Powell is to Proust like English cooking is to French cuisine

"Resumed" reading Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, that is, picked up where I'd left of a number of years ago with volume 6 (of 12), The Kindly Ones. I really ought to read a summary of what preceded, for to me it's just a general recollection of a young man in boarding school who meets a very unnerving and odd character, Winderspoon or some such name?, who plagues him by turning up at various unexpected moments in life, always successful and landing on his feet but extremely unctious and overbearing. The narrator, who has almost no personality whatsoever, is our "window" onto many scenes and phases of English life, as we follow him through the volumes to settling in London, school reunions, the arts and antiques scene, social climbing, politics, pacifism, the world on the edge of war (of course - this is British fiction!). Part of the humor and the fun is how the same characters keep entwining and running into one another - most 12 volume series would have many, many characters, but this one has maybe a dozen - which is entirely possible in England, that sceptered isle with its rigidly defined class structure. Anyway, volume 6 is the first to step out of sequence and go back to the narrator's childhood during or just before WWI in a remote spot in the English countryside. As with about a million other English novels, he has almost no relationship w/ his parents - his father is in the Army, and it's not at all clear what he does except be an officer, the rights of class - and the novel, at least at the outset, is entirely about the narrator's relationship with a number of the servants on the estate, in particular a military guy, Bracey, with serious depression. Powell is often compared with Proust, which is like comparing English cooking w/ French cuisine. Powell is OK - but not in any way the stylist, and his character relations are sketches rather than intricately and lovingly developed. For example, the narrator has as said above almost no relationship with parents - compare with Proust's narrators complex and heartfelt relationship with his parents and grandmother. Still, Proust is an awfully high bar, however, and Powell's novels are a document of an entire generation, as seen from the point of view of one man, one clas.