In 1951, after a twelve-year silence, Anthony Powell, who had produced several Waugh-like novels in the Thirties, published A Question of Upbringing, a gently witty and evocative meditation on the past in which Nicholas Jenkins, soon recognisable as a Powell self-portrait, reviews the course of his life from his late teens at Eton, through Oxford, and into the London social and literary scene of his early twenties and this century’s thirties. The novel, which was well received by the usual people—V. S. Pritchett, Cyril Connolly, Waugh himself—turned out to be the first instalment of an immense roman fleuve, entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, comprising twelve novels, the last of which, Hearing Secret Harmonies (William Heinemann, London, 1975), has now appeared. The first six, in two trilogies, cover the 1930s; there is a war trilogy; and a final trilogy in a rapidly developing time-span covers the post-war years up to the late Sixties. The series deserves attention, apart from any other reason, as probably the last major flourish in the long, honourable tradition of English social fiction.

The books are mostly about people meeting and trying to deal with one another—as friends, enemies, rivals, sexual partners, spouses. Jenkins develops and observes a network of relationships both tenuous and intense, friendships and loves that ripen and fade and fall. All this is presented in a huge casual anecdotal recit, a series of largely comic social encounters in which each character is present as himself or herself and also present as a social force, with the narrator’s voice providing the balancing clues about the situation.