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About this book

In this second volume of the series "A Dance to the Music of Time,"we see [Nicholas Jenkins] entering the ballrooms of high society while also discovering the London demimonde of the late 1920s... Nearly the entire first half of the novel is dedicated to a single evening, where Jenkins describes the participants of a dinner, a dance and a seedy part in exhaustive detail. Here we see more clearly than the first novel Powell's conception of his social circle over the decades as a dance. Stringham and Widmerpool, among other characters from the first novel, enter Jenkins' life again after a gap of several years, but no sooner do they show up than they are cast away by new fates. With Jenkins' greater maturity comes a recognition of more important societal concerns in 1920s England. One character's awkwardly closeted homosexuality creates complications for Jenkins' circle, as does the need for a young female character to procure an abortion when it was seriously illegal. By the end of the novel, Jenkins has even entered among political radicals... --Amazon.com.