Julian Symons, Times Literary Supplement, 15 September 1966
This eighth instalment in The Music of Time opens with one of those scenes that Mr. Powell sometimes provides as a key to the meaning of a single volume. Nicholas Jenkins buys an army greatcoat at a theatrical costumier’s near Shaftesbury Avenue where the elderly attendant is under the impression that the coat is needed for a new musical comedy. “I’ll bear the show in mind,” he says when told that its name is The War. “I’ll wish you a good run.” These two or three broadly farcical pages set the tone.
“The War ” is a joke, the fiddles, intrigues and plotting for promotion that go on at the Divisional H.Q. where Nicholas, still with only one pip, is assistant to Major Widmerpool cannot be taken seriously. France has fallen, the Blitz is on, but Widmerpool is concerned with tracing the defalcations of a WO1 named Diplock, pursuing them through the Sergeants’ Mess cellar account and the Commuted Ration Allowance. Nests are being feathered, positions are being established, Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson scores off Colonel Pedlar about the number of bottles in a pipe of port….
It is upon the military comedy that Mr. Powell concentrates, with such relentlessness that although the locale is apparently Northern Ireland there is no word about the countryside in which the unit is stationed, nor about nearby towns. We are limited deliberately to the Officers’ Mess and exercises, the problem of getting rid of Stringham, who turns up as mess waiter, and of removing an unsuitable officer named Bithel from the mobile laundry….
The style of this book marks decisively the break from the involutions of the first sestet. The writing does not lack Mr. Powell’s characteristic elegance but the narrative is plain and straightforward, there is very little of the casting back in time that helped to give the earlier volumes their peculiar flavour, and the section dealing with Nicholas’s life on leave is closely integrated with the rest of the book. Any English novelist writing about the Second World War in comic terms was bound to work under the shadow of Evelyn Waugh’s fine trilogy. It is part of Mr. Powell’s triumph that he has been able to handle what is basically much the same material in quite a different way to make a wholly original work of art.
William Trevor, The Guardian, 16 September 1966
By now one has come to know Mr. Powell’s people so well that the loss in the Blitz of three or four of them leaves behind it a real feeling of shock, causing one to probe beyond the point of tragedy. Imagining the unwritten scenes, the burials, and sorrowing. In his ability to capture and control the imagination of his readers through his characters, Mr. Powell is the most subtle writer now performing in English. So complete is his power to involve the reader that I for one, recalling over a period of time some small episode or scene observed, have more than once been hard put to establish whether it came from my own experience or from an early chapter of A Dance to the Music of Time.
The Soldier’s Art is the saddest volume of this novel so far. As well as sudden death there is, in its reflection of war, a show of the bitterness that comes when roles are reversed so arbitrarily and cruelly. Everything alters, Jenkins observes, yet remains the same. “That boy will be the death of me,” Stringham bad murmured lightly almost twenty years ago, having listened to Widmerpool’s excited account of the arrest of Le Bas in a field. Yet now, with Stringham something of a wreck and Widmerpool dangerously flashing his upper hand, one finds oneself hoping that that remark was in no way a portent. Heartless and tough within his elephant’s hide, Widmerpool is still the keen, short-nailed creature of his schooldays, yet so secretive does he continue to be that the greater truth about his nature win not be certain until the dance has come to an end. Time, in fact, is at the root of everything; the past a back-cloth against which all action is played, the future doubtful, and tense with excitement now. We may even be particularly fortunate in being obliged to read this novel as a slow serial, bit by bit as each part is published—for time as it moves for us is in rough proportion to the fictional momentum, and is an emphasis of a kind.
With each new volume, the stature of the work increases. As the pattern develops and is revealed in its complexity, it is clearer than ever that a literary mansion is being constructed before our eyes. The Soldier’s Art, beautifully In line with the whole,- sharply economic, elegant, funny and moving, is the most satisfying novel I’ve read since The Valley of Bones.
Simon Raven, The Observer, 11 September 1966
I have one complaint. Mr. Powell has always tried to extract the last possible nuance from every situation, and this, I think, has largely justified his very intricate use of concessives and qualifications. But there are places in this volume where the writing is fussy to a point of acute discomfort. “Howevers,” “even thoughs” and “at the same times” chase one another round and round in ever-narrowing circles until one feels like a hypnotised rabbit. (See, if you will, the second half of page 142.)
This defect is only occasional. For the most part the style is accurate and nicely balanced, with pleasant undertones of irony and nostalgia. The key alters aptly when we leave damp and dreary Ulster for the perils and tatty gaieties of war-lime London, and no less aptly when we return to find Widmerpool heaving like Laocoön in the toils of his paper war. I have heard it said that Mr. Powell’s pace is monotonous; but to anyone with an ear for prose it must be clear that it is the very subtle variation of pace (ranging from callous briskness to elegiac languor) which distinguishes Mr. Powell almost as much as his precision in social analysis or his powers of evocation.
Martin Seymour-Smith, The Spectator, 16 September 1966
[Powell] does not create a sense of boredom, or express a criticism of the quality of a conversation or of the people who are holding it, by causing his narrator to express an opinion. He conveys boredom by concentrating upon trivia and by slowing down the pace of his narrative (a technique he may have learned from Swift’s letters), and he implies criticism of bad behaviour only by using Nicholas Jenkins’s actions as a counterpart to it; for Jenkins is less passive than he has been supposed to be. The moral inferiority of Widmerpool, who is well in evidence in The Soldier’s Art, as a staff major at Jenkins’s Divisional HQ, is exposed by Jenkins’s own humane and, above all, civilised attitudes and actions. A study of what Nicholas actually does, through these eight novels, is in fact highly instructive, and gives the lie to those who claim that he is hardly a protagonist Both the quality of Mr. Powell’s characters as human beings and the extent to which their qualities or lack of them are recognised by others are main, and subtle, themes of The Music of Time.
But Mr. Powell’s basic preoccupation in terms of character is the exposure of sorts of vulgarity or (as in the case of such a fascinatingly ‘seamless’ person as Widmerpool) of what can only be described as profound moral shortcomings. Behind the comedy and the irony, often gay, lies a serious concern with what human obligations are, and how they may or may not be fulfilled. The virtue of these novels is that one can comment upon the actions of their protagonists just as one does upon those of one’s neighbours; and in place of moral comment, which is certainly a form of vulgarity, one has the few but highly evocative actions of the narrator to use as a kind of intuitive yardstick—for Nicholas Jenkins is the only character in The Music of Time who is wholly stage-managed by the author, whose surrogate he is.
W. G. Igoe, Chicago Tribune, 2 April 1967
One of the horrors of war seldom considered is the appalling boredom it engenders. No bureaucracy is more rigid than an army, when it is not actually fighting, and nothing is more mind-destroying than the banal rubrics of its curiously ceremonious way of life. This is the atmosphere Anthony Powell re-creates in the bland prose. like muted Mozart played in slow-motion, of The Soldier’s Art, the eighth volume of The Music of Time….
Powell records the struggles for rank and the impersonal deployment of men to the far alien corners of the world, as if they were walking “dead souls” [bods, the army called them—abbreviation for “bodies”]. These were men who had never been farther from their homes than the space between the town center and the suburbs, and this was war, horrible and absurd.
Jenkins is an unambitious man who wishes only a dignified job. The great character of the book is Widmer pool, who, having achieved the rank of major, now is in a position to wield immense power. He can make “dead souls” march. He grows in stature [as a character in literature] with each book. A sort of dehydrated, in the modern way, Falstaff, Widmerpool is a metaphor for the humorless bureaucrats who rule so much of society, human beings in whom human aspirations apparently have withered and been replaced by an awesome genius for conniving. Their lust for power is insatiable. Viewed by Jenkins, the contemplative, the philosopher, the aesthete, they are comic….
The slow, machine-like liturgical motions of the army will be changed in Powell’s next volume, for as this one closes Hitler invades Russia and the army assumes patterns of war’s more extreme and characteristic realities. This book is part of what I believe to be the great work of contemporary comic fiction.
Robert Garis, The Hudson Review, Summer 1967
Much of [Powell’s] technique is perfectly and quietly traditional, but there are some devices which seem particularly his own. He is good at using the silence created by Jenkins’ attentiveness to emphasize the arbitrary and absurdly violent gestures of the will. In The Soldier’s Art Jenkins comes upon General Liddament reading Trollope: “Then, suddenly, he raised the book he had been reading in the air, holding it at arm’s length above his head. For a moment I thought he was going to hurl it at me. Instead, he waved the small volume backwards and forwards, its ribbon marker flying at one end. ‘Book reader, aren’t you?’”
The General’s act is a dance-gesture of violence, perfectly harmless; Jenkins’ exemption from self-dramatization makes him an alert and wary observer of the harmless violence going on about him all the time. He is an exceptionally attentive listener too, and what he hears is often something actually brought into existence by Powell’s odd prose: “‘You can’t sleep with this noise going on,’ he said. He spoke peevishly, as if remedy, easily applicable, had been for some reason disregarded by the authority responsible.” The noise going on is that of an air-raid; the language of the person speaking and the word “peevishly” are perfectly routine, but Powell’s queer (and characteristic) next clause, through its structure and its bureaucratic diction, makes us hear the virtually supersonic nuance of comic inappropriateness in this response to the event.
These war volumes gave me an increased respect for what I have been describing as Powell’s security of tone and harmony of mind, for they redefined these qualities as Powell’s honesty about and trust in his own way of looking at experience…. Powell’s war is a show and the real war too. He isn’t nervous about having both perspectives and neither are we.