England under attack - in Dance to the Music of Time

The weirdness of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time volume 8 continues - as narrator Nick, his best friend Moreland, Moreland's current squeeze, another soldier (Odo Stevens?), and his date formerly Moreland's beloved - don't worry, nobody can keep these relationships straight and it really doesn't matter, the message is that they're all entwined, as the English upper class circa 1940 is made up of about 20 people all of whom went to the same school, go to the same clubs, marry and divorce one another, and so on - as these five gather over drinks and gossip about ridiculous stuff, culminating in Stephens's reading a poem he wrote about the custom of toasting the King when guests visit the officers' mess: It's actually a pretty good poem, and I think the idea is it's supposed to show the frivolity of this class, or perhaps the insouciance, compared with the great British war poets of the First World War - these soldiers are all so removed from any combat, at least at this point - but it's hovering on their horizon. Powell makes the war even more spooky and scary by keeping it at bay - one of the characters hears a possible air-raid siren during their dinner, but the conversation just moves on - at last Stevens has to catch a train that will take him back to his unit, and he departs with a fellow officer - it seems more like they're heading off to summer camp - and it's not as if they're unaware of the dangers of combat, it's just that they have to keep super-cool, distracted. When Jenkins leaves the restaurant w/Moreland and stops in at M's flat, he learns that there has in fact been another bombing and M's tenant, a nightclub performer who revives old cabaret tunes, gives an eyewitness description - they bombed his club mid-performance - turns out (unsurprisingly) that Jenkins knew the people killed by the bomb - Jenkins heads off to tell their family members and finds that their house, too, has been bombed, killing Lady Molly, an amusing character we've come to know from previous volumes. So this section of this novel ends darkly, ominously - England under attack, and not doing very much about it.