The Bones Begin to Stir
CURLEY, DANIEL
The Bones Begin to Stir THE VALLEY OF BONES By A nthony Powell Little, Brown. 243 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by DANIEL CURLEY Author, "A Stone Man, Yes" Until now each new Anthony Powell novel...
...This could very easily be the conclusion of a novel, but only of a novel that has been drifting toward this moment from the beginning...
...This conclusion points very clearly to the character of the book as an element in a longer work...
...In contrast to Gwatkin is Lieutenant Kedward, a man who never confuses facts with dreams...
...This man is a success by most standards, but Nick has another touchstone as well, this time a quotation from the French general Lyautey...
...That center is the story of Nick's company commander, Rowland Gwatkin...
...He finds himself in a Welsh battalion among strangers who are scarcely less strange than his oldest friends...
...From the opening images of private disaster in family history to the final image of historic disaster, Powell keeps the elements of his story in harmonious relationship...
...Gwatkin sees the army as high adventure...
...There is even the cliff-hanging atmosphere of an old-time serial...
...The old faces appear only incidentally, on a leave, for example, but they are as fine as ever...
...Drill and paper work and protocol are all glamorous to him...
...The instability of the family past has reflected itself in Nick's Uncle Giles, a wonderful comic character who died in the previous volume...
...In documenting this discussion of the disciplines of war, Powell introduces Alfred de Vigny in an unexpected aspect, as a commentator on militarism and the nature of authority...
...Dicky Umfraville, to his own amazement, is about to marry yet again and to an even more unlikely woman than ever, someone we know well, of course...
...The reader of Powell also does well to stay light on his feet, ready to laugh and ready to cry, and ready to feel totally engaged in all his humanity, avoiding always the oversimplification of such people as Kedward: "Kedward dealt in realities...
...Widmerpool was very clearly "not one of us," and now he is revealed at last as one of them...
...Almost the last words are: "I saw that I was now in Widmerpool's power...
...Is Stringham still drinking so much...
...This part of Nick's history, however, is not the dramatic center of this volume...
...The drift of the series has paralleled the historic drift toward the debacle of 1940...
...and, as the ripples of the story spread out, it is Widmerpool, and finally the forces for which Widmerpool stands, who lack this quality...
...This past—family and national—has produced this present, the present of the dry bones referred to in Ezekiel...
...It is simply that the first essential of an officer is gaiety...
...He has even visited the ruinous sites of their homes...
...There may be a million men dead, but it was only Robert Tolland we knew and Jones, D. Thus it is Nick's feeling at this moment, "a disagreeable, sinking feeling" about Widmerpool, that makes the fate of Paris real...
...We are concerned for these people because they are all involved with our own deepest hopes and fears, and the news is always touched with an elegant sense of irony that makes everything—both fears and hopes—bearable...
...Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, is caught up in World War II...
...Nick sums up the position with the comment: "The whole point of soldiering is its bloody boring side...
...The words which actually end the book mark only the arrival of an hour we know must pass: "On the news that night, motorized elements of the German army were reported as occupying the outskirts of Paris...
...He sees himself as some sort of good soldier, even a military saint...
...He is the world gone wrong...
...There is much to be said for persons who traffic in this corn, provided it is always borne in mind that the so-called realities present, as a rule, only a small part of the picture...
...Can these bones five...
...Each book answers questions about people we can't forget: What is the latest triumph of the unspeakable Widmerpool...
...The Valley of Bones, however, is another matter...
...And, Nick, what of you yourself, are you all right...
...Indeed, Gwatkin's problem as a leader is that he tends to slip into dreams of glory and romance when he should be paying attention to exactly that bloody boring side...
...Jimmy Brent, who appeared only once about five or six volumes back, suddenly turns up and tells a long story that casts completely new light on people and events we have surely not forgotten...
...And at the very end Widmerpool is back again, in complete charge of everything including Nick...
...Vigny is speaking of the army in time of peace, but his words apply as well to Nick's training center in Northern Ireland...
...His book Servitude et Grandeur Militaire provides one of the touchstones by which we may judge the meaning of this episode...
...In a sense, of course, the entire "Music of Time" series has been drifting toward this moment, but not toward this moment as a conclusion, a final comment on the state of the world...
...In this installment of "The Music of Time" we see the bones beginning to stir, but it is too early yet to be able to tell whether Powell intends to make the complete affirmation...
...Fortunately we know that the world survived the fall of France, but it remains to be seen how Nick Jenkins will survive the rise of Widmerpool...
...The school boys thought he was funny, and he seemed funny still in his later grappling for power, but now he is no more funny than the man with the small mustache for whom he is the stand-in...
...At the outset Nick finds himself stationed in the very area in which his family long ago originated...
...Statistics never mean as much to us as the individual case...
...Reviewed by DANIEL CURLEY Author, "A Stone Man, Yes" Until now each new Anthony Powell novel has been like a letter from a friend who has kept in touch with the old crowd...
...The question echoed from the prophet is this...
...The answer in Ezekiel is that they do five, that they clothe themselves in flesh and come together, an exceeding great army...
...In listening to Dicky Umfraville recount the history of all his marriages, Nick reveals what seems to be the proposed acceptable attitude: "Tragedy might at any moment give way to farce, so that the listener had always to keep his wits about him...
...On the other hand, this sudden apotheosis of Widmerpool in conjunction with the German victory tells us what has been wrong with him all along—for there was clearly something wrong with him from the moment he appeared at school so many volumes back, the most unpromising scholar since Charles Bovary, but what it was specifically has been waiting this long to be clarified...
...Buster Foxe appears, together with most of the Tollands...
...Gwatkin and Kedward in the world of the company are singularly without gaiety...
...Who is Sir Magnus Donners' current mistress...
...This conjunction of Nick's personal sense of disaster and the world disaster illuminates both...
...He speaks of the soldier as "a dedicated person, a sort of monk of war," committed to enduring all the pains of passive obedience...
Vol. 47 • November 1964 • No. 24
