The Kindly Ones: Book Club

"The fact is most people have not the smallest idea what is going on around them"

When my friend Emma read the Dance a few years ago, she mentioned her favourite characters on a Facebook post. I offered Dr Trelawney as one of mine and naturally finished my comment with ‘The Essence of All is the Godhead of the True’. A few moments later another of her friends simply added in reply ‘The Vision of Visions Heals the Blindness of Sight’. Anthony Powell Geeks, Assemble!

Rereading anything is intriguing, what you remember and what you don’t. I write about this in my – apologies for dreadful plug – new book out next month, ‘My Year of Reading Welshly’ and quote Lone Dove writer and bibliophile Larry McMurtry who said about the experience of returning to old favourites “How nice to be able to return to what won’t change.” Except of course it does change. In this case, the Seven Deadly Sins dressing up episode at Stourwater (Kingsgate in Broadstairs, pictured top, is one potential inspiration for the castle) was lodged in my mind as a lot more carnal, and while Donners’ role in it is still slightly sinister and the whole thing quite unsettling, I remember him as being much more manipulative. Such is memory. Or the perspective of a 56-year-old compared to a 46-year-old and a 24-year-old.

Indeed, even on this my third read through of the series I’m still not quite sure if the reference to the Kindly Ones is supposed to be a general nod towards the coming maelstrom of war or if Powell is directing our sight towards some of the main characters as disruptive personalities. Billson? Gypsy Jones? Betty Templer? Matilda? Certainly we see Jean in a rather different light. As Moreland – as much of a mouthpiece for Powell as Nick – said in the previous book, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant: “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows what is probable. The fact is most people have not the smallest idea what is going on around them.” More specifically in TKO, he notes that “Love means such different things to different people”. Nick must feel very seen.

Certainly, Moreland is not only in decline but in this volume in full exposition mode about the Dance’s central conceit, our lack of agency in engaging with our various Dance partners in life: “Valéry asks why one has been summoned to this carnival,’ Moreland once said, ‘but it’s more like blind man’s buff. One reels through the carnival in question, blundering into persons one can’t see, and, without much success, trying to keep hold of a few of them.”

What I do think is often overlooked in any discussion of Dance is how witty so much of it is. The short story maestro V. S. Pritchett suggested that Dance­ was like Proust translated by P. G. Wodehouse and there’s a strong sense of Bertie-style farce in the scene when Trelawney is stuck in the bathroom at Albert’s boarding house, discussing the meaning of life with Duport, which Nick describes as a most bizarre experience.

I also smiled broadly in The Kindly Ones at Nick’s lengthy assessment of the much lamented Uncle Giles’ military career and his appointments.

“Indeed, the Queen’s good-heartedness in herself greeting him so warmly was as touching as her error of judgment was startling. There was something positively ingenuous in singling out Uncle Giles for the repose of confidence, accepting him so wholly at his own valuation. No doubt the Queen had been badly advised in the first instance. She must have been vexed and disappointed. The Queen’s faith in human nature appeared boundless for, extraordinary as the royal whim might seem, she had indeed been pleased to appoint Uncle Giles to higher rank, instead of quietly - and far more wisely - dispensing with his services at the very first available opportunity.”

My feeling is that this is the most human of the sequence thus far, with Nick’s character in particular coming more sharply into focus. Yes, there is all the familiar stuff about ‘action’ and ‘will’ (Conyers, Trelawney, Miss Weedon, Widmerpool passim) but the various little love triangles make it much less of a literary philosophical exercise and more of a story. What I think doesn’t work at all is the jarring introduction of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Powell tends to avoid ‘real life’ other than references to art, and this sudden intrusion of the outside world feels like the wallop of a blunt instrument, even delivered as a throwaway Gilesism.

A final note, the book is dedicated to biographer Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer (1906-1969). He was a close friend of Powell’s from Oxford days, godfather to Powell’s son Tristram, and the owner of Felbrigg Hall near Norfolk which he bequeathed to the National Trust. Powell valued Ketton-Cremer’s comments on the proofs of his books and said he returned them “never without making improvement”.

Next, The Valley of Bones, and a whole new cast list.