J.G. Links
It is hardly stretching a point to call Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time (12 volumes, Mandarin Paperbacks £3.99 each) a book of 1991. I read it straight through and until this year it would have been hard to borrow and almost impossible to buy the complete set. Read any other way a phenomenal memory would be needed, or at least a family tree, and even so much of the book's effective- ness would surely be lost. It generates its power from the slow but consistent development of the varied cast and its narrator's detachment as the events of some 40 years flow past him, leaving us knowing little more of him at the end than the beginning. There seemed to me a loss of grip in the final stages, exemplified by the failure at the end of its most
memorable character, Widmerpool, to carry any conviction. Powell is, at his best, a subtle and always a fastidious writer, and I (and the listener I read the series to) am grateful for a sense of having shared a life- long experience with him.
With so much reading time thus occupied I have no treasures to offer that readers might otherwise have missed — but I did think David Lodge's Paradise News (Seeker, £14.99) deserved a warmer wel- come than some of its critics gave it.
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