Uncredited, The New Statesman, 1 January 1964
Even Mr. Powell’s admirers have been beard to mutter recently that the tempo of The Music of Time has been becoming painfully slow. The first three volumes offered the excitement of a new fictional world, and the cohesion of Jenkins’s own developing personality and consciousness: one grew into the series with him and at his pace. In the detailed studies which followed particularly, perhaps, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, a sense of dawdling set in: the river had overflowed its banks, and was making pools which, interesting as they were, didn’t always bear such microscopic scrutiny.
It is a pleasure to report that in the first volume of the second sestet, describing Jenkins’s experiences as an infantry lieutenant in the early days of the war, the pace has picked up again; and the gentle, formal style is as authoritatively deployed as ever….
The positive side exists as well. Mr. Powell casts up endless surprises, but never despairs of finding in them some loose pattern, some variety of order. The intellect never lies down before the anomalies which comedy thrives on. Among other things, he has done something to restore the concept of character to the novel —or at any rate to prevent it from being dragged off-stage by the motley crew serving under Music, Ionesco, Kafka, and Camus—though even here his approach is oblique. Characteristics recur in his creations, as the characters themselves turn up in each other’s lives, with a regularity which seem half consistency, half coincidence: very gradually, an interlocking design builds up. His sense of character is nothing internal and fiercely individual, but social and functional: temperament expressed as a habitual role.
Uncredited, The Times, 5 March 1964
The big comic set-pieces are missing, the conversation is laconic, the style deliberately subdued—Mr. Powell is steering clear of comparison with [Waugh’s] Men at Arms. And yet, because war novels must invite comparisons, it might be said that when the trenches and bombs recede so far, the drabness of Army life may be too literally reflected without a Waugh-like extravagance from time to time. In forsaking the eccentrics of his idle 1930s, Mr. Powell does not so far quite succeed in demonstrating the idea that the warrior’s abnegation of thought and action still leaves as much room for colourful individuality.
Julian Symons, Times Literary Supplement, 5 March 1964
The action takes place in Wales and Northern Ireland, covers the period of the “Phoney war” and ends shortly after Dunkirk. Mr. Powell catches beautifully the boredom and purposelessness of military life at a home station, the sense that war itself is immensely unreal and far away and that only the bickerings inside the battalion and occasional visits from the Divisional Commander (he is concerned that the men do not eat porridge) are real. The news of actual death in battle, like that of Nick’s brother-in-law Robert Tolland, seems almost incongruous: as in musical chairs, the piano stops suddenly, someone is left without a seat petrified for all time in their attitude of that particular moment. The balance-sheet is struck there and then, a matter of luck whether its calculations have much bearing, one way or the other, on the commerce conducted.
It would have been possible, and even easy, to confine The Valley of Bones within the limits of battalion life, but anybody familiar with this novel sequence will know that this would have ignored the counterpointing of scenes and characters, past and present, that is inherent in the whole conception. Nick is sent on a training course at Aldershot and while on a weekend leave visits his wife’s sister Frederica, who has under her roof a houseful of characters met in earlier volumes. Nick sees his wife, Isobel, whose first baby is impending, and learns that Frederica has become engaged to Dicky Umfraville. Robert Tolland is having an affair with Stringham’s sister, Flavia Wisebite, and Buster Foxe, whose marriage is breaking up. put in an appearance … but enough has been said to indicate that this interpolation is not managed successfully. For one thing the pressure and interest of the Army scenes is so strong that a reader wants to get back to them….
Malcolm Muggeridge, Evening Standard, 3 March 1964
Anthony Powell wrote somewhere, or perhaps remarked to me once, that what he liked best was looking out of a window. Like Bertie Wooster (whom he resembles in no other respect), he watches the traffic going up one side of the road and down the other with a mixture of resignation, wry amusement, and occasional subdued ecstasy at the diversity and fascination of human beings and their lives. Such is the essential mood out of which the successive volumes of his The Music of Time (The Valley of Bones is the seventh) emerge.
Yet within this mood there are, as it were, three levels—a topmost one where the “smart” characters like Templer and Stringham reside:;a bottom or earthv one where the comedy takes place, and grotesques like Widmerpool, and. the latest comer, Bithel, disport; and in between, the humdrum world whence the narrator. Jenkins, surveys the other two.
This last is, indeed, so humdrum, so photographically exact, that it can be as flat and tedious as life itself. The scene in which The Valley of Bones is set—infantry training during the 1939-40 phoney war—in any case, lacks nothing in inherent drabness….
A comparison with the Waugh one in his wartime trilogy (Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender) covering the same circumstances but at a somewhat higher regimental level, is inescapable. The difference lies in the nature of the narrator.
Waugh’s is more involved, in the sense that he actually believes for a while that the war is about something: his snobbishness is more dynamic, even crazy.
Powell’s narrator just takes the war for granted, as he does existing social arrangements: his snobbishness has no revivalist or mystical edge to it, but is quiet, steadfast, as it were Anglican in its flexibility and tenacity. It is Snobbishness Ancient and Modern as compared with a Gregorian chant; the Thirty-Nine Articles of Snobbishness rather than an illuminated missal.
There is even, at the beginning of The Valley of Bones, an echo of another Waugh book, Brideshead Revisited. Jenkins reports for duty in a place where his ancestors have lived and thriven, going back, it seems, to legendary kings. The Jenkins have thus a more ancient, if less definitive, lineage than Lord Sebastian Flyte. With them. It is a case of Stonehenge Revisited.
Mr. Powell’s unique talent, again like Mr. Waugh’s, finds its best and fullest expression in the comedy scenes. These tend to take the same form. Some practical misfortune or gaucherie illustrates the tragicomic disparity between what a Widmerpool or a Bithel aspires to be and what he is.
Brian Moore, The San Francisco Examiner, 30 August 1964
In the closing pages of The Valley of Bones, we are reintroduced to Widmerpool, the pompous misfit, who has again risen to power, this time in the army. At novel’s end Jenkins is under Widmerpool’s orders.
Widmerpool is considered by some critics to be Powell’s greatest comic creation, but to one reader, at least, there is something contrived and unreal in each of his appearances. Perhaps it is because the author obviously bears him no affection and thus fails to bring him to life in the brilliant manner of General Conyers, an intelligent and appealing figure who in his old age studies psychoanalysis.
Style is still all in Jenkins’ world. The general has it, of course. But then so does Charles Stringham who is an alcoholic; Peter Templer, a coarse stockbroker; Barnby, a lecherous painter, and Moreland, a moody composer. Style in Jenkins’ world implies a fondness for aphorisms, a sureness with women and, above all, an unwillingness to show one’s ambition plain.
Widmerpool lacks these attributes. As a character he is a descendant of Billy Bunter, the fat, greedy, graceless schoolboy, jeered at for generations in English schoolboy weeklies. He is a fool who reveals his ambition, whose face cannot hide his emotions. As Jenkins puts it in an earlier novel, in his characteristic, half-sneering tone: “I had seen him [Widmerpool] with just that expression on his face, waiting for the start of one of the [school] races for which he used so unaccountably to enter: finishing, almost without exception, last or last but one.”
This, then, is the key to Jenkins’ code. One does not do things in which one might cut a poor figure. In addition, one is doomed from the start if, like Widmerpool, one’s father sold artificial manure for a living. Yet as the scries of novels rambles into its second phase the author seems bent on showing that, unaccountably, the boy who showed up for his first term wearing the wrong sort of overcoat may assume a position of power in that frivolous yet minatory universe which Jenkins so much admires. If this is so, one can only forecast that in the remaining five books of the series Jenkins’ sneer will become even more alarming to behold.
Benjamin de Mott, Saturday Review of Literature, 1 September 1964
In several of its chapters, The Valley of Bones is a less than wholly satisfying work. It gives evidence that the author will not be able to maintain contact with his people in the period of the war except by lapsing into flat undramatized statement; the effort to keep the reader in touch with characters seen in earlier volumes produces talk that resembles the opening scenes of Elizabethan history plays. It should also be said that Gwatkin is very nearly the sole energy in the book; the figures roundabout the Captain are pallid, and the relatively inanimate quality of the walk-ons and props serves, by contrast, as a reminder of the all-devouring strength of creation met in the classical comic novels of the last century. And, finally, there are times when this novelist’s habit of expressing moral judgments in aesthetic terms (“coarseness of texture” and the like) seems needlessly timid or clubmanish. But the clubman is rarely visible for periods longer than a half-minute. Throughout the present performance, Anthony Powell is seen most often as a first-rate entertainer. But he appears too as an artist, one who seems almost single-handedly to be keeping alive the idea of Living Likenesses. And at his best he is a swift, laughing, charitable, beautifully intelligent observer: a writer who knows who he is, what he believes, and why he is writing (to discover the meaning of his past, for his own entertainment and that of others). The progress of The Music of Time is among the best pieces of luck England has had since the end of the war.