Masterful Music and Muddled Magjc

...Writers & Writing MASTERFUL MUSIC AND MUDDLED MAGIC BY PEARL K. BELL At a time when so much new fiction reads as though it had been pounded out on a supersonic electric portable between a late lunch and an early martini, there is something hugely comforting about the very existence of a novelist like Anthony Powell For over two decades he has been working steadily, at his own leisurely pace and with undiminished brilliance, on the 12-volume roman fleuve to which he has given the Proustian title A Dance to the Music of Tune Since 1952, when A Question of Upbringing appeared, devotees of Powell's subtly constructed epic comedy have awaited each new installment as though it were a letter from home packed with fascinating news of old friends and enemies, past acquaintances and one-tune lovers It scarcely matters that Powell has limited the scope of his intricate narrative to a small and incestuously intermarrying, interdivorcing segment of upper-middle-class English society and its bohemian, aristocratic, intellectual, political, or merely raffish hangers-on His principal characters have known each other since Eton and Oxford and, except for the exigencies of war and the diversions of travel, have never ventured far from their ritually circumscribed haunts in Mayfair, Blooms-bury, Chelsea, and some grand country houses outside London What counts is the singular authenticity and wit of Powell's vision his flawlessly patient scrutiny of manners as the token of character, his deft choice of gossipy anecdote as an indispensable means of probing the mysteries of sexual, social and political power, his tenacious curiosity about the slow changes in human fortune over decades of public and personal erosion and upheaval, the penetrating reach of his sardonically observant sensibility While Powell has earned Nicholas Jenkins, his autobiographical narrator, from schoolboy to middle-aged novelist over the span of 11 volumes--from the frenetic innocence of the 1920s and the political seductions of the 1930s through the rubble of the War and its aftermath--his readers have gradually discerned the meticulously deliberate design behind the deceptively random flow The scheme is not philosophical, unlike Proust, Powell is indifferent to abstract theories about the nature of time (A character remarks in Casanova's Chinese Restaurant "It takes a bit of tune to realize that all the odds and ends milling about round one are the process of living") But he is deeply intrigued--stoically, not morbidly--by intimations of mortality, and only now m the 11th volume, Temporary Kings (Little, Brown, 280 pp , $6 95), can we see how premeditatedly he has been approaching his present dark preoccupation For here, in terms that are unusually explicit for Powell, we are plunged into a forbidding arena of sexual mischief and perversity, all of it inexorably linked with death The time is 1958, and the place is Venice, where Nick Jenkins is attending a cultural conference at which impecunious intellectuals can briefly live like "one of those temporary kings in The Golden Bough, everything at their disposal for a year or a month or a day--then execution'' Death in Venice...

...Though Powell sounds the keynote facetiously m the opening pages, he returns to it more solemnly later on, when he describes a Tiepolo ceiling in an opulent palazzo The painting depicts the Lydian legend of King Candaules, who invited his officer, Gyges, to spy on the Queen's nakedness, she, then, ordered Gyges to kill Candaules and replace him as King Powell, with ironic parallels and differences, craftily retells the story on a 20th-century human scale, substituting the politician Kenneth Widmerpool and his venomous wife for the legendary figures The pompous monster Widmerpool has been rhythmically moving in and out of Nick's life since their schooldays 40 years ago But in Temporary Kings it is his beautiful curse of a wife, Pamela, who has the central role "It was Death she liked," Nick realizes with awful clarity A French lover dies in her embrace while Widmerpool, at her urging, plays the voyeur Flamboyant to the last, Pamela eventually swallows a fistful of sleeping pills, joins another lover and expires in flagrante delicto With death greedily consuming so many in Temporary Kings, we begin to hear, under the elegantly laconic comic tone that prevails, a menacing rumble The dance to the music of tune has become a danse macabre Densely allusive, shocking, often marvelously funny, Temporary Kings is nonetheless flawed The saddest novel in the series, it is also the most mechanical In the final pages, Nick and Widmerpool, meeting as always by chance, watch a rally of vintage cars driven by aging specters from their common past tootle across Westminster Bridge m a crepuscular drizzle But this metaphor of the heartlessly farcical melancholy of time is too rigged And throughout, Powell has overworked the symbolic echoes of the ancient legend m the Widmerpool tragicomedy When the sweat of effort is visible in a writer so coolly nimble, it is an unsettling reminder that dancers grow lame, that time must have a stop and, worst of all, that there is only one more volume to come and then adieu' By his own count, Powell has drawn some 300 characters into the loosely knit texture of A Dance to the Music of Time, yet the architectonic authority of his imagination maintains this novelistic crowd m precisely the relaxed order--or controlled disorder--he means it to have at every given moment Angus Wilson's desperately ambitious new novel, As If By Magic (Viking, 415 pp , $8 95), is the opposite--a sprawling confusion, a fatty excrescence of shifting scenes and characters that is not in the least like the solid Victorian-type fiction he has been writing with unfashionable zeal since the mid-'50s Although Wilson's gift for broad satirical malice remains very much in evidence, he has completely failed to define his attitudes toward his two principals--it is never clear whether we are meant to love or despise them--and the reader, instead of being engaged in their stones, merely flounders in tedious perplexity The first of these blurred protagonists is Hamo Lang-muir, a brilliant homosexual plant geneticist who has developed a high-yield strain of nee, known as Magic, that promises a miraculous solution to the hunger of underdeveloped countries The second is his hippy goddaughter, Alexandra Grant, who longs for a spiritual magic that will nourish the soul neglected by her rich, liberal Hampstead parents As If By Magic takes Hamo and Alexandra on separate journeys around the globe--he to inspect the progress of his Magic in Africa and Asia, she, with her raggle-taggle troupe of drop-outs, in search of Nirvana Along the way, Hamo is consistently frustrated in his bumbling attempts to snare the beautiful boys who catch his eye, but in Borneo, he is shocked to the depths of his decorous British soul by a gathering of dirty old colonial pederasts He is dismayed as well to learn during his travels that Magic has only made things worse for the peasants by throwing many of them out of work With elephantine irony, just before he is brutally murdered by an angry mob m Goa as the instrument of their woe, Hamo is converted to the cause of the Third World poor against their Magic-promoting governments Unfortunately, by lavishing such an excess of patronizing slapstick on his hero, Wilson reduces Hamo to an unreal caricature, and turns Hamo's story into a campy Cook's tour of Asia that is unredeemed by the obligatory liberal light at the end of the tunnel Wilson's reliance on overcontrived mannerisms makes an even worse hash of Alexandra's pilgrimage She and her neurotic comrades wander first to Morocco, then, m neat conjunction, to Goa, starving and meditating, they slouch toward the promised mystical land of the Bhagavad-Gita, hoping to be reborn But Wilson, incredibly, has them talking like prissy graduate students--the apt quotation from Lawrence and Tolkien, Dickens and Jane Austen, always at the ready And most preposterously, the novelist-magician ultimately transforms Alexandra into a do-gooding Cinderella She inherits immense wealth, proves to have a canny head for business, and will live serenely ever after The imperious fulfillment of Hamo's aborted humanitarianism, "she knew that no magic spells could solve her problems " What we know at the end of this foolish muddle of a book is that a slapdash formula which incongruously mixes a bitchy satire, homosexual in-jokes, a minicourse in rice-growing, portraits of life among the hippies, and a sentimental fairy tale with a fraudulent happy ending cannot solve a novelist's problem...