comic novels

Novella a Day in May 2025: No.12

/ madamebibilophile / 20 Comments

The Maintenance of Headway – Magnus Mills (2009) 152 pages

I remember quite clearly when Magnus Mills’ first novel The Restraint of Beasts, was published in 1998 and shortlisted for the Booker. He was a London bus driver, and so the story made the regional news and I realised he actually drove my local routes. In The Maintenance of Headway, Mills draws on this occupational experience and there was plenty I recognised, as well as thankfully some I didn’t!

The title refers to “the notion that a fixed interval between buses on a regular service can be attained and adhered to.”

This deceptively simple idea is in fact impossible to achieve.

“In this city it’s different. The streets are higgledy-piggledy and narrow; there are countless squares and circuses, zebra crossings and pelicans. Go east from the arch and you’ve got twenty-three sets of traffic lights in a row. All those shops, and all those pedestrians pouring into the road. Then there are the daily incidentals: street markets, burst water mains, leaking gas pipes, diesel spillages, resurfacing road works, ad hoc refuse collections, broken-down vehicles, troops on horseback, guards being changed, protest marches, royal cavalcade and presidential motorcade. Shall I go on?”

This was already starting to sound very familiar 😀

The bus drivers know maintaining headway is impossible, but they are subject to the inspectors, who also know its impossible. Various measures are taken each day to attempt to meet the impossible. At one point, one of the managers tells the narrator off for arriving six minutes late, in theory.

“’See how it accumulates? See the potential for outright bedlam? Your failure to be punctual could make a million people late for work!’

Frank sat behind his desk and bristled with imaginary rage.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘That’s alright,’ he replied. ‘Don’t let it happen again though.’”

Similar surrealism exists away from the depot on the bus journeys themselves:

“Strictly speaking there existed an imaginary line in front of which passengers weren’t supposed to stand. This was difficult to enforce, however, when people simply kept piling into the vehicle. In the past I tried making announcements in which I’d asked them ‘not to stand forward of the imaginary line,’ but they never took any notice.”

The city is never specified but there are various allusions to London: three stations, one Gothic flanked by two utilitarian “Cinderella and her ugly sisters” sounds like St Pancras, King’s Cross and Euston; the “southern outpost” is Crystal Palace; the “bejewelled thoroughfare” is Oxford Street. There are also frequent references to the obsolete, conductor-staffed “Venerable Platform Bus” which are the much-missed Routemaster buses. These various allusions add to the atmosphere that Mills is so adept at creating, of a world at once recognisable and oddly disconcerting.

If you’re yet to try Mills then Headway may not be the best place to start as I didn’t find it quite as sparkling as some of his other work. However, I’ve been a fan of his since The Restraint of Beasts, and if you are too there’s plenty to enjoy: the deadpan humour; the surreal quality never quite articulated; a dark edge questioning free will; a bleakness offset by a light touch. I’ll read anything he writes and it always feels like time well spent. Ironically, this is often an elusive quality to his characters.

“If the bus happens to arrive on schedule it’s good for the public record but little else. Nobody believes the timetables. Waiting for buses is therefore paradoxical.”

“People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case.” (Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies)

/ madamebibilophile / 29 Comments

I did it! This is the final instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. I’d been put a bit behind by labyrinthitis but I finished on 31 December. I’d hoped to write and post this the same day but I got distracted by my Christmas jigsaw puzzle on The World of Virginia Woolf 😀

Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself. The twelfth volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, was published in 1975 and opens in 1968.

Much of Hearing Secret Harmonies is concerned with the past but it opens by introducing a new character, the sinister Scorpio Murtlock who is camping on Nick and Isobel’s land with some of his followers. Nick, always such an astute observer of people, is not taken in by Murtlock’s charisma:

“When Murtlock smiled the charm was revealed. He was a boy again, making a joke, not a fanatical young mystic. At the same time he was a boy with whom it was better to remain on one’s guard.”

“Murtlock himself possessed to a marked degree that characteristic – perhaps owing something to hypnotic powers – which attaches to certain individuals; an ability to impose on others present the duty of gratifying his own whims.”

It’s a masterstroke of Powell’s writing that while Murtlock remains elusive, he is also deeply unnerving. There’s no doubt as to how dangerous he could be, fully realised by the novel’s end.

Nick then attends two dinners which work well as devices for him to meet past friends and acquaintances, drawing them into the final sequences, and alerting the reader as to has left the Dance for good. There is a sense of time folding in on itself:

“Members, his white hair worn long, face pale and lined, had returned to the Romantic Movement overtones of undergraduate days.”

And of course Widmerpool, Nick’s talisman of sorts, reappears. He is quite extraordinary: a former beacon of the Establishment now refuting his knighthood, asking to be called Ken, wearing a grubby red polo neck to formal occasions and focussing on the power of 1960s youth movements for societal change. His involvement with Scorpio Murtlock seems inevitable…

This final volume works well in balancing reflections of the past without becoming overly contrived. There is a sense of reflection occurring organically, without being maudlin, sentimental or nostalgic. Powell is far too astute and insightful for the ending to take such tones.

There’s also a great deal of humour, from larger set pieces with Murtlock’s naked dancing cult providing a bathetic contrast with the central image of the novel sequence:

“It was not quite the scene portrayed by Poussin, even if elements of the Season’s dance was suggested in a perverted form; not least by Widmerpool, perhaps naked, doing the recording.”

To smaller moments such as disagreement over paintings at a retrospective of Deacon’s work:

“Well Persepolis isn’t unlike Battersea Power Station in silhouette.”

And Nick’s various assessments of himself:

“Pressures of work, pressures of indolence.” (my life frustrations in a sentence!)

“These professional reflections, at best subjective at worst intolerably tedious,”

I have really enjoyed reading A Dance to the Music of Time and it hasn’t been an arduous undertaking at all. I’m sure it will reward re-reading; there are so many allusions and subtleties that have certainly passed me by. For me, the sequence peaked with the war trilogy, but each novel held its own joys, working on an individual level as well as part of a whole sequence. I’m going to really miss Nick, even though he remained half-hidden to me throughout the twelve volumes.

“Two compensations for growing older are worth putting on record as the condition asserts itself. The first is a vantage point gained for acquiring embellishments to narratives that have been unfolding for years beside one’s own, trimmings that can even appear to supply the conclusion of a given story, though finality is never certain, a dimension always possible to add.”

“Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.’ (Anthony Powell)

/ madamebibilophile / 26 Comments

This is the eleventh instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The eleventh volume, Temporary Kings, was published in 1973 and is set towards the end of the 1950s. I can’t believe I’m at the penultimate volume!

I’m writing this as I recover from labyrinthitis; today is the first time I’ve been able to sit up after two and a half days flat on my back. So I’m not sure how much sense this post will make, but I wanted to get it written in November. Please bear with me!

Temporary Kings is set for the most part at a cultural conference in Venice in 1958, which Nick has been sent to somewhat unwillingly, by Mark Members who has organised it but can’t be bothered to go himself.

I felt a sense of slowing down, as old acquaintances arrive and new people join the dance; it is almost a series of character sketches. Given Powell’s enormous talent for incisive but never cruel summations of people in just a few lines, this made for an enjoyable read.

For example, how’s this for a description of Louis Glober, a filmmaker:

“What did not happen in public had no reality for Glober at all. In spite of the quiet manner, there was no great suggestion of interior life. What was going on inside remained there only until it could be materially expressed as soon as possible.”

I also liked the new character of Dr Brightman, an academic who:

“had made clear a determination to repudiate the faintest suspicion of spinsterish prudery that might, very mistakenly, be supposed to attach to her circumstances.”

The Widmerpools turn up trailing controversy in their wake: Kenneth has lost his seat as an MP and so given a knighthood and a seat in the Lords (sigh…) and Pamela has been embroiled in a sex scandal. I do enjoy Pamela’s relentless creation of discomfort wherever she goes:

“She had the gift of making silence as vindictive as speech.”

On returning to the UK, Nick finds the conference hard to shake off:

“The conference settled down in the mind as a kind of dream, one of those dreams laden with the stuff of real life, stopping just the right side of nightmare, yet leaving disturbing undercurrents to haunt the daytime, clogging sources of imagination – whatever those may be – causing their enigmatic flow to ooze more sluggishly than ever, periodically cease entirely.”

There is an unsettling feeling to the scenes, and sense of so much unknown among the characters which could implode at any moment. Somehow it doesn’t entirely, but I felt a creeping sense of doom alongside the belief that things will just carry on.

We also have Stringham’s suspected death in a POW camp confirmed. More than any other, that character broke my heart.

Towards the end of the novel, Nick reflects:

“One’s fifties, in principle less acceptable than one’s forties, at least confirm most worst suspicions about life, thereby disposing of an appreciable tract of vain expectation, standardised fantasy, obstructive to writing, as to living […] After passing the half-century, one unavoidable conclusion is that many things seeming incredible on starting out, are, in fact, by no means to be located in an area beyond belief.”

This is a terrible post and I’ve missed so much out! I blame my ears 😉 But I hope it’s given something of the sense of the novel.

Paula’s recent Winding Up the Week post alerted me to this wonderful article about Violet Pakenham, Anthony Powell’s wife and her role in the production of Dance. It’s also a great portrait of postwar Bohemian family life. I really recommend it and you don’t have to have read any of Powell to enjoy it.

To end, a song from 1972 but a UK hit the same year as Temporary Kings was published. I chose it from many 1973 hits because after 11 volumes, Nick still remains somewhat elusive to me as a reader:

“It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.“ (Anthony Powell)

/ madamebibilophile / 14 Comments

This is the tenth instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The tenth volume, the wonderfully titled Books Do Furnish a Room, was published in 1971 and is set just after World War Two. (If you google, there are some marvellous images of Anthony Powell in his book-furnished study, reclining on a red chaise longue 😊)

It opens with Nick back at Oxford, researching a book on Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and meeting old tutor Sillery. At the end of the novel he again returns to an educational establishment from his past, organising a place for his son at Eton and meeting old tutor Le Bas. Between times, he is in London, part of a literary scene, where people are trying to re-establish themselves after the upheaval of the preceding years.

“The war had washed ashore all sorts of wrack of sea, on all sorts of coasts. In due course, as the waves receded, much of this flotsam was to be refloated, a process to continue for several years, while the winds abated. Among the many individual bodies sprawled at intervals on the shingle, quite a lot resisted the receding tide. Some just carried on life where they were on the shore; others – the more determined – crawled inland.”

After the focus on companies of men in the war trilogy, much of this novel reads like an extended character study of one person: author X Trapnel. And what a character he is – uncommonly bearded (for the time), wearing a safari suit, tie embossed with nude ladies, and dyed black RAF greatcoat, he carries a skull-topped sword stick.

“When he began to talk, beard, clothes, stick, all took shape as necessary parts of him, barely esoteric, as soon as you were brought into relatively close touch with the personality. That personality, it was at once to be grasped, was quite tough.”

And yet:

“The practical expression of the doctrine of ‘panache’… played a major part in Trapnel’s method of facing the world.”

As with all Powell’s characterisations, his presentation of Trapnel is clear-sighted but never nasty. He has a way of being unsentimental but never unpleasant; discerning but non-judgemental. He seems to enjoy people as they are.

“No brief definition is adequate. Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, comrade, and eccentric, a sage, virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, hard case, spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the slightest affront, to live to a hundred full years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognised the following day as the most neglected genius of the age.”

Around Trapnel swirl the other characters and events of this time. He is employed by publishers Quiggin and Craggs to write for a new magazine, Fission. The ever-present Widmerpool is an investor, and his beautiful wife Pamela continues to bring disdain and chaos with her wherever she goes.

Widmerpool is an MP, as is Nick’s brother-in-law Roddy Cutts, and I enjoyed this brief portrait of Nick’s visit to Westminster:

“We rose from the table, exchanging the claustrophobic pressures of the hall where the meal had been eaten, for a no less viscous density of parliamentary smoking rooms and lobbies, suffocating, like all such precincts, with the omnipresent and congealed essence of public contentions and private egotisms; breath of life to their frequenters.”

Where of course he and Roddy run into Widmerpool:

“The two MP’s were in sharp competition as to whose passion for directness and simplicity was the more heartfelt, at least could be the more forcibly expressed.”

There are also some great descriptions of the seedier parts of London (now very swish areas, but back then poorer and war torn).

Books Do Furnish a Room is quite a contrast to the immediately preceding war novels and a really effective evocation of a chaotic and impoverished postwar London literary scene. I can’t believe there’s only two more left in the sequence for me to read.

“It turned out in due course that Trapnel impersonations of Boris Karloff were to be taken as a signal that a late evening must be brought remorselessly to a close.”

“One often felt ungrateful in literary matters, as in so many others.” (Anthony Powell)

/ madamebibilophile / 21 Comments

This is the ninth instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The ninth volume, The Military Philosophers, was published in 1968 and is set in the latter part of World War Two. It forms the final part of the war trilogy within the sequence, after The Valley of Bones and The Soldier’s Art.

Nick is working in Whitehall as a military liaison during the later stages of the war, and Powell captures the quirks and foibles of his colleagues in these powerful – for some – administrative roles. He demonstrates how soldiers are still people with all their flaws; and how everyday concerns run alongside such enormous ones as the fate of nations and the likelihood of imminent death.

During an air raid, Nick reflects:

“Rather from lethargy than an indifference to danger, I used in general to remain in my flat during raids, feeling that one’s nerve, certainly less steady than at an earlier stage of the war, was unlikely to be improved by exchanging conversational banalities with neighbours equally on edge.”

While I don’t suppose Powell was anti-war or anti-establishment, he brings his clear sight to all he portrays, including the venerated men of war. An imposing portrait of the man who came to personify the previous war is described:  

“Kitchener’s cold and angry eyes, haunting and haunted, surveying with the deepest disapproval all who came that way.”

And in a rare instance of Powell describing a real-life character (though never named), Field-Marshall Montgomery is all too believably portrayed:

“An immense, wiry, calculated, insistent hardness […] one felt that a great deal of time and trouble, even intellectual effort of its own sort, had gone into producing this final result. The eyes were deep set and icy cold.”

There’s absolutely no jingoism in The Military Philosophers. Nick is a loyal soldier, but he doesn’t automatically equate the behaviour of his country with honourable deeds:

“The episode strongly suggested that the British, when it suited them, could carry disregard of all convention to inordinate length; indulge in what might be described as forms of military bohemianism of the most raffish sort.”

Truly terrifying is the development of Widmerpool in this volume. Already a deeply unnerving character, Powell has him arrive in the volume with some levity:

“‘You must excuse me,’ he said. ‘I was kept by the Minister. He absolutely refused to let me go.’

 Grinning at them all through his thick lenses, his tone suggested the Minister’s insistence had bordered on sexual importunity.”

Later we are reminded of Widmerpool’s absolute lack of any morality, when he describes the Kattyn Forest Massacre as merely “regrettable”.

By the end, he is truly sinister, observing “I have come to the conclusion that I enjoy power.” He informs Nick that he will revel in the command of empire overseas. The racism is explicitly stated; the violence of imperialism implied.

Various associates from Nick’s past reappear in his life. We learn that Nick’s childhood friends Stringham and Templar are both most likely dead, and sadly so is my favourite character General Conyers, succumbing to a heart attack after chasing looters and trying to stop the theft of a refrigerator.  

Stringham’s niece, Pamela Flitton, plays a significant role in this volume, essentially by sleeping with a lot of different men and being furious the whole time. Let’s just say her taste in partners leaves a lot to be desired…

There are lighter moments too, and I particularly enjoyed Nick’s colleague Finn risking both a court martial and being stripped of his VC, in his desperation to collect a fresh salmon and using a military car to do so.

The volume ends with the Victory Service at St Paul’s, and then Nick going to collect some civilian clothes at Olympia. It is a subdued ending, deliberately so.

“Everyone was by now so tired. The country, there could be no doubt, was absolutely worn out.”

I found the tone very moving, reflective of all the loss that had been experienced through the war years and all that must now be endured in the immediate post-war period.

“The London streets by this time were, in any case, far from cheerful: windows broken: paint peeling: jagged, ruined brickwork enclosing the shells of roofless houses. Acres of desolated buildings, the burnt and battered City lay about St Paul’s on all sides.”

“Everything alters, yet does remain the same.” (Anthony Powell)

/ madamebibilophile / 19 Comments

This is the eighth instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The eighth volume, The Soldier’s Art, was published in 1966 and is set in 1941.Unlike the previous few novels, this only had three chapters, the middle one depicting Nick’s leave in London, bookended by his experiences in the army while still billeted in Northern Ireland.

As I mentioned in the previous volume’s post, Nick doesn’t really fit in with army life. But he doesn’t particularly labour on this, or feel sorry for himself. I enjoyed this exchange when he runs into Bithel again:

“’Told me you were a reader – like me – didn’t you?’

‘Yes I am. I read quite  a lot.’

I no longer attempted to conceal the habit, with all its undesirable implications. At least admitting to it put one in a recognisably odd character of persons from whom less need be expected than the normal run.”

In this volume I felt I saw a much fuller picture of Nick’s touchstone Widmerpool. Is machinatious a word? If it isn’t, the character of Widmerpool suggests it should be, because his machinations inform his behaviour through and through.

Nick is acting as his secretary, desperate to get away.

“Indeed, it was often necessary to remind oneself that low spirits, disturbed moods, sense of persecution, were not necessarily the consequences of serving in the army, or being part of a nation at war, with which all inclusive framework depressive mental states now seemed automatically linked.”

Nick manages to stay out of Widmerpool’s connivances due to the latter’s egomaniacal need for control. However, he can observe his senior officer’s behaviour at much close quarters than before, including:

“An amateur soldier in relation to tactical possibilities, and … a professional trafficker in intrigue”

“[My] incredulity was due, I suppose, to an underestimation, even after the years I had known him, of Widmerpool’s inordinate, almost morbid self-esteem.”

By the end of the novel Widmerpool is moving on, and I had a horrible feeling that by the end of this novel sequence he might be Prime Minister…

Another of Nick’s schoolfriends is present in the company. Stringer, maintaining his sobriety, turns up as a mess waiter.

“Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward – in contrast with love – is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment”

Stringer is an intriguing character, with a deep sense of sadness about him. We’ve never learnt what led him to self-medicate with alcohol, and now he is sober he seems to have an extreme resignation to life. He seems too equanimous, knowing no joy. I find him quite haunting.

In the middle chapter Nick uses his leave to visit friends in London. His wife Isobel and young child get a passing reference. If I was Isobel I’d be mightily annoyed that my husband spent his army leave in Blitz-torn London rather than in the country with his newly-expanded family, but maybe she’s more tolerant than I am.

This middle section was hugely moving. Powell conveys the tragedy of war, of lives cut short without warning. Of the senseless waste and cruel arbitrariness of it all. He does it all with understatement which perfectly drives home the horror, and how this became a regular occurrence for so many. It was an astonishing chapter.

It is in army life that Powell finds his comedy and satire. This was probably the most sad, most moving, and most silly and funny of all the volumes I’ve read so far.

I particularly enjoyed a completely daft dinner scene between two Colonels, one called Eric, one called Derrick. Powell uses the rhyming names to full effect, having both of them end their sentences with the other’s name, as they engage in a furious, but politely mannered argument.

“Both habitually showed anxiety to avoid a junior officer’s eye at meals in case speech might seem required. To make sure nothing so inadvertent should happen, each would uninterruptedly gaze into the other’s face across the table, with all the fixedness of a newly engaged couple, eternally enchanted by the charming in appearance of the other.”

There’s also Nick’s experience of inciting the wrath of a General, when he admits he doesn’t like Trollope and prefers another author:

“‘There’s always Balzac, sir.’

‘Balzac!’

General Liddament roared the name. It was impossible to know if Balzac had been a very good answer or a very bad one.”

The more I read of this sequence the more impressive I find it. Powell’s wit, humanity, clear-sightedness, and ability to balance the various aspects of life are really extraordinary. And he does it all with such a light touch.

“All the same, although the soldier might abnegate thought and action, it has never been suggested that he should abnegate grumbling.”

To end, I’m feeling quite smug for working out that I can shoehorn in an 80s pop video by choosing one by some of the Blitz Kids (and fair to say 80s pop videos did not generally follow an Anthony Powell-esque light touch 😀 ):

“Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.” (Anthony Powell)

/ madamebibilophile / 22 Comments

This is the seventh instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The seventh volume, The Valley of Bones, was published in 1964 and is set at the start of World War Two, when Nick has joined the army as an officer.

I’ve said when reading previous novels in the sequence that I’m intrigued by Nick’s outsider’s view, as it’s not clear where it comes from since he seems so much a part of the society he portrays. In the army, the distinction is clearer. Nick finds himself billeted to South Wales within a company made up mostly of bankers, very different to his bohemian artsy London life.

“I indicated that I wrote for the papers, not mentioning books because, if not specifically in your line, authorship is an embarrassing subject for all concerned.”

Nick casts his sharp eye over these new associates in the same way he has for his friends, family and acquaintances up to this point. A central character is Captain Rowland Gwatkin, a man who seems simultaneously devoted to the army and entirely bewildered by it too:

“Gwatkin lacked in his own nature that grasp of ‘system’ for which he possessed such admiration. This deficiency was perhaps connected in some way with a kind of poetry within him…Romantic ideas about the way life is lived are often to be found in persons themselves fairly coarse- grained.”

Gwatkin is really tightly wound, and there is a sense of impending doom at best, destruction at worst with him.

Nick is an indifferent soldier, neither very good nor absolutely awful. There is some consideration of philosophical theories of war, but primarily Nick is interested in those who surround him:

“It is a misapprehension to suppose, as most people do, that the army is inherently different from all other communities. The hierarchy and discipline give an outward illusion of difference, but there are personalities of every sort in the army, as much as out of it.”

Powell brilliant portrays the simmering tensions in the company, both from the mix of personalities attempting to work together within and the increasing threat from Hitler without. There are those with alcohol problems, death by suicide, and broken hearts, yet the days mostly pass in utter tedium. Nothing changes even after the company is uprooted to a posting to Northern Ireland:

“At Castlemallock I knew despair. The proliferating responsibilities of an infantry officer, simple in themselves, yet, if properly carried out, formidable in their minutiae, impose a strain in wartime even on those to whom they are a lifelong professional habit; the excruciating boredom of exclusively male society is particularly irksome in areas at once remote from war, yet oppressed by war conditions.”

As Adjutant Maelgwyn-Jones observes: “That day will pass, as other days in the army pass.”

Yet there is some light relief too, such as an inspection from a visiting General, seemingly obsessed with breakfast foodstuffs:

“The General stood in silence, as if in great distress of mind, holding his long staff at arm’s length from him, while he ground it deep into the earth the surface of the barnhouse floor. He appeared to be trying to contemplate as objectively as possible the concept of being so totally excluded from the human family as to dislike porridge.”

And Nick does get some weekend leave in order to catch up with his family. There he finds people thrown together, behaving oddly and under strain. In other words, not so very different from his army posting. As his pregnant wife Isobel observes: “the war seems to have altered some people out of recognition and made others more than ever like themselves.”

In The Valley of Bones Anthony Powell shows himself uninterested in the glorification of war or in any sort of jingoism. He also doesn’t fall into the trap of a wholly satirical, detached point of view either. He manages a delicate balance between conveying the seriousness of war alongside the human inadequacies and frailties of those expected to enact it.

He also pulls an absolute masterstroke at the finish. The boredom, the admin, the essentially unthreatening – if somewhat self-destructive – colleagues are turned upside down in an instant, and Nick finds himself carried forward, powerless in a situation about which he has a deep sense of foreboding. It’s a chilling ending and I’m anxious to see how it plays out in the next volume, The Soldier’s Art.

“In the army – as in love – anxiety is an ever present factor where change is concerned.”

To end, a song absolutely synonymous with wartime Britain for many, which seems particularly apt for Nick as he’s always running into people he met previously:

“Love is at once always absurd and never absurd.” (Anthony Powell)

/ madamebibilophile / 20 Comments

This is the sixth instalment in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The sixth volume, The Kindly Ones, was published in 1962 and is set around the start of World War Two. This felt a bit of a departure from previous volumes in some ways. We learn a lot more about Nick in this novel; he features much more directly in his own narrative. Powell also shockingly almost approaches a plot in The Kindly Ones, confounding my expectations 😀

The volume starts by looking back in time, with Nick remembering his childhood at Stonehurst, just before World War I broke out. My favourite character from At Lady Molly’s makes a reappearance: General Alymer Conyers, proving himself good in a crisis and kind to those who need it most.

He is visiting Nick’s parents, and I was interested to learn more about them. They are presented with the same clear-sighted economy with which Powell treats so many of his characters, which I found striking in consideration of close family. Nick doesn’t seem to like his father particularly, but there is no rancour or resentment there either:

“’I like to rest my mind after work,’ he would say. ‘I don’t like books that make me think.’

[…]

The one thing he hated, more than constituted authority itself, was to hear constituted authority questioned by anyone but himself. This is perhaps an endemic trait in all who love power, and my father had an absolute passion for power, although he was never in a position to wield it on a notable scale.”

Powell has a knack of presenting his characters with discernment, but without the heavy moral judgement which would make the volumes pretty unreadable. It’s an intelligent, sensitive approach and I think it contributes to writing that is so of its time still managing not to date badly.

It’s hard to see where Nick’s objectivity and distance from his entirely conventional upbringing has occurred, although his friend Moreland suggests maybe Nick’s life wasn’t as conservative as it seemed, in comparison to his own:

“’Ours was, after all, a very bourgeois Bohemianism,’ he used to say. ‘Attending the Chelsea Arts Ball in absolutely historically correct Renaissance costume was regarded as the height of dissipation by most of the artists we knew. Your own surroundings were far more bizarre.’”

Moreland isn’t doing so well, and in the second part of the novel Nick and Isobel have gone to stay with him and Matilda in the country.

“It became clear these fits of ennui were by no means a thing of the past. He would sit for hours without speaking, nursing a large tabby cat called Farinelli.”

They end up at a party with Sir Magnus Donners, where Nick’s old schoolfriend Templar is present with his wife Betty, who is thoroughly depressed. I was struck by the portrayals of female mental illness in this volume. Within this tale are two women who are suffering greatly and Powell treats them with understanding and compassion, never dismissing it with misogyny around ‘hysteria’ which I suspect was much more prevalent at the time.

At the start of the novel the Jenkins’ housemaid Billson has what we would probably now call a dissociative episode, which is where General Conyers intervenes in the manner I mentioned above. At Donner’s party years later, Nick’s compassion is with Betty rather than his friend:

“She had been shattered by the unequal battle. The exercise of powerful ‘charm’ is, in any case, more appreciated in public than in private life, exacting, as it does, almost as heavy demands on the receiver as the transmitter, demands often too onerous to be weighed satisfactorily against the many other, all too delicate, requirements of married life. No doubt affairs with other women played their part as well.”

The plot I was so surprised to find occurs in the next part of the story. During the childhood episode that begins the novel, we encounter mystic/charlatan Dr Trelawney. He reappears as Nick makes a visit to sort out his Uncle Giles’ effects at a seaside hotel and a somewhat dramatic scene ensues, which Nick helps to resolve by dredging up childhood memories. Dr Trelawney is a sinister character, as Nick observes in his room: “A scent vaguely disturbing, like Dr Trelawney’s own personality.” But he is not a comic creation, rather adding to the sense of foreboding around world events:

“There was something decidedly unpleasant about him, sinister, at the same time absurd, that combination of the ludicrous and alarming soon to be widely experienced by contact with those set in authority in wartime.”

If I’ve made The Kindly Ones sound very heavy though, I’ve done it an injustice. There are still plenty of comic moments to enjoy, such as the reappearance of the fortune-telling Mrs Erdleigh, who had met Nick’s late mother-in-law:

“’Lady Warminster was a woman amongst women,’ said Mrs Erdleigh.’ I shall never forget her gratitude when I revealed to her that Tuesday was the best day for the operation of revenge.’”

There is also Nick’s continued gentle ribbing of his brother-in-law: “Erridge, a rebel whose life had been exasperatingly lacking in persecution.”

And Widmerpool behaves with pomposity, even though he is always underscored by a sense of menace:

“I recognised that a world war was going to produce worse situations than Widmerpool’s getting above himself and using a coarsely military boisterousness of tone to which his civilian personality could make no claim.”

The novel ends with Nick getting his longed-for commission in the army as an officer. He could have joined as a squaddie but obviously that would never do 😀 (I can’t be too scathing about Nick’s reluctance/snobbery, given I’d be terrified to join the army and utterly useless if I did.)

I expect the next volume will cover the war years which have been building throughout the last few volumes. Given its title of The Valley of Bones, I wonder if Powell will allow Nick to sustain that ironic distance. I’ll be intrigued to find out.

“At the back of one’s mind sounded a haunting resonance, a faint disturbing buzz, that was not far from fear.”

“I record these speculations…to emphasise the difficulty in understanding, even remotely, why people behave as they do.” (Anthony Powell)

/ madamebibilophile / 23 Comments

I’ve just managed to keep up my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence this April! It’s been a bit of a month and May looks equally challenging so I won’t be doing my Novella a Day in May this year, though I will focus on novellas for the month as I had some lined up that I’m really keen to read.

Back to A Dance to the Music of Time! Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The fourth volume, At Lady Molly’s, was published in 1957 and is set in the 1930s before the start of World War Two. Politics is only mentioned very occasionally though, and the focus remains on the relationships between an insular set of people.

This is the volume where I started to get a sense of the dance. With marriages a strong theme, the characters circle around, encountering one another for periods before spinning off again. Others weave in and out.

 Nick is now working as a script writer and his affair has ended. At the start of the novel he is taken by a colleague to a party at Lady Molly Jeavons. Once again he runs into acquaintance/talisman Widmerpool:

“Yet, for some reason, I was quite glad to see him again. His reappearance, especially in that place, helped to prove somehow rather consolingly, that life continued its mysterious, patterned way. Widmerpool was a recurring milestone on the road”

Widmerpool is engaged to Mildred Haycock, who is quite a few years older than him and has a colourfully described past. Later we learn that Widmerpool’s political aspirations are growing, and there is a chilling speech he gives Nick over lunch at his club, in favour of appeasement of Hitler.

Once again I was struck by Powells astute, clear-sighted assessment of people. Surrounded as it is by a satirical comedy of manners, he can really pack a punch when he chooses.

“Sentiment and power, each in their way, supply something to feed the mind, if not the heart. They are therefore elements operated often to excess by persons in temperament unable to love at all, yet at the same time unwilling to be left out of the fun, or to bear the social stigma of living emotionally uninteresting lives.”

There are lighter portraits too of course. My favourite in At Lady Molly’s was retired General Alymer Conyers. In his eighties, he spends his retirement reading Virginia Woolf, practising the cello, and learning about psychoanalysis:

“‘Been reading a lot about it lately,’ said the General. ‘Freud – Jung – haven’t much use for Adler. Something in it, you know. Tells you why you do things. All the same, I didn’t find it much help in understanding Orlando.’

Once more he fell into a state of coma.”

Quiggin and Mona Templar reappear (“She was like a strapping statue of Venus conceived at a period when more than a touch of vulgarity had found its way into classical sculpture.” Ouch.) living in a cottage owned by Erridge, who is now Lord Warminster. The lord of the manor dresses in scrappy clothes, has a big beard and gives a lot of his money away to good causes. I work near Shoreditch so none of this sounds like remotely remarkable manhood to me, but to his 1930s aristocratic family he seems mad. I’ve read somewhere he may have been based on George Orwell!

Nick meets two of Erridge’s sisters when he visits, including Isabel, “a bit of a highbrow when she isn’t going to night clubs”. He falls in love at first sight but their courtship happens entirely away from the eyes of the reader. Powell’s interest isn’t romance, but rather the dynamics of relationships and how these play out in the wider world.

“Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.”

There are so many ways A Dance… is of its time (which I think is exactly as intended) but it also doesn’t age, through Powell’s astute characterisation. I was very struck by this comment early on in At Lady Molly’s:

“One of those men oddly prevalent in Victorian times who sought personal power through buffoonery”

You don’t have to look very far back through our Prime Ministers to find a much more recent example…

I absolutely whizzed through At Lady Molly’s and I’m really looking forward the next volume, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.

To end, a beautifully simple rendition of a song about Molly:

“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” (Albert Einstein)

/ madamebibilophile / 21 Comments

This is the fourth of my planned daily posts for the wonderful 1937 Club, running all week and hosted by Kaggsy at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book.

Today I’m looking at the fifth of Angela Thirkell’s Barchester novels, Summer Half. Although strictly speaking, Barchester only features now and again, most of the novel being set in Southbridge School and the master’s homes.

Reading Angela Thirkell can be a trepidatious experience. I really enjoy her comedy, but she can also be an unmitigated snob and racism can filter in too. Thankfully, although there were brief elements of both in this novel, they were always short-lived. There are also repeated references to hitting women thrown casually into conversation, although no suggestion it would actually occur.

Those elements aside, I was in the mood for a comic novel featuring events of no consequence, and that was exactly what I got. I really enjoyed it!

Summer Half begins with Colin Keith, the least interesting of the characters, deciding to take a job teaching the Mixed Fifth at the local public school, Southbridge. His father is keen for him to become a barrister, but Colin decides for wholly flimsy reasons to educate the young. He has no vocation for it and finds the prospect terrifying.

“He saw himself falling in love with the headmaster’s wife, nourishing unwholesome passions for fair-haired youths, carrying on feuds, intrigues, vendettas with other masters, being despised because he hated cricket, being equally despised because he didn’t know the names of birds, possibly being involved in a murder which he could never prove he hadn’t committed, certainly marrying the matron.”

None of the above happens and thankfully the Mixed Fifth decide they like him and don’t give him a hard time. The irrepressible Tony Morland from earlier Barchester novels features – now an adolescent – along with his friends Eric Swan and chameleon-loving Hacker.

“Hiding their eagerness under an air of ancient wisdom, critically kind, agreeably aloof, living private lives in the public eye, exploring every wilderness of the mind, yet concerned with a tie or scarf.”

The Masters live in school during term time, and so Colin befriends Everard Carter, a teacher of ability and dedication, who isn’t remotely sentimental about his charges but admits: “I’m wretched without them.” There is also grumpy, socially inept Philip Winter, (a communist!) engaged to Rose Birkett, the beautiful “sparrow-wit” daughter of the headmaster.

Rose is the nearest the novel has to a villain, and she isn’t really villainous. She’s just monumentally self-focussed and devoid of any capacity to comprehend anyone’s needs beyond her own. She enjoys male attention (presumably because admirers will want to please her) and continuously gets engaged:

“What significance, if any, she attached to the word engaged, no one had yet discovered, unless it meant being taken out in the cars of the successive young men to whom she became attached. Her parents very much hoped she would grow out of the habit in time, but for the present all they could do was tolerate young Mr Winter and hope for the best.”

Colin takes Everard Carter to his home over the holidays, where he promptly falls in loves with Kate Keith, Colin’s sister.  Her frankly pathological obsession with darning everyone’s clothes and sewing on buttons doesn’t stop Carter from falling in love at first sight: “he saw his journey’s end”.

Lydia, Colin’s youngest sister, is quite the contrast to Kate. She is boisterous and given to fits of passion over Horace and Shakespeare, while proclaiming a future for herself of staying unmarried and breeding golden cocker spaniels. She also has no qualms about ripping her clothes, stuffing her food, and starting arguments with people she has perceived as doing wrong by those she cares about.

Needless to say, Lydia and Tony become good friends. I thought they were perfectly suited, both being characters I like and enjoy immensely in books, yet would find irritating beyond belief in real life.

We follow this privileged set through a summer of school, picnics, punting on rivers, tennis, croquet, unfounded jealousies and rivalries which are resolved amicably, and the most English of love affairs:

“If he did touch her he thought he might go mad, and as he was right at the end of the pew farthest from the door, that would have been uncomfortable for everyone.”

Summer Half is an ensemble piece where everyone bumbles along together more or less agreeably. Spiky, rude Philip is quite the reformed character by the end, and Rose remains entirely unreformed but nor is she punished.

There are some great comic set pieces, including such dramas as an overflowing bath, and the cleaning of a pond to avoid church attendance. That’s about as high as the stakes get, which was entirely what I wanted.

Summer Half  is an enjoyable, escapist read with no aspirations towards being anything other than it is, as Thirkell’s disclaimer at the start would indicate: “It seems to me extremely improbable that any such school, masters, or boys could ever have existed.” Sometimes we need a break, and for me this was exactly the right novel at the right time.

To end, there are many songs about summer which I could choose, but I’ve opted for this completely bonkers video, set for reasons that are entirely unfathomable, in a boys boarding school. It’s no wonder our country’s in the state it is if this is what goes on at Eton: