Absolutely Anybody

AT LADY MOLLY'S (239 pp.)--Anthony Powell--Little, Brown ($3.75).

Life in Britain, in the vision of Novelist Anthony Powell, is a dense forest of decayed and intertwined family trees. This fourth novel of a series he calls The Music of Time explores the latest area of Powell's private park land to be railed in--and at.

Little read in the U.S., where his The Acceptance World (TIME, Feb. 20. 1956) sold only 2,000 copies, Novelist Powell (rhymes with Lowell) is highly regarded in his native Britain. Evelyn Waugh calls The Music of Time more realistic than Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and much funnier. Powell's thesis is that blood is thicker than almost anything; his social unit is the family, not the individual. Says his fictional spokesman: "There is something overpowering, even a trifle sinister about very large families, the individual members of which often possess in excess the characteristics commonly attributed to 'only' children: misanthropy: neurasthenia: an inability to adapt themselves . . . The corporate life of large families can be lived with a severity, even barbarity . . ."

Four Dogs. At Lady Molly's is largely centered on the raffish salon of Lady Molly Jeavons, who was born an Ardglass (a family "hopelessly insolvent since the Land Act"), was once married to a peer, but has come down to being the wife of the dim, unemployable Jeavons ("He was something left over from the war"). One could meet "absolutely anybody" at Lady Molly's, including her cats, her "four principal dogs," and her monkey called Maisky (after the Soviet ambassador). "Not long ago Lord Amesbury looked in on his way to a Court ball, wearing knee breeches and the Garter. Lady Molly was giving the vet a meal she had cooked herself."

Himself born and bred a member of the Establishment, Novelist Powell writes about British upper-class tribal customs with the air of a man who knows that if an outsider wants an explanation, he is not worth explaining to. He lives in a Regency house near Frome in the county of Somerset, 100 miles from his office at Punch, that venerable and sometimes humorous magazine, where he functions as a slyly discursive book reviewer. "We [the British] are a very peculiar, very odd people," says Powell, looking down at his subject matter in the manner of the legendary clubman who liked to sit in the window of the Carlton on dismal days in order to have the pleasure of "seeing it rain on the damned people."

Four Characters. A U.S. reader prepared to shoulder through Powell's bewildering social underbrush will be rewarded by glimpses of some exotic game and gamy exotics:

P: Widmerpool, a figure of fun reappearing in this novel as the "new man" of modern Britain. In the course of the plot he is taught that marriage is not an exact science but, as Foch said of war, "a terrible and passionate drama." Widmerpool is a bouncing, uncivilized young City type whose political sagacity is expressed in his plan for averting World War II, then looming. The plan: give the Order of the Garter to Hermann Goering ("After all, it is what such things are for, isn't it?").

P: Nicholas Jenkins, the novel's narrator and a movie scriptwriter (as Powell himself once was), whose humor is a soft blackjack. When Widmerpool asks him what would be a suitable name under which to register for a "clandestine weekend" at a country hotel, Jenkins replies: "Mr. and the Honourable Mrs. Smith?"

P: General Conyers, a relic of the Boer War, where he may or may not have been the hero of an absurd cavalry charge, now a court official ("standing about at Buck House"), who likes to play Gounod's Ave Maria on a cello and has late in life taken up with Freud, Jung and Adler. C| Lord Warminster, from a decayed family who "probably made their money out of the Black Death" (1348-49); he is currently spending the last of the Black Death bonanza in sponsoring left-wing causes, and is suspected of hoping that when his estate is turned into a collective farm, he will be its commissar instead of hereditary lord.

Novelist Powell, who was at Eton with Henry Green and George Orwell, at Oxford with Evelyn Waugh, proves that he is not out of place in such company. He is by any standard an important comic if not satiric novelist. Unfortunately infatuated with detail, Powell sometimes seems to obey a new novelist's commandment to the effect that he shall not describe a character unless he describes his neighbor's wife, his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, his ass and anything that is his neighbor's. But through such means, Powell tells a story of the between wars doldrums of England in a style as quiet and sinister as a ticking time bomb.

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