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A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, by VS Naipaul
Picador, £16.99
Being too young when I tried to read them, or perhaps too provincial or of the wrong class, I never got much joy from A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s 12-novel sequence depicting a certain type of English life—the type Powell knew best—in the middle years of the last century. I enjoyed other novels by Powell—his first, Afternoon Men, and his last, The Fisher King—but the series that was said to be his masterpiece seemed to depend for its effect on the reader already knowing the kind of people the author was writing about. Today Powell and his characters would be called “toffs,” but I don’t think it was the social difference between the reader and the read-about that stood as a barrier to the books’ pleasure; Evelyn Waugh wrote from and about the same territory and made it sharp, funny and sad to people who had never heard of Jermyn Street or White’s. Powell, by contrast, looked to be engaged in a long-winded private satire, with footmen posted at the door to keep the wrong sort of reader out.
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