Agree about the war trilogy, though the preceding sequence - At Lady Molly's/ Casanova's Chinese Restaurant/ The Kindly Ones - rivals it. The last three books do, I think, fall away a little from this high standard, always excepting 'Books do furnish a room' which is one of the best single books about the literary life; X. Trapnel is a great cautionary exemplar of the perils of Bohemia.
What is wonderful about 'A dance..' (and what I guess is wonderful about Proust, if I could ever finish) is the way in which as events and characters recur, the effect - both comic and tragic - deepens and widens; thus, as Widmerpool reappears, ever more grotesque, his approach is heralded by a recognisable feeling of slightly queasy apprehension; in the earlier books the episodic disintegration of Stringham has the same note of helpless spectatorship repeated until it becomes nearly unbearable. It is a feeling anyone who has watched a friend fall apart, unable to help, will recognise, and Powell instead of laying in the pathos, achieves much more by dispassionately laying out the absurdity.
Images from a Dance can haunt you; the description of Russian billiards from 'Casanova (?) how after a certain point balls no longer return to play, but their value is doubled; an image Powell builds into a powerful metaphor for the way in which after a certain age decisions - or mistakes - take on a previously unimagined and unimaginable weight and depth, or the conversation on a night train between Jenkins and (?) and the quote from, I think Boileau 'this day too, like all others in the army, will pass'
What is wonderful about 'A dance..' (and what I guess is wonderful about Proust, if I could ever finish) is the way in which as events and characters recur, the effect - both comic and tragic - deepens and widens; thus, as Widmerpool reappears, ever more grotesque, his approach is heralded by a recognisable feeling of slightly queasy apprehension; in the earlier books the episodic disintegration of Stringham has the same note of helpless spectatorship repeated until it becomes nearly unbearable. It is a feeling anyone who has watched a friend fall apart, unable to help, will recognise, and Powell instead of laying in the pathos, achieves much more by dispassionately laying out the absurdity.
Images from a Dance can haunt you; the description of Russian billiards from 'Casanova (?) how after a certain point balls no longer return to play, but their value is doubled; an image Powell builds into a powerful metaphor for the way in which after a certain age decisions - or mistakes - take on a previously unimagined and unimaginable weight and depth, or the conversation on a night train between Jenkins and (?) and the quote from, I think Boileau 'this day too, like all others in the army, will pass'
bleh! 
