Yet one more view of wartime London

The 2nd part of Anthony Powell's The Military Philosophers vol 9 of A Dance to the Music of Time reverts to the incredibly complex machinations of the military bureaucracy in London/Whitehall during World War II, as narrator Nick, now promoted to the liaison for the Belgian and Czech forces, deals various requests and demands. Nobody can really follow all the sinuous paths of this novel, on first reading anyway, and nobody's really meant to - that's the point. What Powell is really doing is presenting a view of wartime London as seen and known exclusively by a very narrow social set - the well-educated, public school young men who have by dint of class have become minor officers, removed from combat and advancing the war effort from home hq. In this section, Nick describes his living quarters during the war - an apartment in Chelsea (his nearly fogotten wife, Isobel, is off somewhere safe from the air raids with their child - amazing how little Nick thinks about her); there's a sense that everyone still living in London is either forlorn and stuck there or in a strange emotional and psychological limbo - women perhaps finding a new independence and strength that eluded them before wartime; the men putting on a brave front of sanguinity - when behind everyone is the constant fear of air attack. Powell's description of life in some of the half-bombed buildings, of the old clubs turned into military offices with the fan lights blacked out, is very vivid and convincing - I've read many other accounts of wartime London, most recently perhaps Atonement, but this one seems to me the most credible - totally absent of the heroics.