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A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Series: Dance to the Music of Time, Book 1
- Length: 21 hrs
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
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Summary
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art.
In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.).
The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses. Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkinsa budding writer shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widermerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. Considered a masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich panorama of life in England between the wars. Includes these novels: A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market, The Acceptance World.
As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Anthony Powell's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Charles McGrath about the life and work of Anthony Powell – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.
Critic reviews
What listeners say about A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Louisa
- 31-05-12
Completely compulsive and absorbing
This is a listening experience not to be missed! It’s true that the first three books (the first download) are not the best, but I’m giving 5 stars to the whole series because you have to get to grips with the first books in order to understand the whole series. Powell introduces nearly all the characters in the first books and you really have to work your way through the 12 books quite fast in order to remember who is who. Recognised as a 20th century classic, A Dance to the Music of Time holds up a mirror to a certain part of British society in the mid-20th century. It is completely compulsive. Once you have got to know the characters they take on depth and as you listen you become increasingly intrigued and involved in the story. Where the books are at their best is in the mid century, when they describe the war years and then the late 40s. With a very light touch, they evoke both post-war depression (gloomy, dark streets) and post-war optimism (new magazines and art movements). As things gradually get better in London, and Britain in general, the story comments on the major social improvements of the period, and some of the truly weird things which happened in the 60s and 70s – explaining, without judging, both the paranoia of some and the search for an alternative society of others. Simon Vance’s reading is masterly – every character has his or her own voice. He keeps faith with the main character, Nick, who looks on but never judges. This is not however, a bodice ripper – only a brilliant explanation of the 20th century. As far as listening is concerned it’s one of the very best books I’ve ever listened to – absolutely absorbing - you don’t want it to end, but it’s also one of those books you can just start all over again!
37 people found this helpful
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- Peter
- 19-11-10
The best way to enjoy this true classic
The written version of this book is rightly regarded as an English classic, but its size (4 volumes)can be off-putting but this unabridged audio version makes it more accessible taking some of the pressure off of your time being read to you whilst driving or working with your hands or when your eyes are 'tired'. This reading highlights the perfect way in which the English language is used throughout the book. Only an unabridged version can really do this book justice. You will find yourself becoming attached to a whole host of characters and following them through their lives and traumas and 4 volumes. And as for value for money... it makes membership even more attractive!!
27 people found this helpful
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- LondonLass
- 06-04-15
A privilege to have read it
Would you consider the audio edition of A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement to be better than the print version?
Have not read the print version
What does Simon Vance bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you had only read the book?
His range of voices was better even than my imagination could have conjured up.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes, but that would have been impossible.
Any additional comments?
If I were Powell, perhaps I would be able to write well enough to describe how fantastically good this cycle of books is—but I am not. What I can say is that it is an astonishing work of literature. The writing is simple and clear, it is by turns humorous and tragic, just like life.
I enjoyed every sentence; when I had to stop I was irritated by the interruptions; I was sorry when it ended and I feel that reading it was my time best spent.
Simon Vance, who narrated the entire twelve books, gave voice to a whole world of men and women, all with their own vocal affectations, habits and accents, all distinct and recognisable. He is obviously a truly talented artist but that sort of reading needed far more than just talent, it required the sort of application that most people would have trouble holding for a few hours, let alone the weeks or even months that recording this massive work would have involved.
The irony is that both writer and actor put so much work into the Music of Time books and they are so skilled at their jobs that the whole thing appears completely effortless.
11 people found this helpful
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- Kirstine
- 10-07-13
Life in a past era in minute detail
I chose this audio book as I had enjoyed watching the Channel 4 dramatization. The whole audio version comprises three "Movements" and each movement is divided into three parts. It's a lot of listening: over 60 hours. It's ordered chronologically so needs to be listened in sequence as the characters back-stories are detailed in Movement One, part one and so on. It did find it helped that I'd seen the screen version so had a mind's eye view of the characters as there are so many of them. The main characters are a group of men whose lives are described from their school days onwards. It's an upper class life starting in the mid 1920s. It's not a riveting listen more an unfolding of their lives and interactions with other people and tangentially with historical events. I've read elsewhere that the author based many of the characters on real-people (see Wikipedia entry about the books). This first Movement takes the main players from school to early adulthood.
The writing is stylish and the narrator does a splendid job of bringing the characters to life.
15 people found this helpful
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- R.Hartop
- 15-04-18
REMOVE THE SPOILERS IN THE DISCUSSION AT THE END
REMOVE THE SPOILERS FROM YOUR DISCUSSION AT THE END OF THIS AUDIOBOOK WHERE YOU DISCUSS ALL THE FUTURE BOOKS IN THE SERIES
6 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Alison
- 03-01-13
Always Beautiful....
I did love the writing and the wit, the gentle flow of the 'story' and the atmosphere it sets. Gently unfolding narratives are fine with me, if I am in the right mood and this is what it delivers. I also very much enjoyed the narration - his voices worked well in underlining the social strata we are living in here.
At times, partly due to the calming qualities of the reader's voice and partly due to the sometimes less than gripping sections, my mind did wander and I may have missed several minutes here and there maybe 10 or more sometimes - but it never seemed to matter much.
If you want drama and action, don't buy this. If you want a rich slice of social commentary with almost no pace but a lot of atmosphere to get thoroughly lost in, this is probably for you.
6 people found this helpful
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- Chris Rayner
- 05-08-15
Jane Austen for the mid Twentieth Century
I read these books in paperback twenty years or so ago. I loved them then, and have enjoyed rediscovering them now. I quite see the criticisms others have made, the snobishness, the smugness, etc. Even so, having been brought up in the England which pervades the books I recognise, and delight in the characters who people them, and I just love Powell's observation and analysis. OK OK, he's not quite up with Austen, but then, who is?
He shares her observation and humour, and his evocation of the zeitgeist of the fifties and sixties in England certainly rings true to me. If I have a quibble it is with the reader's pronunciation here and there. Mostly this is trivial, but nobody who had been to a performance of Siegried could possibly pronounce the name Mime as if describing one of those white faced pests who are inspired by Marcel Marceau. The name is pronounced 'meemer'. This confused me for a moment.
I can't be bothered to write reviews for each of the 'Movements' this will have to serve for the entire set of books.
5 people found this helpful
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- cravendickens
- 19-07-18
Made it to the end of the series!
That's it - many hours and months of listening and the Fourth Movement ended today.
As one of the critics says during the end review - 'There's nothing quite like this in modern English Literature - is there?' My answer would to completely agree. There are something like 300 characters in this series (across novels written over a 25 year period, c. 1920 - 1960) and Powell's mastery in keeping multiple 'plates' spinning as characters are introduced, develop, change (some drastically) and occasionally die is an absolute tour de force.
Very often the settings - London, Country Houses, Venice - are sketchily painted but that is probably to keep focus on the characters and dialogue.
I feel certain that reading the novels will be my next step - much of the humour is (like Austen) not apparent on a first listen and the subtitles of the characters' dialogue and behaviour would no doubt emerge on a 'physical' reading the series.
A staggering achievement - an absolute must for lovers of modern literature - and if you loved Boyd's 'Any Human Heart' then this is a must.
3 people found this helpful
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- Roderic
- 25-01-14
Excellent description of its time
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Yes. The book is very well crafted and is in parts hilarious.
What other book might you compare A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement to, and why?
A Dance to the Music of Time is a counterpoint to C P Snow's Strangers and Brothers series of books, which covers the same period, was a great read, but did not have Powell's sense of humour.
3 people found this helpful
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- Ian
- 23-04-13
A mixed bag
Where to start with this book. Parts of it were gripping and parts of it were very dull. Some of the language was beautiful and some of the scenes were very funny. Other scenes were interminable and I was waiting for them to be over. Certain characters were great like Stringham and Gypsy Jones, while others, including the narrator, were quite dull. I guess that the ultimate test is will I read or listen to the remaining volumes. On balance, I think I will as I am hooked enough to want to know where this goes next as we hurtle towards WWII.
3 people found this helpful
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- Jennifer Seattle, WA
- 03-02-11
A Masterpiece on All Counts
A Dance to the Music of Time, inspired by the painting of the same name by Nicolas Poussin, was rated by Time magazine as one of the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Written by the English novelist Anthony Powell, who took almost 25 years to create the 12-volume set, provides a highly-literate and highly-amusing look into the English upper-middle class between the 1920s and the 1970s. The book covers politics, class-consciousness, society, culture, love, social graces, manners, education, power, money, snobbery, humour, and more.
Although daunting in terms of length, the absolutely brilliant narration by the talented Simon Vance rewards the reader over thousands of pages, hundreds of characters, and twelve installments of gorgeous prose. This is a not-to-be-missed collection of novels for any serious reader of English literature.
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- Edith
- 20-01-11
Unappreciated Gem
I won't belabor the point, earlier positive reviewers are right, this is an excellent production of an overlooked gem. It is full of lovely prose and a fascinating re-creation of a bygone era. The interview which accompanies the First Movement, which you should read first, makes an apt comparison to Proust, while pointing out that Powell's acute observations of character focus much less on the narrator and more on the other characters. There is little navel gazing here, and you come to appreciate the narrator "Jenkins" and his modesty which enables him to cast more light on other characters.
Readers of contemporary novels may struggle with the minimal plot of this book... very little happens during the first six hours of narration! But hang in there as Powell populates his world with memorable characters and transports you to another place and time.
Simon Vance does an excellent job.
15 people found this helpful
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- Julian
- 30-03-18
For the patient
Anthony Powell's epic dance through 20th century middle-class Britain is perfect audiobook fodder - a single first person, continuous narrative without time shifting, like David Copperfield. Although it is framed as a recollection or memoir Powell keeps the timeline clean, so to speak, with virtually no asides from the "present day" on the significance of the events related, or foreshadowing of how things turned out later on. It is minimalist in terms of plot development and very little of significance happens but in 19th century style you get lengthy ruminations on various characters' states of mind from the apparently omniscient narrator - and there are plenty to talk about, some 300 by one count over the twelve novels. The narrator himself is a virtual cipher as a character, really just a kind of personified camera to allow Powell to describe the other characters in close-up, as well as a unifying thread to tie them together. His occasional incursions of emotion fail to convince, but then Britain between the wars was a barely explicable era anyway... a kind of collective post-traumatic stress was abroad, with spiritualism and Marxism its expressions. It would not be to everyone's taste and drags severely at some points, but does manage to achieve real life-likeness - a kind of literary Nashville. As for Simon Vance, he does deal intelligently with the text, making sense of highly complex sentences and sentiments and keeping the ironic humour prominent and the characters engaging (Stringham is the one I wanted to hear more from). One warning - the interview with a critic of the end of the recording is chock-full of spoilers about the rest of the series, so avoid it if you like to be surprised.
3 people found this helpful
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- M. Brandman
- 08-03-11
Masterpiece
Powell's Music of Time books are a masterpiece of English literature. Massive in scope but ironically very narrow in its analysis of people, place and time, Powell devoted his life to these novels. His prose are rich, lyrical and incredibly smart. Simon Vance is excellent as always.
9 people found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 24-02-16
It is no good being a beauty alone...
***** "For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we, ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity."
-- Anthony Powell, A Buyer's Market
BOOK ONE (A Question of Upbringing): the first of Powell's monster 12-book 'A Dance to the Music of Time' deals primarily with Nick and his fellow students during their last year in public school and first couple years either "up" at University or "down" in the city working. The four major players in the first book: Nicholas Jenkins (the narrator), Charles Stringham, Peter Templer, and Kenneth Widmerpool. These characters all show up again in Book 2. Along with various other characters (Nick's uncle, Jean Templer, Mark Members, JG Quiggin, Bill Truscott, etc.).
BOOK TWO ('A Buyer's Market'): focuses on Nick and some new characters, and many of the old, as they maneuver through the social dinners, dances and teas that seem designed to both stratify society AND bring together these young people together to get married; to find adequate husbands for daughters and satisfy the social or monetary need of the men who are just starting to 'make something' of their lives.
Events seem to guide the paths of these people in and out of each others lives. Probably the most painful to watch is Widmerpool, who seems always to exist in a socially difficult place and constantly dealing with sugary embarrassments.
I love how art is taking on a larger presence in his novels. Not a surprising fact given that the book itself is named after a painting with the same name by Nicolas Poussin. But, internal to the book, it makes sense given that Edgar Bosworth Deacon (an artist) plays a part and that Nick is now working in a publishing house devoted to art books.
There are parts of this novel that, obviously, bring to mind Marcel Proust, but a lot of the first two novels, at least, seem substantively more related to both Evelyn Waugh and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I wonder if the either the character of Members/Quiggin is, in fact, E. Waugh. And if so, who the other writer "is".
***** "Emotional crises always promote the urgent need for executive action, so that the times when we most hope to be free from the practical administration of life are always those when the need to cope with the concrete world is more than ever necessary"
-- Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World
BOOK THREE ('The Acceptance World'): There is something amazing about Powell's attempt to gather the passage of time, the progression of life, the dynamic of relationships over 12 novels. When I read Proust and as I read Powell and even Knausgaard, I am always a bit shocked by the boldness of folding together six (Knausgaard), seven (Proust), or twelve novels into a narrative that actually works.
Reading Powell reminds me of reading an Evelyn Waugh that is stretched out over decades, or reading Proust where instead of the narrator focusing in, the narrator is actually ignoring the inner-life and capturing the world and the people around him. It is kind of dizzying if you step back and think about it. It is like reading Downton Abbey serialized from the 30s into the 60s with more characters, more art, and a bit more London and bit less Abbey.
So, I'm done with A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement and done with Spring. Bring on Summer and I'm guessing World War 2.
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- Amazon Customer
- 29-11-18
The greatest English novel of the 20th century
This multivolume masterwork surpasses Prousts's bloated and frankly overrated "In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past" in elegance, profundity, nuance and humor. The Dance to the Music of Time is perhaps too subtle for our crude, simplistic and superficial age.
The narration is excellent.
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- Lakeman
- 03-05-13
A stately masterpiece. Not for the impatient.
If you could sum up A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement in three words, what would they be?
Profound, multi-layered.
What did you like best about this story?
The brilliantly sharp humour, and the ever deepening insights of both protagonist and indeed reader as the narrative unfolds. A marvellous portrait of an era long gone. To be compared with Brideshead Revisited.
What about Simon Vance’s performance did you like?
The different voices and the sense of wistfulness that Powell intended.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No! Certainly not.
Any additional comments?
I don't blame those people who complained they were bored. It is not for everyone. This is a cerebral slow burner of a tale spread over 12 novels and about 40 years. It's not for those who like a rollicking, tumultuous incident-packed plot. It just aint that sort of work.
For those with time, patience, and an interest in English social history, this is a glorious and profound experience.
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- David
- 05-04-20
English people sitting in drawing rooms talking
A preponderance of novels in the Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century seem to fall into the general classification of bored and uninteresting rich people clamoring to be in rooms filled with equally rich and equally boring rich people talking crap about the people who don't happen to be at that particularly drawing room function.
A Dance To The Music of Time generally fits into this category but also happens to be much more extremely ambitious. Originally written as 12 novels loosely autobiographical of Powell's life, the story begins in the years after World War I following the protagonist Nick Jenkins and the young men with whom he attended college through World War II, The Cold War and through the British Hippie movement. Published over 25 years, Powell had originally envisioned a 20-volume aeries but, luckily, was talked down from that foolish notion.
Later publishings grouped the 12 books into four volumes, or Movements, as cleverly coined. This fit in with the theme as the title is indicative of 1636 Poussin painting of the same name featuring four maids believed to represent the four seasons.
The First Movement includes the first three novels, A Question of Upbringing: 1921-1924, A Buyer's Market: 1928-1929, and The Acceptance World: 1931-1933. These are the formative years of the young men as they grasp for their economic and political futures during a particularly tumultuous time with the slumping of markets and the rising of totalitarianism on both the left and right.
As narrator, Nick Jenkins spends very few lines talking about his burgeoning career as a writer but, instead, focuses his descriptions of the lives with whom his own is own is interwoven.
Powell was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell who were certainly more heralded but much less ambitious. Powell said he wanted to write about the English Middle and rising Upper Class because he knew another war was inevitable and it would upend the traditional British class structure in the offing. His prediction proved true.
Powell writes well on this topic which also happens to be my least favorite. I am debating continuing through the remaining Three Movements (nine novels) but am likely to break it up with something a little less nauseating then self congratulatory pampered Brits.
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- Anonymous User
- 29-11-10
simon vance - gifted narrator.
Superb reading of great book.So many characters, so many voices , how does Simon Vance do it?
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- udidit
- 18-11-12
Was tough to take! but brilliantly written.
I found this "First Movement" at times to be so snobbish that I cringed at being British ! However the quality of writing and descriptive gift that Anthony Powell is well worth pursuing and although disappointing even slightly boring, as a story,the autobiographical quality of the book really is a fascinating "painting" of life between the First and Second World Wars, in Britain. If one wants to get lost in someone else's life and time which is not too far away from almost memorable glimpses of Old England with the emphasis on entertaining listening, then this is a book, the first of four movements which is worth the literary effort, and will certainly will not fail to be enjoyed.
2 people found this helpful