Hello world, from Life: Full Colour!
8 January 2019
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The eleventh volume of Anthony Powell’s masterful Dance to the Music of Time sequence opens in Venice where the narrator, Nick Jenkins, has been lured to attend a literary conference. Among his fellow delegates are the erudite but rather intimidating academic, Dr Emily Brightman, and Russell Gwinnett, an American professor who has taken a sabbatical break to work on a literary biography of the talented yet personally disordered novelist, X Trapnel, (based upon Julian Maclaren-Ross) whose chaotic life formed much of the backdrop to the previous volume, [Books Do Furnish A Room].
Gwinnett advises Jenkins that he is particularly eager to meet Pamela Widmerpool (now more properly addressed as ‘Lady Widmerpool’, following her husband’s receipt of a life peerage), who had been instrumental in Trapnel’s decline following her wanton destruction of the manuscript of his unfinished novel “Profiles in String”. This encounter duly happens as the senior attendees of the conference are invited to visit the palazzo where the Widmerpools are staying. One of the principal attractions of the palace is a ceiling painted by Tiepolo which depicts the story of Candaules and Gyges, as recounted by Herodotus. Candaules, King of Lydia, had frequently boasted of the beauty of his wife, and arranges for his friend Gyges to lurk in their chamber where he can see for himself. The particular poignancy of this situation revolves around the fact that nakedness was a near taboo among the Lydians. The Queen, however, glimpses Gyges watching her naked form and subsequently confronts him, telling him that he must either kill her husband and marry her himself (en secondes noces), or she would arrange for him to be killed, thus either formalising his illicit knowledge of her nakedness, or removing him all together. Not surprisingly Gyges opts for the former course, and after killing Candaules and marrying the Queen, he ruled the Lydians for forty years.
Pamela is intrigued by the painting and seizes on its voyeuristic theme as an opportunity to denounce some of her husband’s own unsavoury habits. Widmerpool is surprisingly unfazed by revelations as he has other worries to consider. At the time of his arrival in Venice he had been denounced in scurrilous elements of the British Press who had learned that he had been under investigation on suspicion of having been a Communist spy with connections to Burgess and Maclean.
Meanwhile Jenkins gets to visit his former boss, Daniel Tokenhouse, who turns out to have developed extreme left wing sympathies which have independently brought him into contact with Widmerpool. Pamela pursues, or is pursued by, several prospective suitors, including Gwynnett and Louis Glober, a larger than life American film producer, who is not without his own sexual idiosyncrasies.
Powell manages all this with consummate ease, and right up to the end of the novel one is never quite sure whether or not we are going to witness Widmerpool’s final demise. Once again, Powell demonstrates his extraordinary ability to write a novel in which precious little actually happens yet throughout which the reader is kept at a pitch of excitement and expectation comparable to the most rip-roaring thriller.
5 stars.
This review originally appeared on LibraryThing