The Acceptance World: Book Club

Why don't you change partners and dance with me

After the mumblings and fumblings of the first two books, The Acceptance World is the point where things really get going. After not really covering himself in glory in A Buyer’s Market, a more rounded (and for me, more likeable) Nick begins to appear here.

There are three highlights for me, other than the obvious delight of of Uncle Giles’ presence. First of all, the introduction of the supernatural into the series. Of course the whole conceit of Dance is that there’s something unseen linking our own life with those of certain others, but here with the introduction of the marvellous Mrs Erdleigh this idea leaps into the spotlight. As her remarkable powers of insight and reappearance in this volume suggest, Powell is interested in the theme of mysticism and will return to it in various ways in almost all the upcoming books.

Then there’s the meeting at the Ritz (for those of you with good memories, mentally bookmark the South American group as one of them may be of importance several books down the line in The Military Philosophers…). While the first two books have largely been about introducing the main characters in Nick’s life, in Acceptance we see people doing exactly what Nick describes in A Question of Upbringing about partners disappearing and reappeaing, “unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.”

While people tend to remind Powell of depictions in works of art, I find comparisons to films jump into my mind more frequently and in each reading I’ve made over the years I’ve always had the scene in the 1938 film Carefree when Fred Astaire is attempting to woo Ginger Rogers on the dance floor to Irving Berlin’s beautiful Change Partners. These are the, extremely appropriate, opening lyrics:

Must you dance every dance
With the same fortunate man.
You have danced with him since the music began.
Why don't you change partners and dance with me.

And here are Fred and Ginger in action:

Come on. They really don’t make ‘em like that any more.

And finally there’s the scene in which Widmerpool and Nick put a very drunk Stringham to bed. It’s hard to write about people who are drunk but Powell is bang on the money for me here, the reciting of lines from the end of the quite Stringham-ish Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (the part which deals with death…), the withering putdown of Widmerpool and their bedside struggle (“So these are the famous Widmerpool good manners, are they?”), and Stringham’s final sudden mood change. Even Nick laughs. I hooted. Incidentally, while the cringey Widmerpool speech at the Le Bas reunion dinner largely passed me by, an economist friend of mine who read it some years ago told me it was surprisingly modern and Keynesian, marking Kenneth out as something of an economic radical for the time. As always, it’s hard to get a real fix on Widmerpool.

A final thought. In terms of timelines, when is Nick writing? I’ve never really thought about this before, but this time round it’s struck me quite forcibly that they seem to be his memoirs, along the same kind of lines as Flashman’s via George MacDonald Fraser. In the first couple of books, Nick constantly makes reference to events which he only understands later. So “It was not until years later that the course matters took in this direction became more or less explicable to me” in Buyers, and “I had said nothing of Duport (who, as I was to discover years later, had a deep respect for ‘intelligence’)” in Acceptance. I have it in my head that at some point in the future the narration changes subtly from the current memoir style to more of a journalistic ‘in real time’ approach, but perhaps I’m wrong. I’m keeping an eye out for it in the same way that I’ve spent decades trying to work out exactly when Kay Harker falls asleep in The Box of Delights. It’s a wild life I lead.

By the way, look out for my next book which is technically out on April 10 but probably gracing the shelves of discerning booksellers from next week onwards. While There Is Tea There Is Hope is a jolly little illustrated history of tea in WWII, produced in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum and the fine folk at HarperCollins. It’s never too early to shop for Christmas.