The Kindly Ones is a tremendous novel; it is the sixth in the Dance To The Music of Time series by Anthony Powell, and marks a change of mood and tempo. In the previous novel - Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, the approach of war is marked by the sense of "a body across the line" on the Ghost Railway. As I described in my previous post on this book (link at the beginning), the war is put off for a whole book: having felt its hot breath in the previous book, you are now taken back to the years before the previous conflict - both a device of intense drama, but also reflecting the death of his parents, who Powell refused to write about while they were alive.
The young Nick is made vividly, painfully aware of the approach of the First War as a young child, and ends the novel preparing - a little on the old side, as he is in his thirties - to put on uniform himself for the Second. En route, there are many extremely funny passages - Billson's ghost, Trelawney trapped in the bathroom, the photographs of the seven sins - but also plenty of the harsh light that shines on the scaffold, particularly in relation to Nick's own emotional entanglements, laid painfully bare by a series of difficult conversations brilliantly rendered.
Verbal description of everything, however, must remain infinitely distant from the thing itself, overstatement and understatement sometimes hitting off the truth better then a flat assertion of bare fact.
She can be tough, you know. One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.
In this novel, it seems to me, Powell ceases to be a very fine novelist and achieves greatness. The greatness, of course, informs the books before it as well as those that come afterward: it is almost as if Powell were saying - "Now we come to it; now the crisis for which we have been preparing has arrived".
Good to have you back: don't get lost again!
Posted by: Lindsay | Wednesday, 24 February 2010 at 10:20 PM
I have commented here before that Dance is an all-time favorite of mine. Your review of this volume is spot-on.
I lost me blog roll in a technical mix up, and it has taken me a while to rebuild it. I am glad I found yours again.
Posted by: Rose City Reader | Wednesday, 24 February 2010 at 05:36 PM