John Betjeman, The Daily Telegraph, 13 May 1955
I think The Acceptance World the best novel Anthony Powell has so far written. He has been writing a series of novels about the same people, starting with their schooldays, and in this volume he has reached the period of the slump in 1931-2. Just as people mature as they grow older, particularly when they are in their ‘twenties as are most of the characters in this book, so is this novel more mature than its predecessors….
This novel does not have a “plot” in the accepted sense of the word. It carried this reader along so easily that he dreaded coming to the last page. The narrative power is in the lifelike qualities of the characters. Whatever they do, however futile, is interesting….
The author states the problem of his writing in the first few pages: “Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony — in which all classes of this island converse — upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.” This problem Anthony Powell has long solved in his novels. When he adds to that solution his power of describing a beautiful love affair, as he does in this book, I feel wholly justified in writing the sentence with which this notice started.
J. G. Symons, Times Literary Supplement, 13 May 1955
The Acceptance World is written, with the serpentine distinction characteristic of Mr. Powell’s later style, and shows his infallible sense of social ironies. It shows also, very notably, a sense of place. The atmosphere of the Ritz, “pale pink and sage green furniture, decorations of rich cream and ‘dull gold,” the sea of countenances “stamped like the skin of Renoir’s women with that curiously pink, silky surface that seems to come from prolonged sitting about in Ritz hotels ”—all this is emphasized by the sudden appearance of Quiggin in a black leatherbelted overcoat, self-possessed and hostile, “gazing as if in amazement at the fountain, the nymph, the palms in their pots of Chinese design.”
At times, in this volume, a reader may get a small worried feeling that some of colour belongs to a slightly later period. Surely it was in the late, not the early, thirties that Surrealism was well enough known to be talked about in England, and that “Trotskyist” became a general term of denigration? The participation of writers and critics in unemployed demonstrations, also, was surely typical of the late thirties rather than of the period in which it is placed. But these are the merest rufflings of a general contentment in finding the mores and emotions of a particular group in a particular period so beautifully recaptured.
John Davenport, The Observer, 15 May 1955
Mr. Powell has given us an immense amount of pure pleasure since Afternoon Men appeared in 1931. Its four successors were consistently good. A silence of twelve years followed, broken only by a scholarly biography of John Aubrey and an excellent edition of the Brief Lives. Four years ago came the first link in a chain of eight, or possibly of ten, volumes that will compose the sequence “The Music of Time.” The Acceptance World is the third volume of this, the most exciting experiment in post-war English fiction.
It is still an experiment rather than an achievement. This fiddling with words in not mere critical caginess, for by the very title of the series a comparison is demanded with Proust, and it is already clear that whatever its merits the completed opus must lack the integration of the Recherche du Temps Perdu. The comparison, however, is not ridiculous. On an infinitely smaller scale, “The Music of Time” may well prove, not a worthy successor, but an intelligent English reflection of the French masterpiece.
A reflection from a vast distance. Proustian society was a rotten honeycomb, a world in decay; but not outwardly. The structure of society still seemed more bees than wax-moths: the pattern of the hive was still complex. Since 1918 even the pretence of the old social order has gone: the wax-moths triumphed. In the world of which Mr. Powell is now writing, the world of 1931-32, the fluctuating values cannot be measured against an establishment.
It may be questioned, therefore, if he is wise to use such an immensely elaborate technical apparatus: one is occasionally reminded of an elephant grappling with a pea. The answer is that he has as an artist a perfect right to use it, and the passages of dialogue stand out brilliantly against the thick texture of the commentary. For the moment, judgment must be suspended.
James Stern, Encounter, July 1955
Much of the pleasure of reading Mr. Powell is derived from his increasing ability to be quiet, to understate, never to exaggerate, thus to avoid straining the reader’s credulity. To him the story is not the thing: it is the place, the house, the hotel lounge, the prevailing fashion, the people. Moreover, unless my memory is playing me false, his style in this novel seems far more free, less ponderous than that of its predecessor. As “The Music of Time” marches slowly on, the quality of mercy, in one whose earlier fiction has often been called malicious, continues noticeably to grow, and his novels in consequence to have reached that stage in which impartiality and realism combine to fashion a work of enduring value. On the day my nephew asks me to tell him of the England I knew when I was young, I shall bid him read this history — for that is what this admirable novelist is writing.
Elizabeth Bowen, The Tatler and Bystander, 1 July 1955
To embark on a novel-sequence requires more—that is, of the author—than to write a novel which finishes with its final page. The extended design offers greater scope; but he must be sure that it is a large design. He must take a long-term view of his characters, whose fortunes are to be followed through chance and change for, it may be, any number of years. And the characters must be interesting in themselves, so that the reader is glad when they reappear.
Happily, Anthony Powell has what is needed. The Acceptance World now comes to us, being the third volume in the sequence he has called ‘‘The Music of Time.” It links up perfectly with its predecessors, A Question of Upbringing and A Buyer’s Market. In its own right, I am not sure that it is not the most excellent of the three—but this may be because its dramas and ironies are enhanced by our knowing what went before them….
Jenkins, the narrator, and his contemporaries are by now in their middle or late twenties. He, with his Eton friends Templer and Stringham and the ever-egregious Widmerpool (memorable since A Question of Upbringing), are in a mood for taking life as it comes : early experimentalism is past. Templer’s half-hearted marriage collapses before our eyes ; Stringham’s already has been a failure. Jenkins meets again, by chance, Templer’s sister Jean, and the two fall in love and have an affair—whose emotional climate and tensions are brilliantly pictured….
All these goings on are related by Mr. Powell with a calm lucidity which does not lessen their phantasmagoric oddness—we have here, in fact, a foremost master of comedy. Above all, however, the fascination of this sequence of novels consists in the unfolding of the main pattern: this is how lives are lived—partly shiftlessly, partly in subjection to some fatality, partly in a series of forward spurts owing to energy, enterprise or passion.
It may be found that, in order to keep his people together, Mr. Powell stretches the arm of coincidence rather far. His characters seem to be magnetised, quite by chance, to the same spots. But, look at one’s own experience—this does happen!
L. V. Kepert, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 July 1955
If anyone should ask how can a novelist cover England in the depths of the 1931-32 depression, as Mr. Powell does in this volume, and leave aside the millions of unemployed, starvation, degradation, and the doles, the answer would be that the author’s narrower circle has its own problems.
Its members are sometimes impoverished in their own way, or they have to maintain a constant struggle to keep up seedy appearances. They still have to battle and intrigue to keep their own peculiar jobs — one of the themes of this volume is the series of intrigues between the lofty and dapper Mark Members and the surly radical Quiggin, with the post as secretary to the popular novelist at stake.
Above all, they still have their personal worries was wives and mistresses change hands in a constantly interwoven pattern of hedonistic futility. This ronde d’amour aspect of cocktail society, which the younger Anthony Powell was able to make hilarious in his more carefree novels of 20 years ago, now figures in a sober and pathetic light….
The Acceptance World does not suffer much by comparison with the preceding two books of the series. Most important, it brings us a step nearer the time when, with the whole series before our eyes, we will be able to enjoy the way the details have built up into a uniform work of art.
Francis Wyndham, London Magazine, 1 September 1955
Reading a novel by Mr. Powell, one realizes how much other writers take for granted about society. None of his characters fit into established social categories, as they are usually understood by readers of fiction; yet all are immediately recognized as having their roots in the experience of real life. One of the aims of the series of books which he is at present writing appears to be to explode the myth of categories; Jenkins as a young man is constantly jumping to conclusions about the people he meets, and as he grows older these conclusions have to be modified, in some cases radically altered. This awareness of the fluidity of personality, of the numerous surprises that life provides in the shape of coincidence, new permutations in human relationships, situations that repeat themselves and yet are imperceptibly changed, is brilliantly expressed with no loss to the creation of solid, three-dimensional character. As more is discovered about his people, they become increasingly real, less and less easy to understand.
Dawn Powell, Saturday Review, 3 March 1956
Once you have surrendered to Anthony Powell’s novel, The Acceptance World, with its promise of secret doors to be opened, you are hooked. You are calling on Uncle Giles at Ufford, a vast seedy hotel that seems forever “riding at anchor in the sluggish Bayswater tides,” meeting the bosomy fortune-teller Mrs. Erdleigh, with her prophecies of love and danger, and being stood up at the Ritz by a Great Writer’s secretary. There is no visible plot in the novel. The suspense is only in what you will meet next and what, above all else, the author will say about them. The Acceptance World of the British 1930s, from which Mr. Powell draws his title, was a system whereby certain brokers “accepted” debts on export deals, advancing money on the strength of the broker’s reputation. It suggested, says Mr. Powell, what everyone was doing: drawing happiness from “an engagement to meet a bill.” In a bland, polite, and tired way, nobody in Mr. Powell’s world is shocked, nobody is sorry. It is only much later that one suspects that Mr. Powell’s gift-wrapping of gossip, wisdom, and speculation is more valuable than the gift.
Anthony Arau, The New Republic, 2 April 1956
The world to which the title refers is the financial district of London during the thirties, where banking houses made capital loans to distressed businesses on the basis of theoretically deliverable goods. Via analogy, Powell indicates that the characters in his novel live in a spiritually depleted “acceptance world” of their own. That is, they draw upon one another for varying amounts of intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and most frequently, carnal capital, against the day when the world will be set aright. The catch, of course, is that the goods often are not delivered, the world is not set aright. On such a slender thread is hung the entire burden of an otherwise rather formless plot….
Powell’s method seems to be that of humorous understatement, a ticklishly difficult genre even in much more competent hands. As a result, it is often hard to determine just how much of The Acceptance World’s pervading banality is intended and how much can more meaningfully be traced to a lack of depth on the author’s part. In any event, it is mostly so much old hat. Powell has understated so thoroughly that only vestigial remnants of genuine wit remain; and of plot, character, and thought hardly the rudiments survive. What was intended as a subtle comedy of manners has become instead a mere pastiche of mannerisms.