July 1960
This is the fifth novel in the author’s series The Music of Time, and it is necessary to admit that I have not read any of its predecessors: an embarrassing admission, but possibly useful to you as, if you have read any of them, I feel that you will know whether you wish to read this one or not. Mr. Powell’s idiom and style, which are both personal and impeccable, have that air of establishment and mastery which imply that he has long found his language, and his method of aiming just off the bull’s-eye of his target in order to make sure that you’ve noticed exactly what it was, has been conducted to a fine art.
This novel takes place in the ‘thirties during the Spanish Civil War; the narrator, Jenkins, becomes friends with a composer called Moreland, who in turn has a morose friend - a music critic - called Maclintick, whose marriage is like a perpetual aftermath of an angry street accident. Moreland marries an actress and Jenkins has married Isobel Tolland, whose large, well-housed family also permeate this work. Events occur, but one has no feeling that the characters’ sense of reality hangs upon them - an interesting and unusual inversion of affairs and people in a novel. The latter are so absolutely and unobtrusively real that one has no sense of watching them, or even of meeting them on a series of occasions; one simply - after a few pages - is absorbed into their life - even the tempo does not seem to have the distinction between art and nature to which one has become accustomed. There is nothing boring in this apparently leisured disquisition, nor is one irritated by the way in which ‘dramatic moments’ are deliberately side-stepped, because the writing has a kind of gentle, sinuous power and a consistent degree of intelligence about it which simply commands acceptance, although, in retrospect, I was left with a hunger for some more passionate nature than I found in Mr. Powell’s ecology.