THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS is the ninth novel in Anthony Powell's long sequence "A Dance to the Music of Time" and the last to cover World War II. It opens early 1942 with Nicholas Jenkins working in Whitehall, having left his provincial regiment in Northern Ireland behind and now acting as liaison with other Allied forces. The social comedy and grotesque personalities that Powell excels at now take place among a motley assortment of Polish, Belgian and Czech officers, as well as some British high-ups. Perhaps the most shocking of these new characters is the sex-crazed Pamela Flitton, more force of nature than human woman, who brings disaster on half of the men in the novel.
THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS is somewhat weaker than the best novels of the series in that Powell is too obviously writing from his own wartime experience, but just changing the names, instead of making the necessary abstraction that Art requires. Also, the amount of literary references here is gratuitous. Powell quotes over a full page of Proust, fills up one scene with hymn texts, and has Jenkins make obscure jokes to characters we shouldn't expect to understand them.
But even with its weaknesses, the novel turns very memorable in the latter half, once the end of war is on the horizon. There is a poignant reunion with figures we haven't seen since the 1930s, and Jenkins' own emotions make a rare appearance from behind his stoic narrator's mask. Some characters don't survive World War II, but of those who make it through the war, we feel something of a gigantic summing up before the last three books of the series.
After the disappointing THE SOLDIER'S ART, things are looking very up with the Dance and I look forward to moving on to the last movement.
