by long, winding sentences and dry, understated wit.
The arc
The journey shifts from the bright, naive possibilities of youth through the sobering realities of war, ultimately settling into a quiet, reflective acceptance of mortality and change.
Who it's for
Patient readers who savor sprawling, character-driven social comedies and prefer exquisite psychological observation over fast-paced plots.
Content notes
  • infidelity
  • alcoholism
  • war themes
  • death of friends

About the book

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses. In this third volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, we again meet Widmerpool, doggedly rising in rank; Jenkins, shifted from one dismal army post to another; Stringham, heroically emerging from alcoholism; Templer, still on his eternal sexual quest. Here, too, we are introduced to Pamela Flitton, one of the most beautiful and dangerous women in modern fiction. Wickedly barbed in its wit, uncanny in its seismographic recording of human emotions and social currents, this saga stands as an unsurpassed rendering of England’s finest yet most costly hour.

Includes these novels: The Valley of Bones The Soldier’s Art The Military Philosophers

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu.... Powell’s world is as large and as complex as Proust’s."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War.... The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

Description from Open Library.

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