Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement, Vol. 2 Book

I know I'm in a minority when I say that A Dance to the Music of Time is the greatest novel in the English language, but what the hell. I've read the whole thing rather more than twice, and I think it's a masterpiece: basically, what Proust would have written if he'd been English and done anything with his life apart from going to fancy parties and creating A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. Anyway, I argue for the series as a whole in my review of the First Movement. Now let's talk about this volume. The First Movement is mostly about growing up inside the English class system, which is perhaps why some readers find it antipathetic; many of the characters do indeed come across as dim-witted, rich snobs. Powell grew up among these people, and knew everything about them. He describes them perfectly, neither excusing them nor ranting about their obvious shortcomings. As the progression of the books illustrates, ranting is not necessary. There's nothing you could wish done to them that they don't do, far more effectively, to themselves.

But most of that is still in the future. The Second Movement - books 4, 5 and 6 - is about love, or I should perhaps say, Love. And here, I'd like to defend Powell from the often-repeated criticism that the main character is uninteresting, and that you don't feel he's there except as an observer. It is, indeed, true that you're never directly told anything much about his marriage with Isobel, who's often believed to be modelled on Powell's own wife. I think that this is a ridiculously simplistic reading of the novel. A lesser author might just have given a straightforward account of Nick's and Isobel's story. But Dance is a first-person narrative, and no one is able to describe their own marriage objectively. Human feelings aren't logical enough for that technique to work well: there are so many different threads tangled up together, and one is never sure what the "objective" truth is.

Instead, Nick describes several different relationships he sees going on around him. We have Moreland, who seems to be happily married to Matilda, but who also, we gradually discover, has a crush on Priscilla; Templer, who's driving Betty insane with his incessant philandering; Maclintick, and his shrewish wife Audrey. I can't quite prove it, but it seems to me that these stories are really, in some way, about Nick. I don't think it's as simple as Powell transferring pieces of Nick's and Isobel's story to these other couples. Rather, I would say that the things Nick notices in his friends' marriages resonate precisely because they're the things he recognises from his own.

It's an indirect way of presenting things, but Powell loves the indirect approach. The best example of all is Nick's affair with Jean, which is the focal point of the whole novel. This is the only time when you feel that he's truly present, truly involved; perhaps his distant, abstracted air throughout the rest of the series is just to heighten the contrast. Powell does the whole thing with such wonderful, understated grace. He never says that Nick is unable to forget her. He doesn't mention Jean for hundreds of pages at a time. Then, suddenly, she turns up unexpectedly for a paragraph or two, and again she's the most important person in the world. There's a moment in one of the later books, when someone casually mentions that Jean has left her husband, and is living in Rome. Nick comments in his usual dry way that "it was quite a good test, and I passed it with flying colours; that is, without an immediate desire to go to Rome". It's astonishing how much feeling he manages to compress into that single word, "immediate".

Near the end of Hearing Secret Harmonies, Nick, now an old man, meets Jean for the last time. Many other people are present, and no one in the room knows that Jean is the love of his life; most of them are not even aware that they used to know each other. He says, in plain, impersonal language, that they almost embrace, but somehow don't. They chat politely for a few minutes. She smiles and turns to leave. As she goes out of the door, he remembers the words she spoke to him fifty years earlier, just before they slept together for the first time. It's one of my favourite scenes in any book.