Conclusion: Come Dancing with Powell

Abstract

‘I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet,’ announces John Fowles’s narrator in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. So does the narrator of A Dance to the Music of Time. Yet the sequence does not bear any signs of having been devised in an ‘age of suspicion’; it is written in a classic mode inherited from the nineteenth century, it partakes of a reaction against experiment. The appeal of Anthony Powell’s works is of a very — some would say of a suspiciously — traditional, even obsolete sort: for him, the novel is no disembodied vehicle for expressing ideas or for capturing tropisms, these extremely elusive inner movements that exist on the frontiers of consciousness. Characters are not viewed as a distracting factor, they are not made barely visible and as anonymous as possible. On the contrary, Powell unashamedly rehabilitates them and exploits to the full the aim extolled by Balzac in his preface to La Comédie humaine: ‘faire concurrence a l’état civil’, or by Arnold Bennett: ‘The foundation of good fiction is character creating, and nothing else’.¹ For Powell, the character still ‘occupie[s] the place of honour’, is still ‘endowed with every asset, the recipient of every attention’.²