THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS by Anthony Powell. 244 pages. Little, Brown. $4.95.
Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, a serial novel issued in fairly regular installments for more than 18 years, can now be seen for what it is: a great prose composition in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Powell invites his dedicated (though still small) readership to think of his work in musical terms. The descriptive form that suggests itself for his nine novels is a series of piano concertos with variations on a single complex theme. Powell's narrator, Nick Jenkins, is, of course, at the piano.
The period covered in Military Philosophers, the ninth of the series, is roughly from 1942 to V-E day, an era that would seem to call for the verbal equivalent of massed bands, with effects by real cannon in the manner of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Though Powell's narration continues pianissimo, the result is far from flat. His prose is a percussion instrument, delicate but forceful because precise.
Byzantine Labyrinth. In The Valley of Bones (the seventh novel), Nick Jenkins was an officer in a Welsh regiment training for the invasion. Now he has been transferred to the offices of the British general staff in Whitehall. In that bureaucratic maze, Powell's khaki characters may seem less military than dilatory. But anyone who has inhabited the Byzantine labyrinths of noncombat wartime staff headquarters will recognize the wry truth of Powell's picture of intrigue, futility and boredom.
Powell's human comedy exploits to the full the incongruities of manner and matter inherent in his jumble of diverse characters, classes and accents. It seems surprising that even the British Empire could have converted such a collection of civilian highbrows, esthetes and scholars to effective military ends. Outside Whitehall, bombs are succeeded by rockets. The London toll of death and damage mounts. Throughout there is a sharp impression that what Powell refers to as "our incurable national levity" is a strong clue to the British survival. It is a specific against too much hope, and thus against bitterness at hope defeated. "Not all the fruits of Victory are appetising to the palate," an esthete says after V-E day, as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are transformed from Nazi-occupied countries into Communist satellites. "An issue of gall and wormwood has been laid on."
Jenkins' position as liaison officer with various Allied military missions gives Powell a chance to extend his insular comic powers to foreign fields. It also allows a sidelong glance at some of the larger tragic ironies of World War II. With remarkable feeling, Powell conveys the consternation of those concerned with Anglo-Soviet relations when chilling evidence comes in that the Russians have massacred 10,000 Polish officer-prisoners in the Katyn Forest.