Simon Raven, The Observer, 13 October 1968
There has always been a note of threnody beating in the background of Mr. Powell’s Music of Time, and in this volume, the ninth of the series and the third about World War II, it becomes the dominating theme:
. . The dark waters of the Thames below, the beauty of the day, brought to mind the lines about Stetson and the ships at Mylae, how death had undone so many…. Barnby was no longer available to repaint his frescoes. Death had undone him. It looked as if death might have undone Stringham too….
And it has certainly undone Peter Templer, left to die without weapons or supplies in a far country because he has been fighting for a resistance movement of an unfashionable political brand. It is even possible that Widmerpool, Templer’s old schoolmate, had a hand in that. For betrayal as well as death stalks through these pages. The Government blows cold on its tried ally, Prince Theodoric; the British Field-Marshal (never ask me who) is ready to turn on the Belgian Partisans and shoot them if they don’t toe the line.
Yet despite the treachery and the yawning graves, there is comedy here as never before in all this series; not need we be surprised at that, for gaiety has always been the most natural reaction to the rumbling of the death-carts.
Anthony Curtis, The Sunday Telegraph, 13 October 1968
The atmosphere of the Whitehall of 1942-5, of those hierarchical offices sealed off from each other as much as the outside world, in which the destinies of hundreds of men in faraway countries were settled in a smoke-filled conference room, has been caught with assiduous perfectionism.
This has involved Mr. Powell in a supporting cast of characters who make their débuts at this late stage, masses of officers, Belgians, Czechs, Poles, janitors, drivers, tenants, army lawyers, and so on, in addition to all the old friends whose fortunes we are eager to have brought up to date. The point is, presumably, that the common cause of war overlays one’s permanent relations with a great many temporary ones, nonetheless intimate and revealing while they last.
But once this point has been taken it does make for a very crowded book. I constantly found myself being reminded of those illusionists who spin plates on a stockade of supple billiard cues and while you hold your breath lest the earlier plates should stop spinning and crash to the ground they are busy setting innumerable new ones in motion. Mr. Powell struck me as having this time to do rather too much haring back and forth across the stage jogging all his wobbling plates back into life.
Paul Scott, The Daily Telegraph, 17 October 1968
The Military Philosophers ends the trilogy within the sequence devoted to Hitler’s war. No one has caught better the fatigues-and-inspection atmosphere of the compulsory charades that enlivened that six-year confrontation of amateur and professional preservers of the national honour.
In this book Jenkins has risen in rank and employment to the military-diplomatic fringes of Whitehall, where Widmerpool (wouldn’t’ we have guessed?) is already dug-in, bucking for his red hat, and Stringham’s pretty but bad-tempered niece. Off-stage, in those bleak theatres where the masks of comedy and tragedy were less easily distinguished, Templar is dead, and so is the poet Stringham, who said in the last book that being killed is awfully chic.
Always keen to convey enthusiasm for Powell, I find it increasingly difficult to discuss his work in terms the uninitiated will understand, At this three-quarters finished stage of the one English novel said to rival Proust’s (a fair comparison) the best recommendation a reviewer can make to outsiders is that they should come in. I don’t think it matters greatly where: each volume is a self-contained and open-ended pleasure. A sustained and orderly study of the whole, when it is finished, is a bonus we can look forward to.
Anonymous reviewer, Times Literary Supplement, 17 October 1968
The Military Philosophers, bafflingly detailed and superficially bewildering, shows considerable fineness of observation, and firm control of a scheme: the demonstration of the essential continuity in human character, “the sequence of inevitable sameness”. The old characters decline and die, or assert themselves and survive, whichever is appropriate. For Widmerpool, not surprisingly, war is simply the continuation of personal aggrandisement by other means. Very interestingly, neither Widmerpool nor Mr. Powell’s major new creation, the appalling Pamela Flitton, is treated humorously here: grave issues of motive and responsibility are raised by Widmerpool’s indirect implication in the deaths of both Stringham, whose money he ironically inherits, and Templer, with whom Pamela has been involved. This is a theme of unaccustomed grimness which Mr. Powell explores with a brilliantly suggestive obliqueness. The ludicrous gyrations of Jenkins’s acquaintances have turned (as they always might have done) into more sober and lifelike movements. Comedy seems only an incidental. In this sense, after eight volumes of his sequence, Mr. Powell’s is still a developing talent.
Francis Hope, New Statesman, 18 October 1968
There are plenty of ridiculous incidents in this book (“will delight regular fans” and all that), since the combination of war and foreigners permits misunderstanding and mishap to run riot. But they are sad incidents, too, not only because of the dry, Eliotesque melancholy of Mr. Powell’s prose, but because they represent the frustration, in most cases, of a decent ordering impulse; and their consequences can be literally fatal.
The greatest disorder of all — one that creates a new order, or at least pattern, of its own — is sex. Mr. Powell writes extraordinarily well about this, by a process of indirection. He emphasises its power by dwelling on its social consequences: people not only go to bed, but forgo money, abandon careers and leave homes in order to do so. And the ATS driver (since no apparent diversion is ultimately wasted) turns out to be an instrument of this chaos, sulkily sleeping with almost everyone from Duport (“I only stuffed her once. Against a shed in the back parts of Cairo airport.”) to Prince Theodoric. She is a marvellous creation, largely by having no character at all, only a sexual destiny. As one observer remarks: “Giving men hell is what Miss Flitton likes.” She ends this book, with the usual cross-referencing economy, married to Widmerpool: not Venus and Mars, but Venus and the god of that indestructible Will which Widmerpool embodies. One can scent disaster, and look forward to the next volume. The author’s long triumphant march continues.
Norman Shrapnel, The Guardian, 18 October 1968
The Military Philosophers brings us, among wartime fringe units of the Army, organised from subterranean retreats below Whitehall, and Powell achieves startling effects with his sleep-walking air and sustained lack of emphasis. It is one of the most individual tones of voice in contemporary novel-writing, and one of the most artful.
In spite of all those discreet modulations, nobody can say that Powell understates. He can be positively operatic: in fact, at one point he relates his bureaucratic underworld to the realm of the Nibelungen and carries the conceit to quite elaborate lengths. He fashions his style with great suppleness to cope with the cross-currents of background, mood, and narrative. It is a style that has the echoes, hesitancies, and evasions of real speech and thought. He is bright when occasion demands, flat when flatness is called for, even pompous when it seems appropriate (as when he writes about “tenebrous side-turnings off the main road of military operations”). Along one “of those side-turnings, inevitably, we meet Widmerpool: now Colonel Widmerpool, OBE, a Military Assistant Secretary.
It is comedy quite without belly-laughs. The writing is rich in more melancholy reverberations: Powell likes quoting from obscure, sombre Victorian poets, and is fond of serious comic characters like the middle-aged Chinese military attaché who is so delighted with his six months’ course at Sandhurst that he demands to be sent to Eton.
Julian Jebb, The Times Saturday Review, 19 October 1968
To read the three wartime volumes consecutively and in a short space of time can leave no doubt in a reader’s mind that he is in the presence of a masterpiece, and casts grave suspicions on those who have spoken lightly of Mr. Powell’s achievement: how could any literate man dismiss a work of such scape, such detail and such artistic control?
There are stumbling blocks, it is true. Occasionally the prose is stuffy in its rigorously imposed search for exactitude. Pomposity creeps in: phrases like “a mummer’s obscure quip” do not serve as well as, say, “a theatrical joke”. There is also the whole question of coincidence, that state of affairs so often encountered in life but so hard to make convincing in art. Mr. Powell is a great reverer of the Nietzschean principle of Eternal Recurrence. It makes for drama and for laughs, but not always for credibility.
The Military Philosophers is the most pessimistic of the nine volumes so far published. The war is settled into its gloomy stride, kicking comfort, kindliness and human lives aside. Jenkins is working as a liaison officer with a bogglingly various assortment of allied generals. Molly Jeavons, Chips and Priscilla Lovell and Bijou Ardglass are dead. Stringham is missing in the Far East….
But the mood of the book — the departure perhaps from the high comedy and irony which marks so much of the other volumes — is indicated: by the presence of Pamela Flitton, this fatally beautiful, viciously destructive girl stalks the pages like an avenging angel. She is, perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest, a metaphor! for the war itself: involving men in tortures, whilst relentlessly destroying herself.
Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times, 9 March 1969
There is a kind of tragic humor about Powell’s novel which is very much of our day. It is bound up with the changing circumstances and relationships of the crowd of human beings presented here. Where the 19th century novel had a beginning, a middle and an end, the contemporary novel reproduces continuing flux. It is not about what happened — that is, about events which occurred within a stable and traditional context — but about what appears to be going on around us right now: so that we can’t tell for sure what is event, and what is context. We are dealing less with occurrences than with processes. Since nothing exactly ends, nothing can be exactly defined. Thus Powell’s
characters can be seen as diversely and ambiguously from one decade to the next as Richard Milhous Nixon himself….
On a tour of freed France with Allied representatives Nick meets not only Montgomery, but the ghost of Proust, discovering, as he leaves, that the nameless resort town where the party has spent the night is really Balbec, this the Grand Hotel, this the esplanade where that frieze of girls moved against the sky. Proustian musings? Then in a page the party travels on to the scene of the invasion landings where “grey marine shapes” loom “like battlements of a now ruined castle.” War passes, art endures, and the Yugoslav attaché remarks, “We’ll soon be in Brussels. I hope to get some eau-de-cologne. In London it’s unobtainable.”
The humor of such juxtapositions is one of the great delights of Powell’s novel. But the free flow of the book’s events permits it to move from comedy to seriousness or any combination of the two. The somber and the tragic have never been absent from the novel, and the ludicrous has often lurched toward the insane. In this volume, however, there seems to be an increasing crystallization, around a negative pole, of all the forces of evil at work here.
That pole is Widmerpool, who is not only one of Powell’s most brilliantly conceived characters, but is one of the great characterizations of our time. Once a buffoon, he is now at least halfway to being an ogre. Once a masterpiece of absurdity, his self-esteem now approaches the manic. If he is aware of the net of circumstance about him, it is as something to scramble up. Power draws him like a magnet, and he is coming to wield more and more. Human relationships, even human lives, are quite unimportant. He hears not the music of time, but the latest cliché…. Villain and clown, ready to use any means for his own ends, the weight of Widmerpool as a shaping force is growing clearer and clearer.