The Eve of Destruction - Powell's The Kindly Ones and the outbreak of war

I'm afraid I was a little unfair to Anthony Powell in yesterday's post, comparing him unfavorably to Proust. There are great similarities between Proust's Search and Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, in regard to structure, focus, use of first-person narrative - but also tremendous differences. Nobody works language and describes not only a scene but the ineffable moments of time and sensation and memory and desire as Proust does. Powell actually doesn't try to do that - his style is much more efficient, clear, and to the point - although he very often turns a fine phrase, often to comic effect (often at the end of a paragraph). The time frame of his work is vast, as in Proust, but he is more directly focused on social events and upheaval - the volume I'm reading now, The Kindly Ones, is set on the eve of WWI and he does a fine job of showing life in a remote and down-at-the-heels estate just before the war, and then explodes the entire narrative with a flash-forward to all the casualties of war that will effect or eradicate so many of the characters in part one of this volume. Most of all, he is swift and sure at creating a dramatic, and a comic, scene - the images are indelible in our minds - even if not as deep and mysterious as Proust - they are quite well delineated: the young narrator's visit with the servant to a military encampment and his observation of a prisoner who'd lopped off a finger to avoid service, the many discussions about the new "motor cars" and their difficulty and unreliability, most of all the strange breakdown of one of the servants who suddenly appears in the dining hall start naked - the world is going crazy, coming apart at the seams, so to speak, and the very young Jenkins - now a mature narrator looking back on his life - is trying to make sense of what's going on around him, even though much is senseless and transient. (Also as a note - his parents and in particular his uncle are playing a larger role in this volume than I'd initially thought, from the first 30 pp. that concentrated on the servants.) A more interesting comparison might be with F.M. Ford and Parade's End, which I'll think about in a future post.