Temporary Kings

I have mentioned Anthony Powell's roman fleuve A Dance To The Music Of Time previously, though only to compare it unfavourably to Simon Raven's scurrilous Alms For Oblivion sequence of novels. Now here's something you don't hear that often - I might have been wrong. Raven is hugely entertaining but as I read Temporary Kings, the penultimate of the Powell books, I am struck by the sheer rigour of the literary technique, what The Oxford Companion calls its 'architectural command of structural rhythm.'

Powell manages to encompass great sweeps of time within a single narrative strand - typically a recollection sparked by a current encounter turns into a full-blown description before melting back into the original time-frame. It is fiendishly clever. If Cormac McCarthy had gone to Eton and Oxford maybe this is how he would have written. 

Admirable, but, no, on reflection I think I'd still want the Raven for company on my desert island. A man whose Times obituary gave him the headline 'Writer and Notorious Libertine' is probably better suited to my refined low tastes. Alms For Oblivion will keep depression away while I try to remember how to lash poles together to make a shelter - the sort of thing they used to teach us in Scouts. God how I loved that juvenile militia. Never did me any harm and no one ever so much as dared to lay an abusive finger on me. Mind you I was a fat ugly bleeder.