At three in the morning, Anthony Powell took a turn for the worse, and the doctor was summoned. He was new, youngish and he turned out to be called Powell too. While they were waiting, the novelist’s elder son, film director Tristram Powell, chatted to Dr Powell about what part of Wales his ancestors came from. It was a typical Powellian moment: unexpected, genealogical, comical, melancholy. Tony Powell died later that night, quietly, at a great age (94) after a long period of frailty, surrounded by his two sons and his wife Violet to whom he had been married for 65 years, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren asleep in the converted stables beyond the lawn. He left behind the slightly surprising instructions that his ashes were to be scattered on the lake below the Chantry, his Regency house in Somerset. The fishing syndicate, however, would need to be consulted, because they had a tricky feeding programme for the trout. Another Powellian moment: unsentimental, down-to-earth, not without a touch of the macabre.

Still, his death seemed a calm and graceful one. The huge obituaries all recognised him as the last literary lion of his generation, and his 12-volume novel series, A Dance to the Music of Time, as perhaps the greatest achievement in English fiction since the war. Yet almost at the same moment, the old chorus of detractors launched into their familiar catcalls: Powell was an incurable snob, obsessed with upper-class life, Dance was a soap opera for a closed society which was destined for the scrapheap of history-in fact, was already smouldering there. Vainly his admirers asked whether, on that account, Shakespeare was to be dismissed for his obsession with the life of the Danish court. Powell certainly was greatly interested in family trees, and the old green volumes of the Complete Peerage were always on a handy shelf, although he said that, if there was a Burke’s of Bank Clerks, he would buy that, too. But the accusation of snobbery needs not merely rebutting, but standing on its head. Powell’s fascination was not at all with the smug connections of a closed caste, but rather with the remarkable anarchic openness of English life, its quirks and eddies and, indeed, with the ups and downs of life generally-as conveyed in the torrential quotation from Burton’s Anatomy with which he closes the twelfth and last volume of Dance. As a matter of fact, his fiction was extraordinarily democratic in a way few other writers of his time could claim. The light plays evenly on each personage-not merely on the beautiful, elusive Jean Duport, or the charming, doomed Stringham or even on the monstrous Widmerpool, who has joined the fictional valhalla of Raskolnikov, Fagin, Sherlock Holmes and Jeeves-but also on Alfred Tolland, the dim aphasic relation who only appears at family parties, on Le Bas, the awkward housemaster with a weakness for late Victorian poets, on Eleanor Walpole-Wilson, the dogbreeding dyke, on Uncle Giles, who so memorably said in the 1930s, “I like the little man they’ve got in Germany now.” Indeed, it is these unremarkable, unglamorous characters whom we are most pleased to meet again and the sense of whose ongoing life Powell revives. The same is true of places-the Ufford (the private hotel in Bayswater which is the nearest thing to a home for Uncle Giles), or the upstairs room at Foppa’s restaurant, or Stonehurst, the Aldershot bungalow rented by the narrator’s parents.

It is not simply that these people and places are shabby or past their best (if they had one). It is more that they simply exist as we do, without necessarily having to take to drink or communism or the priesthood (or, in the case of Graham Greene characters, all three) in order to qualify for fictional attention. Perhaps the most crucial of Powell’s insights was that everyone, when you got to know them, was equally extraordinary. It is this evenness of curiosity, this utter lack of bedazzlement, which gives the world of his novels-particularly the middle volumes about the war-their unique quality, a kind of shimmering solidity which both haunts you as irremediably other, and yet breathes a familiarity which makes you want to identify the original models-which are, of course, composites. “If someone is good for being a ‘character,’ he is probably good for many characters. You can form the basis of perhaps half a dozen people from one human model” (Dickens certainly did with his father), as Powell liked to say when maddened by admirers’ claims to have found “the real Widmerpool.”

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