Possibly the longest set piece in Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time

Second a very long chapter in Anthony Powell's Books Do Make a Room, vol 10 in A Dance to the Music of Time, is entirely focused on the funeral service for narrator Nick Jenkins's brother-in-law Erridge, or Erry - yet another example of the strange, shifting way in which Powell develops characters, or doesn't; one of the earlier volumes included a lot of scenes and info about Erridge, if I remember correctly, the oldest brother and an eccentric and ascetic pacifist and leftist - lived in a few cramped rooms in the remote family estate, gave away most of his space, and his fortune, to leftist causes, was ostracized as an objector to the war - but then over multiple following volumes we learn nothing more about him, and now he's posthumously once again at the center - and of course as in all volumes of this series characters keep making surprising, quite ludicrous re-appearances, often strangely enough now married to other members of the tight if dispersed social circle: prime example here is the radical leftists and sexual libertine Gypsy Jones turns up at funeral now married to publisher Carridge who offers Nick an editing and reviewing job. This does not seem a likely fate for the iconoclastic Gyspy but within the weird rules of Powell's fiction it makes sense. No normal reader could possibly keep straight all of the characters and the references and cross-references in the many conversations at and after the funeral - but as usual Powell draws our attention to Widmerpool and in this case toward his beautiful and disturbed young wife who makes a considerable disturbance leaving the church during the funeral, then becoming ill during the post-funeral gathering. This long set piece, one of the longest extended scenes in the whole series so far, is hilarious in some ways (the doddering elderly uncle who can't quite express himself, the clean-up after Mrs. W pukes in a huge Chinese vase) and at other times sorrowful: Powell does great job capturing the mood of post-war England, when all of the survivors feel both blessed and guilty, faced with opportunity but still suffering deprivation (gas rationing, and the strange presence at the funeral of a German POW functioning as a house aide) and uneasy in the peacetime economy.