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A Buyer's Market

This second novel in Anthony Powell's series, A Dance to the Music of Time, A Buyer's Market (1952), follows the characters to whom we were introduced in the first volume, A Question of Upbringing, as they leave school or university and begin looking for careers - or in some cases just jobs of any kind in the buyer's market of the title. Only so many plum spots are available and competition for attention and accomplishment ensues.

Widmerpool has settled into a job with Sir Magnus Donners that he sees as a stepping stone to a bigger future. He won't go far, however, if he keeps knocking over the statuary at Sir Magnus' estate. Jenkins, the narrator, is working as an editor at a small London publisher. Templer is making lots of money but we aren't entirely sure how, and Stringer, who also works for Sir Magnus, doesn't do much work and drinks too much.

We meet Mr Deacon, a painter, and his girlfriend, Gypsy Jones and we attend balls and house parties where the major characters keep running into one another. Jenkins again meets Templer's sister, Jean, a meeting that will be important in the future of the series.

A Question of Upbringing

Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time is a duodecology. (You don't run into one of those every day.) Like Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Snow's Strangers and Brothers, this roman-fleuve concerns itself with the passage of time and its effect on the work's primary characters.

Those primary characters, introduced in this first volume, A Question of Upbringing (1951), are four. The Jamesian narrator, Jenkins, shares many biographical aspects of Powell's own life. Templer and Stringham, Jenkins' friends from public school are respectively, a man of the world, even at age 18, and a romantic lad compared by the narrator to Elizabethan gentlemen in old paintings. The fourth character is the aptly named Widmerpool, a stiff and strange character, out of place wherever he goes, displaying tremendous self-discipline, and remaining ultimately undecipherable.

Time separates the four. Jenkins and Stringham attend university. After a time Stringham leaves to become a private secretary to a politician. Templer goes to work in the city, and Widmerpool finds employment with an important London firm. Time brings the characters together again in somewhat unexpected ways and places and separates them again.

The title of the collective novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, is self-evident but I have never figured out why Powell called this first novel A Question of Upbringing. From my point of view in the early 21st century on the west coast of North America, the upbringing of the four characters seems remarkably similar. Perhaps I'll figure this out as I read the later volumes.