First things first, Happy Leap Year, and if you’ve decided to propose to anyone I do hope they’ve said yes.
The opening sequence to A Buyer’s Market, the sale room, somehow epitomised for me what these books are about. Disparate, unconnected objects united by their presence in the same room and under the same roof, all seemed like an analogy with the people various gathered within Anthony Powell’s extraordinary novels.
‘The odds and ends harmonise quietly with each other.’
And yet a funny thing happens when I am reading A Dance to the Music of Time.
I read for a while, a few pages maybe, and I blink and think, and wonder what have I just read...
Somehow something tells me it hasn’t sunk in..
I soldier on thinking I’m feeling my way in a place I really don’t know, and who on earth are all these people anyway and was this really a good idea. I gave myself a prod and say ‘Concentrate’ and read on. Nothing distracts me, but is it really making sense.
But then an even funnier thing happens.
Several hours later the whole thing is absolutely crystal clear in my mind.
If you asked me how Anthony Powell, with his often fairly convoluted sentences detailing the minutiae of life, manages to achieve this, I’m not sure I could tell you. What sleight of pen is at work here remains a mystery which perhaps one of you has unlocked. I’d be interested in your thoughts.
This month A Buyer's Market and take as an example the party at Mrs Andriardis'. It reminded me of heady days in London in the 1970s and I wonder if this sort of thing still happens. There you are standing in the street having been to one bash and someone you know comes along and invites you to another one and you think ‘oh why not.
And so, several hours after I’d read through the party, there it was crystal clear in my head. The place, the house full of people; downstairs, on the stairs, up the stairs, people everywhere, mingling, talking and then the extremely drunk person (Stringer) coming up with a completely ludicrous idea and making an idiot of themselves.
i think it might be how my student nurse roommate and I ended up travelling back to Bloomsbury at some ungodly hour, in our Laura Ashley frocks, with our umbrellas up, sitting on the tube train. It’s not worth me even trying to remember why, or how, but it was 1973, we’d definitely been to a party in Hampstead and must have been compus mentus enough to at least realise we had to go to on duty the next day. Amazing how safe we felt in London back in those days...whether we actually were on not is an entirely different matter, we were young and invincible.
Go on...tell all. I bet you did something mysteriously daft too. You can tell us, what’s said on the scribbles stays on the scribbles...we won’t let on and it was ages ago anyway...
I loved the coincidences that Antony Powell concocts too. They are often scorned as too contrived in fiction. I mean what were the chances of Jenkins bumping into Stringer like that when they hadn’t seen each other for so long. What were the chances that they’d both be on that London Street at that exact moment..
Except it happens. Many years ago Bookhound and I were in London, walking across a crowded Trafalgar Square when who should walk around the corner by St Martin-in-the-Fields than our friends from the village who we hadn’t seen in ages. We roared at the idea that we hadn't bumped into them down here in ages and yet there we were in the middle of London. A similar occurrence a few years later as I turned the corner from Marylebone High Street into Oxford Street and actually physically bumped into another very good local friend.
Dear Widmerpool pops up again and then there's Gypsy Jones. In case you missed Anna's comment. on the A Question of Upbringing post I will mention it here. There is a real danger in doing what we had both done and looked up a bit more information on Gypsy in Hilary Spurling's Invitation to the Dance.
Beware, there be spoilers.
Enough thoughts fro me, I'm wondering how anyone else is doing...
Do you have any reading tips to share...
I'm finding I need to get into the groove, get a few pages under my belt, this is definitely not start-stop reading but onwards to The Acceptance World. I’m a little ahead of myself with Book Three, and if anyone was having doubts about whether to continue with this read I would say stick with it because I think suddenly Anthony Powell gets into his stride. I’m loving it and can’t wait to pick it up each time.
Meanwhile, if you are still there please do declare...
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