Comic Opera (Act VI)

THE KINDLY ONES (254 pp.)--Anfhony Powell--Little, Brown ($4).

The kindly ones were the harbingers of all the gross Furies of history that were to despoil two generations of British youth. This, the sixth in Anthony Powell's great series of novels, called The Music of Time, carries Narrator Nicholas Jenkins back to the outbreak of World War I and forward to the beginnings of World War II.

In the opening flashback to the eve of World War I, Nick Jenkins is a small boy living in his father's country house at Stonehurst. The servants and the horses are in their quarters. The chef is good. All seems secure. There are no local portents of doom except a hysterical maid who appears to serve the mousse stark naked and is promptly whisked belowstairs in a Madras shawl.

The war breaks it all up, and war comes to the Jenkinses appropriately enough with the arrival of a general in a motorcar. A visiting uncle is heard to mutter: "Never driven one in my life. Not too keen on 'em. Always involved in accidents. Some royalty in a motorcar have been involved in a nasty affair today."

Armpits & Armageddon. All this may seem trivial and inconsequential, like a parlor game in which people amuse themselves by swapping anecdotes about what they were doing when they got the news of Pearl Harbor. But the reader, seduced by the perfectly tailored prose and the quiet delight of well-mannered comedy, may be led to overlook the muscular structure of Powell's art. Nick Jenkins is no Prince Hamlet, but as an attendant lord he misses nothing; his eyebrows are often raised, never his voice. Human action, Powell seems to be saying, is of primary importance in itself but secondary to the movements of history. The climactic events of the times take place while one's attention is otherwise engaged--scratching an armpit or walking the dog.

Classic Comedy. In contrast to the innocents of pre-1914, those who waited, in trance or stupor, for the second doom of 1939 knew they were in for it.

Nick Jenkins, who has come to a remote seaside hotel to bury his tiresome Uncle Giles, runs across the bounderish Duport, an Eton and Oxford acquaintance whose wife has briefly been Nick's mistress. From Duport, Nick learns that his beloved Jean has been unfaithful not only to Duport (an event of which Duport is mercifully unaware) but to Nick. The classic comedy of cuckold and lover and the excruciating embarrassments involved have seldom been done so well in English. There is a party at the castle of Sir Magnus Donners, "the great industrialist," who is widely suspected of odd but harmless sexual deviations and is easily persuaded to photograph a charade in which his guests represent the seven deadly sins. Kenneth Widmerpool, whom Pow'ell addicts have already enshrined as one of the great ones in the long waxwork gallery of English comics, appears as an ambitious officer with a rich, newly acquired military vocabulary. In his own phrase he is "up to his arse in bumph" (i.e., a busy desk officer). An unconscious clown as an Etonian, an obtuse and thundering bore as a successful businessman, a disastrous figure of Freudian fun as a lover, Widmerpool, as Powell says in a hundred ways, is the sort of man this age was designed for. In Widmerpool is seen the force of Powell's art--a deadly bore in life becomes a fascinating character in fiction.

In this intricate and wonderfully comic multi-act opera, Powell has restored the pleasure of wondering what will happen next--unknown in English fiction since the times of Dickens' serial novels.

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