A Question of Upbringing

Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time, 1634-1636

By Anthony Powell, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1995

The first novel in Powell's twelve-volume cycle entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, after a history painting by Poussin.  Powell's work represents a sort of High Tory take on the 20th century, and he is frequently cited as a British Proust.  I read The Guardian's "Digested Read" by John Crace before actually plunging into the text.  This means I could only read Powell's work as parody.  Describing the opening of the novel, Crace is beyond brilliant:

For some reason, a glimpse of the lower orders warming themselves at a brazier in the street made me think of the ancient world. These classical projections in turn suggested a Poussin scene, where Time gives shape to the steps of the dance that had hitherto felt unfamiliar. So where better to start my meandering epic than at the school - there is only one so I need not be so vulgar as to name it - where these classical allusions first became choate.

Oh, yes, this is the right tone to take with Powell.  The narrator sees men at work in the street, this reminds him of the ancient world, his thoughts shift to Poussin's painting, and all this end with a mediatation on his life at Eton. The narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, is a snob who likes housemates Charles Stringham and Peter Templer, they are rich and elegant, but not Kenneth Widmerpool, he is a grunting little striver.  Eventually Jenkins lands at university (either Oxford or Cambridge) where his social life centers around Professor Sillery's tea parties.  This is England in the 1920s.  I enjoyed the pacing of the novel.  Events proceed at an even pace that isn't languid but denotes a modern, pre-digital era when mothers drove up from London to have lunch in their son's rooms.