Hey, great, as always, but didn’t love this one quite as much as all of the others. Still wonderful. I’m sure if I reread it I’d love 150 pages of being at a party, but kind of the same thing I went through with the second book. Alright already. ( )

"Come, let's away; the strangers all are gone."
-- Shakespeare, 'Romeo and Juliet'

Time's hand is often a cruel one. For those of us with fond memories of the past, our youth, our joys and ecstasies, it can sometimes be a comfort. Yet every encounter with the past - a nostalgic dinner conversation, an unexpected reunion with a lost acquaintance, the Proustian involuntary memory of the madeleine dipped in tea - runs the risk of tearing down our illusions: revealing the ulterior motives of one we thought had found us attractive, surprising us with a catty remark made behind our backs, or startling with a sympathetic character portrait of someone we had dismissed. (I well recall, in my youth, my first successful audition for a main role on the stage. It was a meaty role alongside brilliant actors, and I was obnoxiously proud to join the company. Years later, I happened to run into an actor acquaintance from that time. He told me - assuming that I knew - that, after the auditions but before contracting me, the director had reached out to him and another actor to see if they were available. He was sharing an amusing coincidence, an alternate-history in which he played the role rather than I. Yet, all I was hearing was the reveal that even though I must have been the best of the auditionees, I was a poor enough performer that the director sought out two outside hires before settling on me due to their lack of availability!)

Temporary Kings takes up this theme on a broad scale - although not at first. More than half of the novel is set in Venice, about a decade after we last saw Jenkins, Widmerpool, Pamela, and their cohort. The ravages of Time have killed off so many of the series' characters, that these are really the only three we still care about (perhaps in the case of the latter two, I should say "have a morbid interest in"). The spinning plates of the Dance are beginning to settle; our focus is narrowing. Here, these three spend an enlightening time in Venice as part of a literary conference, along with a slew of new characters, who provide us with a great deal more discussion of literature and art. In some ways, it is a strange transition for the series to make, especially as we are racing toward its end. Yet art has always been an underlying subject matter of the series and indeed Powell's well-known aesthetic tendencies suggest he sees art appreciation and moral character as inevitable soulmates. (One of the new characters, Tokenhouse, dismisses Widmerpool off hand, recognising that the man has no interest in art "good or bad".) Much is made of the psychological destruction of the late X. Trapnel and the offstage deaths of several other figures from the murky past. But it is the grotesque, vicious, sexually malevolent marriage of Pamela and Widmerpool - sorry, Lord Widmerpool - that makes up the meat of this particular volume.

I know we're supposed to dislike Pamela, and yes she is certainly a negative force in the world of the Dance. But - like Nick at novel's end - I have rather a strong respect for her. Perhaps she has just been doing what she feels is necessary to get by. Perhaps it is merely in the shadow of her husband's self-serving, face-saving villainy, she seems a figure of force rather than evil. Or perhaps I am quite mad. Either way, if Pam's exploits are the subtext of much of the Venice sequence, Widmerpool's dominate the novel's latter sections. Nick (sometimes along with Isobel) attends three functions: a war reunion dinner, a reception at the Soviet Embassy, and a Mozart opera. At each, old friends update him on the growing scandal around Widmerpool's alleged espionage activities, as well as a few other tidbits about characters we have loved or loathed. What is interesting is that Powell indulges more in a technique I wish he had used liberally in the early volumes. Nick - whom Powell often made arrive at, or observe, events despite a slight silliness to his presence - has, throughout the series, often heard reported tales which he recounts to us. But here, he sometimes gets multiple versions, and has to decipher the truth based on his knowledge of the participants, and his knowledges of the biases of those relating the story to us. It is a much more invigorating conceit and - while not unprecedented in the series - would, I feel, have given more weight to the earlier volumes. There have been many ambiguities, of course, oh so many; still I yearn for more.

Trying to rate this novel on a five-star scale seems an exercise in absurdity. As the penultimate volume in a series of staggering worth, Temporary Kings has great power. Every character appearance is now weighted with such history, and the abrupt jump in time (the first time more than a couple of years have passed between books) creates the powerful effect of seeing familiar faces through the disconcerting prism of age. It's a technique Proust makes great use of in his final volume, and I assume Powell will take up the mantle in Hearing Secret Harmonies. If there are flaws, they are only perhaps in a slight lack of "spirit of place". Powell was pushing 70 as he wrote this volume, and had spent the last two decades as an increasingly respected novelist, alternating between his grand home - a literary haven for the well-heeled - and yearly holidays abroad. The late 1950s for him were not fertile grounds for literary material. (And, Hilary Spurling notes in her biography of the author, he was also racing to finish the series lest he should pass away; in the event, Powell would live another quarter-century, unwisely releasing dense volumes of autobiography and diaries that would rather tarnish his image!) Whereas the novels set in the 1920s and 30s, and the War Trilogy, have a vibrant lived-in quality, this volume feels occasionally airless. There are references to the Cold War, of course, and notes of time passing, as when Hugh Moreland suggests that his obituary will not refer to him as "Mr Hugh Moreland since it is no longer the custom to include that salutation. Yet one feels strongly the puppeteer hand of the author, bringing his characters together at conferences and operas, without much sense of how they relate to the world around them. Perhaps it doesn't matter; at this stage, we are so invested in the people themselves that the world-building has drifted away. A New York Times review from 1973 said that, despite the series still being enjoyable for fans, "one goes on reading the “Dance,” feeling rather like a guest enjoying himself at a party after the band has left and the hosts have gone".

I can't say I entirely disagree. ( )

I seriously contemplated giving up on this series when I was not far into this book. I don't regret reading them all in order, but I was starting to be ready for a different voice and different world. I didn't find any of the characters in this one particularly engaging or compelling, which is a big problem in what is essentially character-driven fiction. There were a few laughs, as always, but I felt like I was working hard. I found the book grew on me as I progressed, so by the end I was quite enjoying myself. ( )

paperback

The eleventh volume of Anthony Powell's masterful Dance to the Music of Time sequence opens in Venice where the narrator, Nick Jenkins, has been lured to attend a literary conference. Among his fellow delegates are the erudite but rather intimidating academic, Dr Emily Brightman, and Russell Gwinnett, an American professor who has taken a sabbatical break to work on a literary biography of the talented yet personally disordered novelist, X Trapnel, (based upon Julian Maclaren-Ross) whose chaotic life formed much of the backdrop to the previous volume, [Books Do Furnish A Room].

Gwinnett advises Jenkins that he is particularly eager to meet Pamela Widmerpool (now more properly addressed as ‘Lady Widmerpool’, following her husband's receipt of a life peerage), who had been instrumental in Trapnel's decline following her wanton destruction of the manuscript of his unfinished novel "Profiles in String". This encounter duly happens as the senior attendees of the conference are invited to visit the palazzo where the Widmerpools are staying. One of the principal attractions of the palace is a ceiling painted by Tiepolo which depicts the story of Candaules and Gyges, as recounted by Herodotus. Candaules, King of Lydia, had frequently boasted of the beauty of his wife, and arranges for his friend Gyges to lurk in their chamber where he can see for himself. The particular poignancy of this situation revolves around the fact that nakedness was a near taboo among the Lydians. The Queen, however, glimpses Gyges watching her naked form and subsequently confronts him, telling him that he must either kill her husband and marry her himself (en secondes noces), or she would arrange for him to be killed, thus either formalising his illicit knowledge of her nakedness, or removing him all together. Not surprisingly Gyges opts for the former course, and after killing Candaules and marrying the Queen, he ruled the Lydians for forty years.

Pamela is intrigued by the painting and seizes on its voyeuristic theme as an opportunity to denounce some of her husband's own unsavoury habits. Widmerpool is surprisingly unfazed by revelations as he has other worries to consider. At the time of his arrival in Venice he had been denounced in scurrilous elements of the British Press who had learned that he had been under investigation on suspicion of having been a Communist spy with connections to Burgess and Maclean.

Meanwhile Jenkins gets to visit his former boss, Daniel Tokenhouse, who turns out to have developed extreme left wing sympathies which have independently brought him into contact with Widmerpool. Pamela pursues, or is pursued by, several prospective suitors, including Gwynnett and Louis Glober, a larger than life American film producer, who is not without his own sexual idiosyncrasies.

Powell manages all this with consummate ease, and right up to the end of the novel one is never quite sure whether or not we are going to witness Widmerpool's final demise. Once again, Powell demonstrates his extraordinary ability to write a novel in which precious little actually happens yet throughout which the reader is kept at a pitch of excitement and expectation comparable to the most rip-roaring thriller. ( )