Temporary Kings is the eleventh book of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time cycle. More elegiacal than what has come before, it's clear that the series is drawing to a close. That's probably a good thing; as much as I enjoyed this novel, it's a pretty clear fall-off from, say, the WWII volumes, or even the immediately preceding novel, Books Do Furnish a Room.
Widmerpool's turning out to be a Stalinist spy of some sort felt like a plot twist out of a different sort of novel altogether, and the spectacular blow-up at the end of the novel felt like an inelegant departure from the normally restrained tone of the other novels.
On the other hand, some good new characters are introduced, and I liked the way the book weaves the past into the present so effortlessly. Nick hears an old man singing "Funiculi, Funicula," and that takes him into a reminiscence of when he was younger in Italy for a short while, then he's back to the present, and then there might be a short bit about one of the characters we saw in a previous volume, and so on. All this, of course, adds to the elegiacal tone I mentioned above.
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