In The Soldier's Art, Nick Jenkins knows despair. This is the second of the three war books from Anthony Powell's Dance To The Music of Time, but there is no war in it - just the bleakness of life working in a dead end job under Widmerpool's obsessive military bureaucracy, and the comedy of being a living, observing being. General Liddament is a joy, as is our first view of Finn (VC), and the blitz evening in London, with its tragedy, ignorance and superficial gaiety, is a an absolute masterpiece. Here is what I wrote about it last time through, and here are a few apercus from this reading:
I have absolutely no histrionic talent, none at all, a constitutional handicap in almost all the undertakings of life; but then, plenty of actors have little enough. "Told me you were a reader ... didn't you?" "Yes, I am. I read quite a lot." I no longer attempted to conceal the habit, with all its undesirable implications. At least admitting to it put one in a recognisably odd category of persons from whom less need be expected than the normal run. Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward - in contrast to love - is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events which had, for example, come between Stringham and myself. (on Browning's Child Roland To The Dark Tower Came) Like everything that's any good, it has about twenty different meanings.
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