Sunday Literary Interlude, no. 3 - the warm glow of vindication. I slogged through all twelve books of Anthony Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time", hating almost every minute of it, searching in vain for the cause of breathlessness such as:

“I think it is now becoming clear that A Dance to the Music of Time is going to become the greatest modern novel since Ulysses.”
—Clive James

“I would rather read Mr Powell than any English novelist now writing.”
—Kingsley Amis

But now relief comes; V. S. Naipaul agrees with me that, whatever other good qualities he might have had, Powell was a great big boring windbag as a writer as far as Dance... was concerned. Naipaul reviewer Ian Jack puts it thus:

Powell, by contrast, looked to be engaged in a long-winded private satire, with footmen posted at the door to keep the wrong sort of reader out.

(Wish I'd said that. I did write to a friend while I was reading the opus that "...it is as though the narrator lives his entire life encased in layers of cotton wool, layer upon layer of deadening verbiage and analysis choking off all air and human contact" while discussing the most obscure, indirect, opaque, verbose, and yet sexless sex scene possibly in all of modern literature, near the end of A Buyer's Market.)

I think the secret behind all the glowing reviews was that Powell was basically writing about a world shared by himself, and by the reviewers, also; people are always apt to fall prey to the navel-gazing instinct, and I'm sure the reviewing set found Powell's endless &ndash endless! – meditation upon their mutual experience fascinating.

(Note to self: Do not give in to temptation to read In Search of Lost Time).

Posted by David Fleck at 30 September 2007 09:14 AM