Is England the size of a village? A Dance to the Music of Time

One of the real pleasures of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time is his use of dialogue (or, often, monologue) to create and delineate character; I wish I could capture this from memory, but the only way, really, is to quote the text, so you'll have to find some passages for yourself - but those who have read his books will agree that he uses dialogue not exactly realistically but in a broadly satiric matter. For ex., Widmerpool - to read any of his pompous and self-absorbed but finally idiotic declamations completely tells you that this guy is an ass and an ass-kisser completely self-absorbed and incredibly insecure at the same time. Or the novelist X. Trapnel, introduced in vol 10 Books Do Furnish a Room, a sponger and lout but a writer of some talent who despite his disheveled appearance and eccentric mannerisms somehow exudes charisma and attracts a band of acolytes: Powell captures Trapnel's acidic wit and his lofty sense of his own significance. In this volume, somehow, however improbably, Trapnel has persuaded Widmerpool's beautiful and unhappy wife, Pamela, to walk out of the marriage and run away with him. In other books, with other characters, we would shrug this off as ridiculously unlikely, but in Powell's work there is a constant shuffling about of characters and couplings, characters appear and fade out and show up again volumes later and the narrator, Jenkins, crosses paths with with those from his past with such uncanny frequency that we have the odd sense that the entire scope of his world over a lifetime consists of about 20 people and that England itself is about the size of a village. Maybe it is.