At long last, the final volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. Like its predecessor, I don't think it comes up to standards of the best books in the series, but it's not necessarily easy to pin down why. Certainly, on a sentence-by-sentence level, or even paragraph-by-paragraph, Powell is as good as ever here.
Oddly enough, I think part of the problem is the relatively well-defined plot. I think that most of the books in the cycle have some sort of underlying structure, as I've mentioned in the occasional blog post. But these last two novels may as well be subtitled "The Decline and Fall of Widmerpool." And I think that the overtness is unfortunate -- Powell works well when everything is understated, I think.
Having said that, the final chapter was fantastic. Everything that I've liked about the whole cycle, with a nice tie tack to the first novel, A Question of Upbringing, bringing us full circle.
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