Anthony Powell, A Dance To The Music Of Time. 1: A Question of Upbringing (1951)

Twelve-volume Epic Fantasy series are common enough, in our saturated-market 21st-century; but I’ve decided to embark on an old classic of the genre: Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Wheel of Time, starting with the first instalment, A Question of Upbringing (1951). Though published only a few years before Lord of the Rings, Powell’s fantasy is much more Peake-like in tone than Tolkienian—this may be why Moorcock, known for his hostility to Tolkien, reworked Powell into his Fantasy sequence, the like-titled A Nomad of the Time-Streams.

Like the best Fantasy, the novel describes a world that is in some respects familiar to ours, and in other respects bizarrely estranging and alien. Like Peake’s novels, this Fantasy realm is post-medieval, yet ineluctably old-fashioned and unmodern. And, actually, ‘Peake-like’ isn’t the right description for this beguiling, oblique narrative. Though it deals with Gormenghast-like structures (schools, mansions, universities) and Titus-Groan-y social rigid social hierarchies of great antiquity and baffling complexity, A Question of Upbringing treats this material with surprising deftness, subtlety and above all with a saving sense-of-humour. It is not that Peake wholly lacked humour, I suppose (although most commercial Fantasy treats its worldbuilding with deadening Epic Seriousness) but his sensibility was grotesque, Dickensian, exaggerated, and his comedy followed this form. Powell takes a fundamentally Peake-like raw-material but finds in it a stately ridiculousness that enables him to deploy wit and charm in his storytelling. Levity is altogether a better Fantasy stallion than Ponderousness.

A Question of Upbringing introduces the main characters and covers their early years and education: four young lords of an imperial kingdom not entirely unlike England. The main figure and narrator tells us about his three friends, Lord Widmerpool, Lord Stringham and Lord Templar. This last name, given what I assume will increasingly be revealed as a time-travelling theme, is surely significant. Other names are similarly significant. In the novel’s first chapter these young aristocrats are being educated at a superbly archaic, creaky scholarly establishment, presided over by a lower mortal whose name (‘The Low One’, ‘La Bas’) signifies his relative status. In chapter two, the narrator spends time at the manses of Stringham and Templar. In the third, he travels to a neighbouring kingdom, learning the language and local mores with Widmerpool. In the final chapter the narrator has enrolled in some kind of higher college of arcane knowledge, where he is taught by (amongst others) a wizard called Sillery. This latter figure’s magic is not of the Gandalf sort. Rather he devotes himself--and Powell cleverly implies the dubiety of his moral being-in-the-world--to cultivating alliances, influences at court and in larger society. This is a deeper understanding of 'magic' than potions, grimoires or wands that shoot-out sparkly ectoplasm. When Stringham decides he wants to leave the College of Magic, his Lady Mother—a person of considerable importance in this stratified world—pays him, and Sillery, a call to dissuade him. Facing her, ‘Sillery himself, more than ever, took the shape of a wizard or shaman, equipped to resist either man or woman from a bisexual vantage’ [214-15]. This hermaphroditic quality is, in some mysterious Powell does not spell out, the heart of his magical power; and he keeps his abilities close to his chest.  The youngsters are less circumspect. Templar does take his friends for a ride in a magic chariot, possibly powered by Sillery’s magical force—it’s not clear. The chariot crashes into a ditch.

The world Powell describes, and in particular the Jack-Vance like minutiae of its (wholly hierarchy-governed) interpersonal interactions, are extraordinarily absorbing. What is said and implied. The way characters are continually—but tacitly, in a never-spoken manner—jockeying for position. Instead of the Fantasy clichés of continent-spanning wars or fierce dragons, this novel is content simply to trace the ‘upbringing’ of its young noblemen, from childhood to young adulthood. Doing so it paints-in its fantastic, bizarre yet somehow compelling world much more effectively than other Fantasy tomes.

Another one of the clichés of Fantasy Powell overturns is the ‘goatherd boy grows, undertakes many adventures and ends up King’ narrative; and he does so by concentrating on characters who have nowhere higher to go, who are already at the top of the social tree. The concentration on 'schooling' has range and nuance that Harry Potter (for all its excellences) lacks: chapter 1 gives us an effective portrait of a 'Hogwarts'-ish establishment; but chapters two and three show that education is something that happens as effectively and importantly outside the ancient walls of the school.

The whole imaginary realm is beautifully, wittily rendered; although—like Westeros—I really wouldn’t want to live there.