This is the fourth book in Dance to the Music of Time and it is interesting to watch Nicholas Jenkins’ world expand over the course of these books. It is also impressive, because Powell always takes care to link his relationship with a new character back to an older character (older in a narrative sense). In fact, you could link every character, through several or more layers of remove, to those three friends from school: Charles Stringham, Peter Templer, and Kenneth Widmerpool.
Partly because of my own affection for a fantasy of the twenties, I have found myself feeling less involved as time passes. It doesn’t help that I don’t feel deeply engaged in Nicholas’ story anymore (lector emptor: I have already started the fifth book and I’m getting more excited by Nicholas again).
But it’s also not really his story, is it? He’s a cipher, generally. A stand-in for you and I, the readers. The observer of a changing world.
But things still happen and I’m not entirely satisfied with it. He gets engaged, but the courtship is quite literally skipped over. He meets her (Isobel Tolland) and instantly realizes that this is the woman he will marry. The next ‘section’ of the book picks up with them being engaged. But I didn’t feel it.
With Jean Templer (yes, the sister of his school friend, Peter Templer; her married name being Jean Duport), you felt it. The desire. The connection. I couldn’t tell you a whole lot more about Jean’s character than Isobel’s, but I could tell you a lot more about how she made Nicholas feel. His feelings were painfully realized in the book. Part of it is that Nicholas is a passive observer, someone carried along by the ‘music of time,’ but not, necessarily, one of the musicians. But I am left unsatisfied.
Widmerpool more and more strikes me as a sort of villain. The secret villain of the novels, I feel, who will someday do something terribly wicked to hurt or destroy Nicholas.
As frequent readers of this blog (a set people consisting exclusively of relatives) will know, I love Edgar Rice Burroughs’ planetary romances. I need to get around to reading the fourth book of his Barsoom novels (Thuvia, Maid of Mars, for you completists out there). But I have never read, nor have I ever been much interested in his Tarzan stories. I remember, when we lived in Norfolk, Virginia, one of our rooms was designated as the library and on the shelves was a Tarzan novel. I think it was The Beasts of Tarzan, but don’t quote me on that. All I remember was a wonderfully lurid, pulpy cover featuring an alligator. My mother, while never actively discouraging from reading it (she never discouraged me from reading anything), did let me know that she felt the stories were racist. So I never read it, despite not infrequently pulling it down from the shelf and looking at its exciting cover. She also told me about Johnny Weismuller and the Tarzan movies, which were sometimes on television on Saturday afternoons.
the coffee philosopher 