Dance to the Music of Time – Third Movement

This is a lovely copy at a reasonable price and it arrived quickly from the USA

Beautiful cover, robustly bound.

Describes the war years. The narrator gets shafted from one miserable army post to the next dreary place. Uncle Giles dies in 1939, richer than expected. Widmerpool murders Stringham, sending him to Singapore in 1941, in spite of poor health. He kills Templer, sending him to Yugoslawia in 1945 - to meet a rebel group, whose funds had been downsized by Widmerpool. The mysterious soothsayer Myrna Erdleigh reappears, while cruise missiles crash into London. The even more enigmatic occultist Dr. Trelawney (Aleister Crowley) dies as a drug addict, but his cult will rebound in the 1970's, in Volume 4.

大河小説の第三部である。戦争のエピソードが面白い。そして、深い。原文は読みやすく、人間と社会について様々な思考に誘う。そして、優雅である。このような作品を古典と云うのだろう。登場人物に魅力があるのも好い。

Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time is an absolute masterpiece chronicling the decline of the English aristo class from WWI til the 1970s. Previous editions have covered an approximate decade but the third movement is more compact including only England's 6 war years. Jenkins is as enigmatic as ever: seemingly "in" but not "of" the class. As much an observer as a participant.And no, there is no "action" if one means cataclysmic events. But if you are interested in reading about a time, or place and how life unfolds a reader can't do better then these books.My one complaint is that Third Movement seems to drag a bit at points. The war brings together a motley assortment of folk: Gwatikin, Stayce and Blithel move in and out of the narrative with varying degrees of success. Powell's depiction of the banker in a heroic strut is pitch perfect and a wonderful example of the author's comic brilliance. Other characterizations felt less successful, but perhaps that is true only in comparison to the first two books. Mixing the interaction of different classes as war would felt a bit jarring but not doubt it is or was quite authentic.If you are looking for a series that patiently follows a character and a class through almost half a century of epic change, you can't do better than A Dance to the Music of Time: First, Second and Third Movements.