The Proustolkienian Fantasy continues, and although nothing very much happens in the second instalment of the saga there's no denying the slowly accumulating heft and richness to its intricately imagined world. Like the first canto, A Buyer's Market is divided into four long sections, and concentrates on the young lordlings from canto one, adding a few new ones: an elderly peace-mage and artist called Deacon, his young apprentice Barnby and a gipsy wench called Gypsy Jones most prominently. Again the emphasis is on the intersubjectivities of Powell's characters rather than on explicit quests, wars or the like; although several hints are dropped that a war is coming, and higher status princes move through the background of the story planning, manoeuvring and the like. There is an emphasis in this volume on bards, saga-tellers, painters and sculptors; the artistic and artisanal crafts that supply so much of the fixtures and fittings of Standard Heroic Fantasy Worlds without ever, it seems, actually appearing in the stories. The narrator, having completed his education, has become a scop or rhapsode of sorts, telling stories (including our story). He believes himself in love with beautiful young Lady Barbara, but falls out of love with her at a gathering of the clan--a kind of Moot, or Festival, at which there is feasting, quaffing and dancing, along with some strange rituals.
Among the residue stood an enormous sugar castor topped with a heavy silver nozzle. ... Barbara now tipped the castor so that it was poised vertically over Widmerpool's head, holding it there lilke the sword of Damocles over the tyrant. RThe massive silver apex of the castor dropped from its base, as if severed by the slash of some invisible machinery, and crashed heavily to the floor: the sugar pouring out on to Widmerpool's head in a dense and overwhelming cascade. [304]This ritual does not rebound to the honour of the comically priggish Widmerpool (we remember him from volume one), a character who aims for nobility and status without, quite, possessing the inner virtue to deserve it, according to the exacting, rococo requirements of this imagined society.
The first two sections are slow, uneventful and not especially engaging. The third takes place in the castle of one of the land's aristocrats:
[We] passed under the portcullis, and across a cobbled quadrangle. Beyond this open space, reached by another archway, was a courtyard of even larger dimensions, in the centre of which a sunken lawn had been laid out, with a fountain at the centre, and carved stone flower-pots shaped like urns, at each of the four corners. [419]Here lords and ladies mingle, obscure but intricately involving (for the reader) social rituals enacted. Characteristic of Powell's narrative strategy, though, is this encounter with -- again -- Widmerpool. The narrator is descending a stairwell towards the castle dungeon.
The way was dark and the steps cut deep, so that I had slowed up by the time I came, only a short way below, to a kind of landing. Beyond this stage the stairs continued again. I had passed this stage, and had just begun on the second flight, when a voice—proceeding apparently from out of the walls of the castle—suddenly spoke my name. ... I have to admit I was at that moment quite startled by the sound ... A second later I became aware of its place of origin. Just level with my head—as I returned a step or more up the stair—was a narrow barred window, or squint, through the iron grill of which, his face barely distinguishable in the shadows, peered Widmerpool. [437-8]The narrator assumes at once that the local Thane, known as 'The Chief', has incacerated Widmerpool for some reason. In fact this vision ('Widmerpool, imprisoned in an underground cell, from which only a small grating gave access to ... the gloom of the spiral staircase') is only a trompe-l'œil: 'Widmerpool was merely speaking from an outer passage of the castle, constructed on a lower level than the floor from which, a short time earlier, we had approached the head of the spiral stair. He had, in fact, evidently arrived from the back entrance, or, familiar with the ground plan of the building, had come by some short cut straight to this window.' This little vignette neatly captures Powell's larger approach. He gives us the sort of plot-twist we might expect from a conventional pot-boiler Heroic Fantasy, and then deflates its pomposity by showing how much of the heroism, and the fantasy, is a kind of trick of perspective. Clever.
In the fourth section the narrator attends Deacon's funeral; has a brief sexual connection with the gipsy wench, and attends a rather pinched banquet hosted by Widmerpool and his mother. There is a sense of slowly gathering but inexorable larger narrative momentum; but such developments as the plot may disclose will have to wait until volume 3.
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