Books: Musical Chairs

THE VALLEY OF BONES by Anthony Powell. 242 pages. Little, Brown. $4.50.

To pick up one of Anthony Powell’s novels at random is as bewildering an experience as walking into a theater halfway through Henry IV, Part II. Who is Hugo Warminster? Why does Dicky Unfraville despise Buster Foxe? What ever became of Eleanor Walpole-Wilson and her Lesbian roommate?

Powell’s cool, elegantly witty books in fact are not so much self-contained novels as chapters in a projected, twelve-part series that he calls The Music of Time. So numerous are the odd and diverting characters who flash in and out of his pages that a list of all their names and relationships, assembled by London’s Time and Tide two novels back, occupied four full pages of type. Yet every one of them is as distinctively striated and plump with life as a mountain trout, and the society they inhabit is as compellingly real and elaborate as Proust’s Paris.

Twitching Thread. In The Valley of Bones, No. 7 in his series, Powell picks up the life of Nicholas Jenkins, his all-seeing narrator, shortly after the outbreak of World War II; it ends about a year later after the fall of Dunkirk. At 35, Old Etonian Nick is a somewhat overage second lieutenant assigned to backwater posts in Ireland and Wales, where he passes his time studying anti-gas warfare and reading Thackeray’s Henry Esmond. The shooting war, which largely flows past him, interests Powell less than its effects on the worm-eaten aristocrats and upper-middle-class English men and women who inhabit his fictional world. Not a great deal happens. Nick’s brother-in-law, Robert Tolland, is killed while serving in France with the Field Security Service. “Would he have made a lot of money in his export house trading with the Far East? Might he have married Flavia Wisebite? As in musical chairs, the piano stops suddenly, someone is left without a seat, petrified for all time in their attitude of that particular moment.”

Nick encounters all manner of odd types in the army. He is linked to them all by the warp of a social fabric that Powell understands as well as any writer now working, and by the long arm of coincidence, which Powell nudges more shamelessly than any novelist since Dickens. When a character in The Valley of Bones moves, another character inevitably twitches at the end of a fictional thread that may stretch all the way back to A Question of Upbringing, the first in his series. Nick has a casual conversation with a fellow officer, and a memory floats Joyce-like to the surface: “I was struck by a thought as to where I might have seen Pennistone before. Was it at Mrs. Andriadis’ party in Hill Street ten or twelve years ago? His identity was revealed. He was the young man with the orchid in his buttonhole.”

Patterned Spectacle. An officer sitting with his back to Nick suddenly swivels in his chair—and turns out to be Widmerpool, that inspired clown who appears in all his novels as Powell’s satiric image of England’s “new man.” Some characters will presumab y never reappear. Others, notably Lieut. Odo Stevens, who falls in love with another of Nick’s sisters-in-law, will obviously glide into view again in later chapters of the saga.

Powell’s vision of society, as he explained at the outset of his series, is one of “human beings moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.” Powell himself consummately controls the melody. To the reader who joins his dance, it is clear that he is unfolding one of the great comic sagas in English fiction.