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

There are occasions when I look back at previous reviews and feel somewhat naive. When I read A Question of Upbringing in those heady days of November 2016, I didn't warm to much in Powell's literary toolkit. Now that I've read A Buyer's Market, although I fully stand by that review and my analysis of the author's shortcomings, I appreciate him all the more. This review is a high 3 stars, but I can't yet offer him that much-ballyhooed fourth.

Aside from some flashbacks to Paris after "the war", we are mostly situated at the end of the '20s, as Nick and Widmerpool attend a variety of social functions, from grand dances to awkward dinners and finally a funeral, along the way running into everyone they met in the first book, and being forced to constantly reassess their approach and point-of-view.

Although Powell and Proust share a connection, it's becoming clear that Powell is as far from modernism as one can be while still writing literature in the mid-20th century. Powell's interest is in our personal development, and how we interact with society, but I think less with how society forms us, and especially less with the idea of human memory and fallibility. When Powell deals with character growth, he does not primarily mean internal growth - aside, perhaps, from Nick Jenkins himself - but instead with how we change as viewed by others.

The received wisdom about these books is that Jenkins is something of an audience surrogate, but I see him as a fully-fledged character. What works best about these novels is the wry understanding Jenkins develops about himself, and the way he viewed the world. I think what people mean is that Jenkins' life remains opaque. He is constantly reflecting on how separated he has become from those school and university chums we met in book one. But we really have little idea of which people he is spending his time with.

What else works? Powell's ability to conjure up ambience in just a few sentences, his gradual comic Jenga puzzles, as in the first event the lads attend which culminate in little moments of comedy like the forgotten pile of Deacon's anti-war magazine. And his light skewering of the upper classes, always with affection but never with a blind eye.

What doesn't work? Well, Powell's prose meanders between the sublime and the utterly mundane. Maybe up to 10 times in this novel, Jenkins sees someone in the distance, or hears a voice, and tells us how it was vaguely familiar. Sometimes Powell will devote a whole paragraph of inane reflection, only to gradually reveal a character we've met before. If thinking cynically, I wonder if this was Powell attempting to formulate the actions of the mind and memory on the page but if so, he is far from successful.

In his satire of the lower classes, from the insufferable Quiggins to the constantly aggressive Gypsy Jones, Powell reveals his own biases in a way that - unfortunately - is setting him against the zeitgeist, and I suspect it's the reason these famous books have stunningly few reviews on Goodreads, especially as the series moves toward its end.

There's also the problematic nature of older writing, which I'm not going to keep bringing up in these reviews, but here black people, Jewish people, and not infrequently women get a bum rap, and - unlike in the writing of Powell's great, humanist contemporary Barbara Pym - one cannot write these bigotries off as the voice of characters. Still, Powell existed in his world, and his writings are not intending to stir up hate or disenfranchisement, so I'm not going to hold him in contempt just because his views do not match mine.

Powell and Art

Art continues to play a crucial role in Book Two, and I think any reader is well-advised to engage with the works mentioned. The Pre-Raphaelites;the porcelain Staffordshire dogs that tell us so much about character; Jenkins' view of Le Bas as a figure from the Bayeux Tapestry; Mr. Deacon's strong dislike of the Impressionists; Degas; Mestrovic; and the Haig Memorial. Art inhabits and surrounds these characters, and interpretations of art are one of the key methods by which Powell distributes characterisation to the ever-expanding supporting cast. It's one of his greatest attributes.

So, it's fair to say I won't be waiting another two-and-a-half years to dip into the Dance again. At the same time, what surprised me most when I skimmed through Book One before starting this one was that I remembered it so well. Not just the plot but so many specific incidents and conversations. If Powell can linger with me so strongly after one book, I imagine I can string out the Dance over a number of years and be richly rewarded. ( )

Much like the first one in this series, I found the final chapter quite poignant. There's something very sly about the humour in this book, such that every time I laughed out loud it made me wonder if I'd been missing jokes all along. I don't think I had - there's just so much depth and richness here that it's not quite clear where to focus the attention. ( )

Read about half of this a couple of years ago, and got bored and stopped. I read my review it’s pretty funny. Home sick from work, so decided to try again, and basically read the book in a day.

Not sure why I was so impatient the first time I read it. ( )

paperback

I'm not saying this is the best part of the book, but here's a brief part near the end that stuck with me:

"She looked so despairing at the idea of Widmerpool possessing, as it were, an operational base in extension to the cottage from which he, and his mother, could already potentially molest Hinton, that I felt it my duty to explain with as little delay as possible that Widmerpool had recently taken a job at Donners-Brebner, and had merely come over that afternoon to see Sir Magnus on a matter of business."

Whether you find this formulation tiresome or clever--I definitely think the latter--is a good indicator of how you'll feel about the series. Slow-moving but always well-written, with plenty of little moments like the above. ( )