Kenneth Widmerpool - Context: A Dance To The Music of Time

Context: A Dance To The Music of Time

Anthony Powell's novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time comprises twelve volumes, spanning a period of approximately 50 years, from the early 1920s to the beginning of the 1970s. The title is taken from the painting of that name, by Nicolas Poussin. Through the eyes of a narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, the reader observes the fortunes and misfortunes of a varied collection of mainly upper-class characters. Their general ambience is a bohemian world of art, literature and music, intermingled with more practical spheres—politics, business and the military. In a 1971 study of the novels, Professor Dan McLeod summarised the overall theme of the sequence as that of a decaying establishment confronted by "aggressive representatives from the middle classes elbowing their way up". The latter are prepared to suffer any number of indignities in their pursuit of power; nevertheless, the establishment proves capable of resisting the advance of "all but the most thick-hided and persevering" of the outsiders. Of these, the character of Kenneth Widmerpool is the principal embodiment.

The first three volumes of the sequence are set in the 1920s and follow the main characters through school, university and their first steps towards social and professional acceptance. The next group of three occupies the 1930s; the protagonists become established, put down roots, watch the international situation anxiously and prepare for war. The background for the seventh, eighth and ninth volumes is the Second World War, which not all the characters survive. The final three books cover the 25 years from the early days of the post-war Attlee government to the counterculture and protests of the early 1970s. During the long narrative the focus changes frequently from one group to another; new faces appear while established characters are written out, sometimes reappearing after many volumes, sometimes not at all—though news of their doings may reach Jenkins through one or other of his many acquaintances. Apart from Jenkins himself, Widmerpool is the only one of the sequence's 300-odd character who takes part in the action of every one of the twelve volumes. In the words of one commentator, the novel sequence may be regarded as "the dance of Kenneth Widmerpool, who is Jenkins's fall-guy, tormentor, and antithesis". Widmerpool dogs Jenkins's career and life; in the first pages of the first book, at school, he is encountered running through the mists in the vain hope of athletic glory. In the final scenes of the last book in the sequence he is running again, this time at the behest of the quasi-religious cult that has claimed him.