A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell

The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance. Classical associations made me think, too, of days at school, where so many forces, hitherto unfamiliar, had become in due course uncompromisingly clear.

When A Question of Upbringing, the first book in Anthony Powell's monumental series A Dance to the Music of Time, begins, the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, is a green young student at a tony secondary school in England. Like a lot of people at sixteen or so, his life takes the form of a preoccupation with other people, whose habits and values he yearns to know better so that he might fashion himself after them. There's his roommate, Stringham, wealthy and mercurial, and Templer, a brash womanizer. Rounding out this group is Widmerpool, an aloof, buffoonish student whom nobody likes. Widmerpool's ambition is comic, and the more popular students either rag on him or do their best to ignore him; on the other hand, even if you didn't know a little about Widmerpool's rise to power and fortune over the course of the series, you might recognize it as something more formidable than the young students are able to.

Mostly, A Question of Upbringing feels like an elliptical take on the familiar campus novel, something a step removed from Lucky Jim or the first part of Brideshead Revisited. The lynchpin scene of the friendship between Jenkins, Stringham, and Templer comes when Stringham sees a wanted poster that bears an uncanny resemblance to their overbearing house master Le Bas and calls the cops to report him. But the friendship quickly fades--Powell cannily reveals how brief the relationships we consider formative in our youth really can be--and the scene moves outward through slight variations: a finishing program in the French countryside, the first year of college. What Jenkins learns at these institutions is really the shifting and subtle nature of human beings: the subtle changes in Stringham and Templer, for instance, that makes their friendship no longer viable.

There's a curiously unfinished quality to A Question of Upbringing: characters are ushered onto the stage to make very light impressions, and then ushered off again, as if being earmarked for later use, which they probably are. Powell makes much of the way that people leave one's life and then suddenly appear again, revitalized and seen anew in new contexts; though the novel feels preoccupied with its preparatory motions, you have to admit this quality captures something of the anticipatory nature of youth. I sort of expect the first book in the series is like a TV pilot; something with rough edges you have to sit through to get to the good stuff. I will probably read one of these a year until I finish: it will take twelve years, at which point I'll be 46. That seems to me perhaps to be the right way to absorb a series with a scale like this one.