“A continuous frieze in high relief, deep cut and detailed” (Evelyn Waugh)
POWELL, Anthony. A Dance to the Music of Time. London: Heinemann. 1962-1975.
8vo. Twelve volumes. Original red cloth lettered in gilt to spines on black lettering pieces, in the original James Broom Lynne jackets; light shelf-wear, small, closed tear to centre of jacket spine of At Lady Molly’s (this is also the only price-clipped volume); a lovely near fine set, in like wrappers.
An attractive complete uniform set of Powell’s masterpiece, one of the monuments of twentieth-century fiction in English; the first five volumes are reprints from the 1960s and 70s, the remaining seven are first printings; all are in nice examples of the wonderful Broom Lynne jackets.
The twelve volumes of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975, hold a special place in British fiction of the twentieth century. Comparisons with Proust’s great novel on a similar scale are inevitable, and both authors achieve effects that exploit the possibilities of breadth and depth opened up by the capaciousness of the form.
The sequence unfolds across more than half a century, between 1914 to 1971, each of the twelve parts at once a free-standing novel and an interconnected part of the whole. The sheer size of the canvas allows for the subtly traced, slowly evolving examination of the inner and outer life of its narrator Nicholas Jenkins, but also the manners and mores of twentieth-century England, or at least those facets of political, cultural and military life that Powell knew best (it is inevitably, if guardedly, a semi-autobiographical work). Observing this world in which “the more raffish elements of the establishment commingle with the upper echelons of bohemia”, Jenkins discerns “a pattern dictated by the rhythm of life” (ODNB), like the seasons in the Poussin painting from which Powell borrowed his title (that painting is described by Jenkins at the beginning of the first volume). The way the work unfolds invites these visual parallels, Powell’s biographer, Hilary Spurling, describing it as “in both real and fictional time like a Chinese scroll painting, a vast canvas streaked with violence and perturbation, suffused with humour, at once passionate and dispassionate, lyrical and absurd, almost disintegrating at points into gloom and chaos, rising at others to fierce, complex, brilliantly coloured climaxes.”
SKU: 2123945