Powell a precursor of Alice Munro?

Part 2 of Anthony Powell's The Kindly Ones, volume 6 ofhis series Dance to the Music of Time, gets back to the whacky, gossipy style of the first 5 volumes - moving away from Jenkins's recollections of his pre-WWI childhood in the remote countryside, and now we get the cavalcade of names and their complex relationships, who married whom and why and for how long - it's kind of a primer to remind us (me) of the characters we'd gotten to know in the earlier volumes. I'm still at sea - and no doubt meant to be; part of the fun of this series is the complex web of relationships that all touch on issues of class, sex, war, politics, and art to varying degrees - and the funny thing is that, no matter how many relationships and inter-relations Powell develops, the whole novel, all of England!, seems to consist of about 20 people who just keep running into one another. As with the other novels in the series, it takes some time for the theme or the plot to come into focus for the reader - in this way, Powell is an unacknowledged precursor of Alice Munro. Gradually, though, it's becoming apparent that a key player in this volume will be crackpot religious fanatic and cult leader Trelawney - suddenly everyone, including the rather staid and socially upper crust retired general - seems to know this guy and actually to have followed his cult with some interest. Hm. The other theme emerging is the marriage of J's friend to a young woman who it seems may have been a prostitute and surely was involved with a high-standing person in their set - and how his marriage takes him out of the London scene, away from the art scene, and into some kind of isolation. It's taking a lot to get my mind around all these characters, and Powell blithely ignores one of the fundamental rules of fiction: telling rather than showing - there is so much to tell before he sets his story in motion - but his smart yet easy style carries the story along and holds my interest, at least for now. Unlike Ford Madox Ford, with whom he makes an interesting comparison, Powell works in short segments, and in more or less straight chronology, so his novels, while equally complex and allusive and rich in the politics and events of the day, are not nearly so daunting for the (American, contemporary) reader.