ABSTRACT
The most ambitious venture in post-war English fiction was brought to a triumphant conclusion in 1975. This was Anthony Powell’s novel in twelve volumes, A Dance to the Music o f Time. An unfolding o f English upper-class and upper-Bohemian life, extending over more than forty years in time (and twenty-five years in the writing), it is too subtle, contrived and self-aware to be described as a roman-fleuve. N o English novelist has matched Powell’s ability to achieve an intricate intertwining o f art and reality. The critic John Bayley has remarked that ‘nothing shows the complete originality o f Powell’s technique more than the way his fiction imitates memoir, and almost in a double sense, like a trompe-Voeil painting’, so that the novel becomes ‘an anecdote arranging itself in the elaborate composition o f a picture’.
