A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

Majestic, grandiose, epic, monumental…for another look at this and other spectacular chef d’oeuvres you could go to: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEVa4_CsRStSBBDo4uJWT8BSWtTTn0N1E


With twelve volumes you cannot get better, more meaningful and yet jocular entertainment than this…

-          Except perhaps for Marcel Proust
The spectacular Anthony Powell has been compared with Proust, albeit some found him superficial and criticized him.
To my surprise and displeasure, V.S. Naipaul, whose Bend in the river and House for Mr. Biswas I loved, said something like this:

-          “It is good that I had not studied the work of Anthony Powell
-          This way we stayed friends- he did look it over, after the death of the miraculous-for me- master”
This epic, phenomenal work was so mesmerizing that I spaced it out over the years, to have a “delayed gratification”.
I rather have a few years embellished with twelve chef d’oeuvres than a few months with a short, sensational peak experience.
So I have read the first tome as early as 2012 and only finished Hearing Secret Harmonies a few weeks ago.
For the past few days, I amused myself with a dramatized version produced for the BBC, which keeps my mornings occupied.
There is a quandary here:

-          The adaptation may be right and that would put me in the wrong
-          Windmerpool, admittedly a crucial player is made  into an extremely important personage, way beyond what I feel, perhaps falsely, is his proper standing
In the view of Michael Butt, Nick Jenkins- based on the author- is obsessed with his nemesis that is actually turned into a…good friend.
Nick Jenkins keeps saying to Ken Windmerpool that he wants to be his friend, when what I recall is rather the opposite.
The adapter has studied this titanic masterpiece much better and might have gained insight into the psychology of characters…

-          And yet, to me Lord W is blown totally out of proportion and cherry on top, he is not the villain I knew, but some old boy who is not responsible for the two deaths of Charles Stringham and Peter Temple, because it all happened on account of him being bullied in school and having a disadvantaged background, coming from a lower class family, his father operating a horse manure joint making liquefied fertilizer or something of the sort…give me a break, will you!
Yes, he is the epitome of evil and appears whenever we expect him the least- from Venice to the last ball aka wedding party.
But the transformation into a tragic, not totally unlikeable personage turns the story upside down- for me that is.
As stated, it is likely that I took the wrong view and then again, the voluminous chef d’oeuvre had to be cut from more than sixty hours of reading to a six hour part broadcast by the BBC Radio, in a special format.
The division of the novel into chapters entitled Marriage, War, Peace, Last Dance does not appeal to me either.
But there are other challenges- I guess handicap might soon be eliminated from vocabularies- that the adaptation faces.
One would be the need to eliminate some of the –granted many- characters and transfer some of their attributes to those remaining.

-          Delavaquerie is gone and his lines and actions are now in the domain of Nick Jenkins
A modern touch was wanted, if you ask me and that did not agree with conservative, maybe old fashioned fellows like myself.
The stink bomb becomes an explosive device and the cult of Scorpio does not have the amusing tones from the original and then there is a rock band, or anyway music that did not go in harmony with the messages of the sometimes hilarious groupies of Murtlock

-          “The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True”

TIME and The Modern Library have included this fantastic masterpiece on their lists of


-          The Best 100 Novels

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